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Comment by sundvor | Hacker News Reader

We've come an incredibly long way since Genlock on the Commodore Amiga!

I use OBS Studio with my Streamdeck, a Logitech Streamcam, NVIDIA Broadcast, a condenser microphone via a Steinberg XLR audio interface along with Elgato Key lights and iHue fill lights for my working from home office Google Meets.

Startup and shut downs of the entire stack including launching into Google Meets are automated with the deck (one button to macro up, one to macro down), and with proper lighting as well as NVIDIA Broadcast, the audio and video quality is just amazing. The amount of tech I'm throwing at how I connect with Meet may seem like overkill, but it really makes a lot of sense to spend some time on what's my primary interface with my colleagues and customers.

If I need to quickly mute my image, a scene in OBS that shows "be right back" is an immediate Streamdeck key press away. Next to it is the audio source mute key. It's great.

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Oh man that sounds like an awesome rig. I didn’t realize Nvidia Broadcast can reduce background noise like keystrokes until you mentioned it here. Does that really work? If so I now have a reason to buy a new GPU and finally use my cherry mx blues again.

I'd say that it works very well. So well in fact that as I reinstalled windows and watched F1 on Sunday I was surprised to see that Ferrari had managed to remove the engine sound from the drivers microphone, but at some cost to the clarity.

Turns out the background noise removal was turned on for my output too.

Wow, that’s… kind of insane. Cool. I’m gonna have to check it out.

It also completely eliminates screaming cats and babies. It's worth the price of the GPU upgrade alone.

I know that Slack and Google are slowly baking these features in, but NVIDIA are in a league of their own. AMD not having them made my GPU brand choice easy last time I upgraded.

It does work and fairly well at that. However, for the audio processing component of Broadcast, you don't necessarily need an RTX card. There's an official version that does the work in plain old CUDA. Might not be quite as efficient, but also works just fine.

Yep; I used RTX Voice or what it was called on my old 1080TI. With my 3070 I'll use both voice and video, to just slightly blur the background.

OBS ships with rnnoise, which is like NVIDIA Broadcast, but works on any CPU. See also NoiseTorch and EasyEffects if you're on Linux.

It's pretty great, works decently, but the sad thing is the author put it out a few years ago, trained it on proprietary datasets, wrote a paper and then moved onto something else, never to be seen again. Now it's pretty much unmaintained since it requires some very specific ML and DSP knowledge to hack on.

https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise

NVIDIA Broadcast in my opinion is better, but rnnoise will do if you can't run it.

I found rrnoise to be okay; not great. Surprisingly heavy on resources, even on my M1. I use and pay for Krisp now, which is much better

Doesn't consume more than a couple percent CPU on my Linux desktop

Unless OBS (or FFMpeg or GStreamer) is giving you something you need (maybe correction on your camera or some touch up filters or whatever), I'm not sure if you (the royal "you") really need OBS for this setup.

I also have a very similar setup. High quality webcam, high quality headset, and a few lights pointing into my face to offset the lighting in the room. I have Zoom configured to use original audio and turn off echo cancellation and most audio postprocessing as the headset pretty much does everything I need audio wise. I've even had my partner talking in the same room and others on my VC haven't heard a thing.

My webcam needs almost no touch-up. While I can stream at 1080p easily (and do so with friends over FFMpeg and an RTSP server), Zoom (and I'm guessing Meet) will frequently downsample your webcam output when in a VC with multiple participants to save on bandwidth. A 1:1 chat can have you streaming in full 1080p glory, but I don't ever need a post-processing layer atop my webcam.

The setup is as easy as me turning on my camera and putting on my headset. Make sure you are using Ethernet so you don't run into AP congestion, especially if you have others in the house doing VC as well. But yeah modern high quality VC is almost completely plug-and-play.

Nice setup!

OBS scenes is the killer feature for me, so it just works well. In addition the AFK one I've also set a couple of zoom levels that frame me better if I decide to slide my seat back a bit.

I even have scenes for sprint planning estimation sessions. 1-3-5-8 etc superimposed over my picture. :D (they are numbered buttons on the Streamdeck).

Aha now that's an interesting way to do it. I guess in my setup, and my room geometry, I don't need to generally have specific scenarios ready for, say, planning so just turning my stuff on through Zoom is fine.

I do love reading about all these setups though. I feel like so many tech companies and software engineers are new to remote work that these tips can go a long way to interfacing effectively with coworkers. At least in my case it was trial and error until I got what I wanted.

