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Comment by prahladyeri | Hacker News Reader

If only OBS was somewhat lighter, I'd have used it. You need an Intel i5 or Ryzen 1300x processor for a "minimum requirements", imagine what would it take for a decent performance!

Instead, I use another app called ShareX [1] which is much lighter on the OS and processor. It may not have all the features but you can easily create a screencast or recording session with ease.

[1]: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

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The Ryzen 3 1300X is a low-end, nearly 6-year-old CPU. The Core i5 2500K is a mid-range, _12-year-old_ CPU. It's a perfectly reasonable minimum requirement.

I use ShareX and I use OBS - there doesn't seem to be a huge overlap in functionality?

ShareX - screen capture and screen recording.

OBS - streaming (and lots of related functionality).

I'm guessing you were using OBS for screen recording - but that's not really close to it's core feature set.

i use obs exclusively for your sharex use case.

I use the gnome screenshot widget.

A lot of people use OBS for screen recording. I do think ShareX is extremely limited unless you want to record something super simple.

OBS' ability to compose a whole scene, dozens of different capture methods, overlays, full audio mixer, transitions, etc. It's the perfect place to record any sort of desktop-based video. It's far far more than just "screen recording".

I don't see anything wrong with using OBS for screen recording.

I use it for streaming as well, but having it installed, I also use it for recording when I need it. Also for video capture from the webcam.

OBS can do no wrong to me.

Yeah - I guess I hadn't really considered it for that task. I've only used for live stuff personally and I hadn't made the connection with screen recording per se.

I find OBS not to be that heavy as long as your GPU does all the work. A modern i3 would probably do fine if it has QuickSync enabled and not too many extra filters and inputs at the same time.

ShareX doesn't live stream as far as I know? Let alone offer WebRTC?

Sean recently posted a link to an ffmpeg fork where this work is being done too. Gstreamer already has a WHIP module that flew under my radar. So there should be plenty of good options soon.

Windows only. Still, good to have alternatives. OBS is nice in that learning it means you can use it on 3 of the biggest platforms, even if performance isn't top notch.

I haven't used ShareX so I may be missing something here, but the website seems to indicate it's a screen capture utility. Does it do more?

OBS is not a screen capture utility.

> OBS is not a screen capture utility.

I've been looking for a way to record my screen and webcam as separate files and so far OBS¹ seems like it might be the only tool that can do that. Is that not a good use for OBS?

¹ https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/source-record.1285/)

I guess they mean not just a screen capture utility

Sorry I should've been clearer: it can certainly be used to capture your screen. It's just an extremely ancillary subfeature.

It is.

It can do screen capture. That doesn't make it a screen capture utility. In the same way as Visual Studio is not a note-taking app, blender3d is not a video editor and Excel is not an IDE.

Sadly people recommend OBS for regular screen capture on Wayland, after X11-based capture apps like SimpleScreenRecorder no longer work on Wayland. And OBS isn't very good at screen recording, and even cropping the recording by dragging a specific region, then shrinking the output file size to this region, cannot be done easily (alt-dragging the bounding box followed by "Resize output (source size)" picks the uncropped source size, and the "Crop/Pad" filter doesn't allow dragging a screen region).

In fact the issue was closed without understanding what the reporter was asking: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/8822

OBS doesn't work for me on Wayland either.

I log in into X11 when I use OBS on Ubuntu.

It will work under wayland if you have xdg-desktop-portal/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr set up.

If you've got that set up up correctly, screen sharing will also work in Firefox (for instance on discord).

As far as I understand it, xdg-desktop-portal is a DE/WM agnostic protocol that enables applications to easily capture a screen - the user just has to run the right backend for their environment. I think it does other stuff too, but screen recording is probably the main use case.

I'm using Manjaro Sway Edition where that was configured out of the box.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal

OBS is the screen capture tool. Unless you define screen capture somewhat differently? Nearly everyone on Twitch (or other streaming sites) is using it.

Use the GPU encoder not x264. x264 is very CPU heavy, even on veryfast.

As fast as processors are these days I don't see this as a valid complaint (especially with how inexpensive machines powered by the Apple M1 are these days).

I've been using OBS since it first came out (11 years ago?) on just a 2012 MacBook. Never had a single issue.

Post your specs you dinosaur

obs works well for me on a decade old machine.

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