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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much of a use for OBS these days, but man it's a real game changer compared to the hoops you had to jump through for capturing your screen or external devices a decade or so ago.

I'm sure many people remember all the old YouTube videos with an "Unregistered Hypercam 2" tag in the corner. I recall a time when the only decent screen capture tool was Camtasia, which had a fairly high price tag.

I've played around with OBS a bit, and occasionally use it for screen captures, and it's a really impressive, feature-packed piece of software that feels like it shouldn't be free. Big props to the people who made it happen!

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I agree that modern OBS is pretty good for screen captures, even if you don't need to stream. You can record 4k60 without too much overhead on modern systems directly into a .mp4 which plays nicely with other software/services without an extra conversion from a proprietary format. On macOS at least, recording with OBS is substantially better than working with expensive video recording software like ScreenFlow.

The weakness with this workflow is that OBS only allows saving one video at a time, which may be an issue if you want to composite video/mix audio better in post-production (e.g. computer screen recording + webcam + secondary screen recording such as iOS), although you can record audio in separate tracks. Of course you can run multiple instances of OBS simultaneously in this use case and save them together.

> The weakness with this workflow is that OBS only allows saving one video at a time

Not anymore thanks to plugins!

https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/source-record.1285/

You can still only record one scene AFAIK, but you can still record multiple standalone sources. Its great if you want to record your screen or some complex scene, but still record your face camera separately to do whatever you want with in post production instead of doing it during recording.

You can also spawn multiple instances of OBS (it’ll warn you to be sure you want to). I’ve used that to do Desktop Capture of my presentation screen, while doing video effects and Desktop capture of my Teams Meeting on the other screen.

Media creation in general is so easy now. Even professional game reviewers used to have to literally take pictures of CRTs and then publish screenshots to accompany screenshots in printed guides! Compared to today where anybody can get OBS and stream their gameplay and commentary, live! OBS is definitely an awesome piece of software that deserves its praise.

There were capture cards going pretty far back. In some ways capturing desktop footage was easier because of no hdcp blacking out content.

Right, capture cards you had to seek out in the pre and early internet days and pay hefty sums for, not to mention have the drive space for the captured footage in decent quality.

Meanwhile OBS is free and supports the common compression codecs that allow you to store hundreds of hours on even smaller modern drives.

That's true! But what if you want to actually share the video? Uploading to Youtube or Twitch is painful.

I use Loom. E.g. when I wanted to show my team all of our Mercury perks, it was about 60 seconds start to finish to get a shareable url: https://www.loom.com/share/4e39a76fee3e40abad7c8af9ecd682e6

Was surprised how easy it is.

I like and pay for Loom. Works well with my clients and makes meetings faster.

I used it to make some tutorials at work in the past. Being able to record the computer audio and the mic audio on two separate tracks for editing later was quite useful!

Don't forget FRAPS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraps

I remember when Fraps was THE capture software. My computer couldn't run it due to some issues with Intel graphics not being able to run DirectX (or something, it was 10 years ago).

It was really good software for the time, assuming you has an OpenGL or DirectX window.

I was surprised at how easy it was to use. I was expecting it to be difficult, as is often the case for software that is packed with features for advanced users, but it turned out that recording a window is just a matter of pressing a button.

I wish OBS was around when I was making Minecraft YouTube videos when I was 11. Good times. I used some no name screen recorder and captured the region of my screen that was the Minecraft window. The quality is exactly what you'd expect.

I've used OBS to do a few programming streams during quarantine. It worked without fail on X11. That alone was impressive for a cross platform tool for me, let alone how easy and powerful it was.

I do kind of miss the nostalgia of those old days though...

OBS is basically the Gimp or Libreoffice of video production. There are paid tools that are better but if you don't mind the quirks it does pretty much everything an amateur could want, and most of what a professional needs.

I think its a step above that. For many workflows, OBS is basically the best option. I bought XSplit a long time ago, when it was in beta or something. OBS came out around that time but it wasn't what it is today.

Today though? I still use OBS even though I still have XSPlit (I got a perpetual license). If there's something much better that isn't thousands of dollars, I'd like to know what it is.

There's a lot of commercial editors that are nicer than Gimp, and Office IMO still beats Libreoffice and isn't that expensive. But OBS? I don't know anything much better.

The plugin ecosystem and the community support is just top notch too, because EVERYONE uses OBS. If you use a commercial option, it's much harder to google up how to do some stuff.

XSplit was pretty good feature-wise in ~2013/2014 - I don't think OBS would be as feature-rich if not for Xsplit. The only other software I can recall which was an alternative to Xsplit was Wirecast - but it very expensive for small-time streamers (like ~$400 or so?), and had pretty high hardware specs.

Definitely agree with you regarding the plugin ecosystem, it's a key reason why OBS was able to explode in popularity - and many popular plugin features have been merged into the main app over time.

In my opinion, the true spiritual successor to Hypercam 2 is not OBS Studio (a real-time multi-source video compositing framework) but ShareX (a window or screen recorder).

> and it's a really impressive, feature-packed piece of software that feels like it shouldn't be free.

Nobody should ever think like that.

The phrasing is poor but the idea they're getting at is that it's so feature rich and well designed it feels as if it was produced by a team of hired engineers instead of people working for free in spare time and for donations.

My kids learned to use OBS and iMovie and it's pretty mind-blowing what they can do making little homemade minecraft movies.

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