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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Minor OBS tangent: as of macOS Ventura, OBS is now an extremely good screen recorder for macOS with much less UI jank: previously there were a few issues such as not being able to capture application sound or not showing the mouse, but now everything works well.

Incidentially if this WebRTC support takes off, it may be a great tool for high-quality peer-to-peer desktop streaming.

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Yes. Also worth noting that for OBS 29 (in beta currently), Apple has contributed native hardware encoder support for H265 and ProRes, which both work very well. Very nice pick for their engineering outreach people!

edit: Forgot to mention that they also contributed Continuity Camera and Desk Cam support, so those are built in to OBS now as well.

Is there a way to confirm if the encoding is H265? I use the Apple Hardware VT Encoder and it doesn't provide many options (I use a Mac w/ a T2 chip which should be able to do H265)

If you're on OBS 29, all options will appear in the encoder dropdown in advanced output mode. The full suite: https://puu.sh/Juc1K/33d8aecc33.png

Ah, those aren't visible to me so maybe the T2 isn't enough and you do need AS. A bit of a bummer :(

They’re only part of the Apple Silicon hardware so that would make sense (though a Mac Pro with an Afterburner card would have it too, but I’m too poor to know if that works)

I was literally typing up this message when I saw your comment. I assume that the answer is yes?

> I'm pretty naive, but would this enable one to self stream to a limited audience? Like if I wanted to just steam my desktop to <5 people. I've kinda been surprised that there's a lack of tools that can accomplish this.

It would be really cool if I could present something from my desktop, show my face, and whatever, while just handing my friends a link and not requiring them to download anything.

I don't know the answer to the WebRTC part, but as long as you have a server with not-outrageously-priced outbound bandwidth, you can install an open source RTMP server like SRS[1], and stream to that RTMP server from OBS. It's really easy, configure the RTMP server & stream key, then "Start Streaming" which is right next to "Start Recording". You can then hand your friends a link, and they can play it in any media player with RTMP/HLS/FLV stream support, or you can add a simple web UI with e.g. hls.js[2] (very easy to write, there might even be prepackaged solutions) so that they truly don't need to download anything.

[1] https://github.com/ossrs/srs

[2] https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/

I’ve always just used nginx rtmp:

https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module

The hardest part to establish peer to peer streaming like this is actually making sure all participants can see your IP address. Residential and cellular network are often behind CGNAT which make peer to peer connections almost impossible without using dedicated relay servers (e.g. SRS like other mentioned). Even if you have a publicly routable IP address, your router configuration might cause issues with peer to peer connections and it's non-trivial for average layperson to fix by themselves.

Did macOS Ventura help this somehow?

Yes. A point release added an API to do this better and Apple has contributed a PR to OBS to make use of the new API:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595

What are some advantages of OBS over, say, the screen recording tool built into QuickTime?

I haven't used QuickTime, but OBS does allow you to record multiple things and overlay them in any way that you please. Which is why streamers typically like it. The "share window + camera overlay" is common, but you can also add templates, multiple video streams, etc. Can you do this in QuickTime? I know most basic screen recording tools you can't do this so easily.

Since a couple years ago you don't even need to open QuickTime for a screen recording, just ⇧⌘5 to bring up the system native screen recording tool. If you just want a quick screen recording and nothing more, it's a lot more convenient than OBS, especially if you want to record a window or part of the screen. In OBS you need to manually configure output dimensions and cropping is difficult and unintuitive, you can't just drag out a rectangle on your screen. I don't know what gp was comparing to when they said "an extremely good screen recorder for macOS with much less UI jank"; the native screen recording tool certainly doesn't have any UI jank and is lot more user friendly.

Where OBS shines are

- Precise control over encoding parameters;

- Mix and match multiple input sources, beyond just screen + system sound + mic; this includes rearranging and cropping multiple application windows;

- Add text, images, filters, etc.

In short, it has a lot more power user features. If you just want to quickly record the entire screen / an application window / part of the screen, native screen recording tool beats it handily.

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