Comment by gechr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gechr | Hacker News Reader

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After trying various solutions - including DeskPad - I came up with a custom cross-platform (I'm on macOS, but assume it'll work elsewhere) solution that worked incredibly well on my 40" ultrawide monitor: OBS[1].

Having never used OBS before but knowing it was popular among streamers, I wondered if I could use it to (1) only share the specific applications I wanted to share and (2) share them at a resolution that people could actually read, without constantly being asked to zoom in.

I first tried setting up a virtual camera and sharing via my video stream, but it was laggy and the quality was so poor that people couldn't read what I was sharing. I quickly gave up on that approach.

Then I discovered Projectors[2]. By right-clicking on the main view in OBS and selecting "Windowed Projector (Preview)", it launches a separate window, which I can then share directly via Zoom, Teams, Meet, etc.

Whatever I drag into the OBS view is displayed in the Windowed Projector (similar to DeskPad), with the added bonus that I can choose to blur certain applications that might be dragged in. For example, if I open Slack or my password manager, the entire window blurs until I focus back on my terminal or browser.

It took a bunch of tweaking to perfect, but I'm very pleased with how well it works now.

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[1] https://obsproject.com/

[2] https://obsproject.com/kb/power-of-projectors

I also use OBS for different purposes.

When I'm teaching a class, I will share the screen that has the projector fully screened on it (which is normally the screen for my teleprompter (so I'm looking into the eyes of my students)). I have a bunch of scenes set up, so I can quickly change the scenes using my Stream Deck. You can make really smooth transitions, so I have a scene for:

- Full camera

- Full camera shifted ~60% to the right with a small desktop screen (where I'm showing my slideshow or code) on top

- Full desktop with face in upper right or lower right (another Stream Deck button to toggle face position)

- Full desktop, no face

I also have countdown timers that I can set from the command line when we are taking a break or waiting for the class to start.

OBS is awesome.

However, I also record many courses and must do them in HD res. Sadly, my MBP has a notch and won't natively do HD. OBS doesn't help with this (easily). My current solution (which I'm curious to try DeskPad to see if it is better) is to use the BetterDisplay app and create a "virtual screen" with HD dimensions. BD lets me "mirror" the virtual HD screen to my Mac monitor, and it magically resizes the dimensions correctly to HD.

It's a painful workaround (especially because every time my Mac or other monitors sleep, all of the orientations of the monitors and the mirroring of the virtual screen are forgotten).

I would love a way to tell my MBP screen to go HD, but to my knowledge, that doesn't appear possible.

There is an app called RDM which can do that.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

My main work machine is also a Mac and I found the accessibility zoom a really useful and quick feature. I simply share my entire screen or a window in whatever meeting/share app and then use a 3-finger gesture and Cmd+ or Cmd- to zoom in and out. That zoom level is fully passed on by the screen share.

Obviously this feature has to be enabled and wasn’t intended for this purpose but it works perfectly!

Application-independent zoom is such a nice feature. I've been keeping a zombie version of compiz (formerly beryl) on linux working for years, mainly because I love my wobbly windows and desktop cube, but it's long had two features great for screen sharing purposes too: the zooming like you mention (have it bound to meta+scroll wheel) and drawing annotations (alt+meta+left click for free drawing, there's also eraser, erase all, straight lines, and filled rects/ellipses).

Thanks for sharing this! My main issue with the windowed projectors is that you can't force them to have the proper size for the resolution of the OBS canvas which causes the result to be scaled and it has window borders. I've worked around this by having a virtual display (in my case BetterDisplay [1], but DeskPad should work as well) and use the full-screen projector instead, as an added benefit there is no additional window floating around. The resolutions are all aligned, so no scaling.

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[1] https://betterdisplay.pro/

Blacklisting falls into badness enumeration territory. It's good that you can blacklist sensitive windows, but it would be more useful to have a whitelist feature. If I want to share my browser tab and a game I'm playing, I could simply tell it that, and not have to worry about whatever other sensitive information may pop up randomly at any given time.

Why did you prefer this to DeskPad? I haven't tried either but have been looking for a solution for this without knowing it.

Not OP, but OBS is cross platform and you can set up custom scenes. So you can basically show whatever you want on it, and save those so that it automatically works like that every time. It also can act as a virtual camera, and you can record.

Having used OBS before (not the OP) it is much more feature rich and widely used.

Any tutorials or write-ups on how to achieve the blur on certain windows that you bring in? That seems really useful and I haven't seen it before.

Thanks for sharing your method!

Not OP, but this exists: https://git.bernloehr.eu/glax/OBSBlur

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