Comment by schrodingersket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schrodingersket | Hacker News Reader

schrodingersket

I haven't spent much time in the video processing/streaming space, but I was delighted to discover OBS Studio this week while putting together what has turned out to be an incredibly cozy little entertainment setup by feeding the two gaming consoles and geriatric gaming desktop I've acquired over the years into an HDMI switcher and USB HDMI capture box that in turn streams the feed into an OBS Studio preview (launched from Steam) running on a dummy display.

Launching OBS Studio through Steam lets me stream that preview to my VR headset over a 6GHz WiFi dongle and play games wirelessly in what feels like my own little private theatre. OBS Studio was the puzzle piece I hadn't figured out when the headset showed up last weekend, and I've been really impressed by its performance so far... I think this setup even shaved some latency off when playing online, since consolidating the consoles next to the router let me hardwire them.

Many many thanks to the OBS Studio team for making software that's helping me live out a small part of what I remember hoping technology could be like back in the 90s. I am grateful (:

It's very heartening to read testimonials from users who aren't jaded. I hate negativity around OSS online

What's the negativity? Anything wrong with OBS in particular? I haven't used it in a while, but recently saw DHH saying it's awful. I reckon that's the usual Twitter hyperbole/rhetoric that attracts attention, so just wondering.

That's not what he said. OBS decided to not support streaming to Rumble for political reasons. So Omarchy is gonna ship a leaner alternative soon-ish, that's all.

Someone needs to ship an alternative of omarchy the same way.

Omarchy is just Arch + config + slop + fascism, you can just build your own desktop, and you can skip the last two.

Must be quite comfy to live in such a simplistic reality. Imagine not having to think through all the complexity of life all the time by just crying fascism whenever people disagree with you.

Was envious for a second there. Then I was reminded that I quite enjoy thinking.

This is disingenuous. You chose to word it in a ridiculous way: "crying fascism whenever people disagree with you". If you enjoy thinking, please think a bit more and be more charitable. Maybe it's not "crying" at all? Maybe it's not because of a simple disagreement?

I'm sure that obs can export to something that can be used to stream to rumble.

I saw somebody else besides DHH talking about their decision not to accept PRs with AI written code briefly. I believe there’s a Rust fork in progress.

It's been years since I needed to use it, but: lack of an undo button. Not being able to undo stuff was very annoying, and felt out of place for an otherwise nice piece of software.

OBS added Undo/Redo in 2021, and it tracks the last 5,000 actions in the session.

https://obsproject.com/blog/obs-studio-27-released

Oh that's good to hear!

If DHH disapproves of something, you know it must be good.

To misquote the classic about programming languages.

"There are the live video compositors everyone complains about and there are the ones nobody uses."

But really, it is great to see a piece of open source software as the default choice in a field where they tend to suffer, desktop applications.

A lot of negativity about OSS is deserved, and doesn't necessarily come from supporters of proprietary software, but for long-time OSS users and programmers, who want it to be better.

But many OSS programs are awesome, and OBS is one of them.

I believe a lot of negativity comes from people who believed the OSS preachers "come come, you don't need that proprietary crap, we have everything free and better"

And then most people are in for a surprise, that usually the above is only true in theory. But in reality there are driver issues, missing firmware, outdated repositories, broken updates ... critical missing features and in general a need to understand technical details with no polished UI.

And speaking of, with OBS I really liked the UI to just get started, but performance/quality of produced video was way worse for me, then simple screencapture with ffmpeg.

It was very heartening to have this experience! I tried to refrain from harboring overly positive or negative expectations while setting this up and am quite content with how it turned out (especially since every part of this stack can run on Linux; this morning, I swapped out the gaming desktop part of this setup out for my Linux dev laptop + eGPU just for fun, and it all works identically).

How was latency for all of this?

Surprisingly low. Steam reports about 12-15ms latency over the 6GHz dongle, and the Internet seems to think that the capture card preview adds about 49 ms; I haven't tested the latter claim myself, but ~65ms feels like a reasonable number. I don't usually seem to notice <100ms latency when I play games (which could be a skill issue on my part), and indeed I don't notice delay between the VR headset image and the direct HDMI passthrough that goes to my desktop monitor (the non-dummy display)

I had initially only planned to use this setup for turn-based games, but after this pleasant surprise, it looks like I get to explore some other kinds of games :D

and all this without vibecoding!

Funny how you went the huge app route for such a narrow scope where I would have just used a lightweight tool like ffplay given the setting would never really change.

wait, OBS is a huge app but ffmpeg is not?

Depends what are our criterias:

- size on disk

- cpu usage

- size in memory

- impact on user lives

- impact on developer lives

- impact on our industry as a whole

- <insert other criteria>

The thing is, ffmpeg is a dependency of obs, so if you install obs you have ffmpeg installed while the opposite is not necessarily true.

Quite so! I'm sure I could have fiddled with ffmpeg commands, set up a custom Steam launcher, etc. I probably would have if OBS Studio's preview performance introduced too much overhead.

I also discovered that OBS Studio can be installed directly from the Steam store, which makes makes the whole thing feel just a little more seamless (I'm streaming to the Steam Frame). I don't mind trading the extra install space for that feeling, especially since OBS is OSS. It was really pleasant to have this all "just work" end-to-end on both Linux and Windows stacks.

Yes in contradiction to what the downvoters might think, I am not judgemental. By all means use what works for you. I was just pointing out how one thing can be done different ways and I might not even have thought about using OBS for that purpose while being a user myself of the program.

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