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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a streamer, but I find OBS is great for other uses.

The main things I use OBS for is:

  - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time.

  - routing master windows audio through a compressor/limiter when listening to videos or streams that have poor leveling (though you need to install a virtual audio output in windows to do this - I found something called CABLE that works.  Then windows outputs to CABLE, OBS reads CABLE into desktop audio source, and then you  monitor that on you speakers/headphones, so you can now add audio filters to desktop audio source.)

  - adjusting gamma/contrast/brightness of webcams (but not during face to face video calls; OBS does introduce lag which limits the usefullness of this)

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> - routing master windows audio through a compressor/limiter when listening to videos or streams that have poor leveling

If anyone wants to do this on linux, there's easyeffects[0]

[0] https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

> - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time.

Can you show what sources you setup for this scenario? I haven't put much effort into it, but slamming my mic and audio output in there didn't produce satisfying results.

What is the issue you had?

Not op but my setup would be webcam on screen, in the audio mixing (right click, advanced maybe) put each audio feed onto its own track for later editing

I can't picture anything wrong with a quick setup other than maybe the audio tracks all being mashed into track 1 by default. Would need more information

AH now I see. The microphone output IS SO QUIET I can barely hear it. Google Meet doesn't have this issue.

Moreover, I was adding audio output capture and Desktop Audio mixer was hidden. So I adjusted output volume for 1 instance only and it was always so much louder (thinking mixer doesn't work), that I cannot hear mic. I figured the latter out that I don't have to add Audio Output Capture source explicitly and I can adjust that volume.

But my mic output is unusable.

> - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time.

FFMPEG alone (well, with the pulseaudio loopback) can do this. It can also stream to stuff like twitch with no extra software. OBS is great but I feel like it's overkill for a lot of what people do.

FFMPEG also requires a command line which makes it completely unusable for nearly everyone.

Good luck figure out the command to compose even a simple scene with a webcam on top of a desktop feed, let alone switching inputs or mixing audio. All of which are very basic thing you'd want to do when creating a screen recording. Meanwhile it's 4-5 clicks in OBS.

Imo it's the opposite. Learning to use FFMPEG feels like overkill when OBS makes simple tasks simple.

Low latency hardware encoding and muxing with ffmpeg can be rather tricky depending on your setup. OBS works out of the box on every platform. If you’ve never measured end-to-end latency, your viewers are missing out.

Well most obs users like the facility of composing scenes without having to check how to identify each window/input/source. I tend to favor cli tools but we are talking about video software and the ability to have immediate preview is really comfortable. Also I don't think ffmpeg can switch scenes comfortably. I am using obs to create some video tutorial at work. I could record different rushes but I find it more convenient to record a single rush with different scenes and cut the hesitations or repeated moments due to bad prononciation or cough or whatever afterwards with avidemux.

However this give me an idea about a tool that would export scene composition and video output settings to ffmpeg argument for easy reuse. It is true that if you don't have an usecase where you switch scenes it could be handy to start a record/stream from a command line. For example I have been ripping some videos from my streaming services so that my daughters can watch the movies on a plane, works great for that. Didn't bothered using ffmpeg because the preview allowed me to be sure I was recording the correct window without realizing 2h later I had recorded trash. Surely there are better ripping tool but at least this way probably do not attract attention from said streaming services as you are recording in real time.

I'd love to see the one liner for ffmpeg that actually does this. You could probably publish it as a novel, haha

I love ffmpeg as much as the next nerd that tinkers with video but.. it's video. It's so much nicer to interact with it using a GUI.

Not to mention if you did something wrong you could just change it in OBS rather than kill the stream and tinker for half an hour

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