What's the latency like?

Also, do you know what keystrokes the Stream Deck actually sends? Is it some ctrl-alt-whatever combo, or MIDI, or what?

I do technical pieces to camera for training material and also live work at STEM shows (Raspberry Pi Jams, Arduino chats and other tech stuff), and have a three monitor setup.

Screen 2 will be running any apps I need to show (coding etc.) and screen 3 is at the back of the workbench, which has a downward facing camera so I can show me working on the boards and other electronics.

Switching scenes from main cam to what's on screen 2 to the workbench is very handy, even without a dedicated key pad.

The only hassle is that under Linux, OBS sometimes forgets the camera device designations on startup and I have to pull out the USB connections, re-plug and then go into both camera definitions and re-select the right cameras.

I have device video and audio sink definitions behind he scenes so that the video and audio can be fed to virtual devices inside Zoom or Teams etc.

Edit: Oh, and I have a client plugin which allows me to use my Android phone camera as a roving webcam to highlight things on the workbench such as a scope screen, power supply current reading etc.

All works quite well.

If you haven't looked into this already, I'd recommend checking out how to write a udev rule for your USB devices. There's probably a way to lock them down so OBS identifies them consistently.

The Arch wiki has fairly in-depth instructions for understanding how udev rules work https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/udev

This may also be helpful: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/webcam_setup

How do you find the memory consumption of those apps? I found NVIDIA Broadcast and a few other streaming utils were passively eating like 3GB of RAM. Not typically a concern until you're spinning up VMs and dev environments and suddenly getting paged.

I'd love something like Broadcast but much more lightweight, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.

I haven't really paid much attention to the memory usage to be honest; running Windows 11 on a 32GB Ryzen system. It was plenty until some of my Docker requirements started getting greedy (my next system will have 64, but also because I play DCS World now on occasion).

I am however issuing a kill of the NVIDIA Broadcast app with my shut down macro as it will otherwise peg the 3070 usage % at a non idling level, which is somewhat worse for power usage, temperatures and longevity (than not doing it). OBS Studio is also shut down, after stopping the virtual camera with a keyboard shortcut. (It's basically reverse of the start up).

So I'll only have all the software running for the duration of my meeting. I've put the cam on a flexible arm, easy to push out of the way when done and I confirm the light is off.

The shutdown also sets the video lights down to "warm ambient" levels rather than turn them off - especially on dark winter days, they do improve my mood.

And fwiw I had to explain my use of the Streamdeck to my tax accountant; they were cool after hearing a version of the above. :) The macro features are such a stress reducer, really.

(And no, I never stream anything. Would rather not broadcast my ugly mug in public, but at least with this I can cast myself in the best possible light - pun intended - to my colleagues).

Please write a blog post detailing your setup.

I’d love to do something like this but could really use some hand holding for the setup part.

Haven't done any blog posts in decades, but if I was to start again it would be a good topic to cover.

It can be a bit costly, but found it well worth it now that it's done. I'll send you an email in case you have any specific questions.

Is it possible for you to share a video of a sample broadcast so that we can see this amazing quality and all the benefits compared to, say, a nice 4K webcam alone?

Sorry I don't really post in public. There's plenty of YouTube videos that detail the impact of good studio lighting on a regular webcam.

Logitech StreamCam is one of the better webcams. I have it on a flex stick that I pull down in front of my 32" - I have 3x of those plus a smaller above.

I'd love to upgrade it at one point but there's not really a large number of compact cameras with good optics. I might look into GoPros, but am not really to keen on spending much more as I'm happy with the current results.

Where does Scala fit into all of this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imh2cH4CnaA

What on earth is an "iHue fill light"? I don't get any hits on Google for this term.

A fill light refers to what the light is doing - it’s making the shadows of your frame a bit brighter so the camera can pick them up.

(As an example, a hair light is an overhead light that’s typically used to give hair more depth and detail. The poster talks about a key light, which is the strongest light in a standard 3 light setup)

I imagine ihue is the brand of light. Or maybe just a misspelling of Hue’s brand.

Thanks, yes it's the Hue light - as sibling comment pointed out, I dragged in the app name for one that controls them.

And I have two, one above to the rear right and another to the rear left doing exactly what you describe.

A Fill light is the counterpart of a spotlight

There's an app called iHue https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/46irji/introduction_ne...

Cheers, yes I mixed the app name in there in my post - thanks. They are Phillips Hue Play Light Bars; love them.

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