My favorite OBS feature is that you can bring in transparent browser windows all over the place. As such, I have my work conferencing set up so my time appears in the upper-right corner. I’m on the east coast and everyone I work with is on the west coast. It’s a nice way to remind them of my current time. (It also passive aggressively animated to purple with a moon when its “after hours,” a/k/a 5pm for me.)
I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events.
It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS.
I realized you could do that a few months back and finally built a little HTML/CSS/JS-based 'TODO' list so people could more easily follow along with my progress completing a set of tasks during live streams: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/obs-task-list-overlay...
It was trivially easy to get it formatted properly without me having to know anything about the GUI programming language OBS uses. Definitely an enlightening moment when I realized you can overlay anything with HTML!
This is fantastic. I really like the local-time clock idea. Now that I’ve been enlightened, I think it should be a standard option in all conferencing software.
I completely agree. I've had quite a few people ask me "how do I turn that on in Google Meet," to which I then have to explain, "it's waaaaay more complicated than you'd expect."
I'm surprised "simple overlays" aren't a thing in any of the video conference software yet.
I've embedded a browser window in an OBS stream on my mac, and it just about ground my computer to a halt; the CPU was pegged at 100%, and using it with Zoom basically meant not using anything else.
I used to run a daily show off a tricked out MacBook Pro, and it was really problematic (e.g. 30 second delays on live streams). Moved to PC with a good processor and video card, and now it just sips the processor at ~12% with near-live performance. If you use OBS for live streaming, I strongly recommend you move off of Mac, especially if you do anything beyond the most basic operations.
There is a lot that you can do to optimize OBS streams before you may need to jump to Windows, however :)
I’ve got a within-the-last-18-months MacBook Pro, so yeah, your mileage may vary. A dedicated graphics card helps tremendously. I’ve got a gaming PC with a recent NVIDIA card and it does even blink at it.
I haven't tried embedding a browser window in OBS on Mac yet, I'll have to try it.
But you should check to see if you have activated hardware encoding. Go to "Settings" and "Output", select "Output Mode: Advanced" and then in the "Encoder"-dropdown you should now see an option called "Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder". That should hopefully help somewhat with CPU.
It's just mac. On my Windows desktop OBS purrs like a gentle kitten while streaming games, running Unity, and pulling in windows from 3 4K monitors (and my CPU is from 2014, and a GTX1080).
It crashed the first time I tried to set up the most basic stream on Mac, so I never tried again.
Throttling is one thing that can cause high kernel_task usage, but you can also run ‘pmset -g thermlog’ to verify whether it’s actually due to throttling/cooling issues.
I have the same issue. How do you know if it's throttling and if so what is the action to take? My fairly recent Mac is completely failing at doing video, while my 2012 I dragged out of storage has no issue.
The command’s output is pretty straightforward. It tells you the percentage of CPU you have available to use. Leave it running and try something super intensive. It’s much easier to get my Intel MBA to throttle than my work-provided 16” MBP.
As part of a school project this past year, my son had to do a historical video report. Together, we hacked together a set of 17th century evening news overlay graphics complete with scrolling headline ticker. OBS was great.
As I mentioned in another comment — I used jQuery, and chose not to share anything because I don't need everyone's feedback on how old and dumb that makes me. :)
But basically, anything you can render in a browser can happen on the screen. Get JavaScript to show your current time in a browser, then pull in that URL into your OBS scene. The background will be transparent.
I think it's using Blink to render things underneath, that's what it seems like at least.
Doesn’t alter the existing stream. OBS creates new virtual camera that it outputs from your mix of input sources. You then tell zoom to use the OBS virtual camera as its source.
Instead of "altering" a stream, you use OBS to take the camera input, then output it via virtual cam. Once you have the basics setup, you can get fancy setting up scenes, overlays, color corrections etc. Works great for green screens as well.
My code isn't public because it uses jQuery and I don't need the feedback about how old I am because I like jQuery. :)
But generally speaking, if you can get JavaScript to display the current time in a browser, you can pull in that file via a browser source (using a file:// protocol) and show it on the screen. From there, it's a matter of doing anything else you can get JS to show in a browser. Or, if you have a local server running, you can display entire websites along side your face.
At that point, it's an interesting shift in mindset — you're not designing stuff for the browser, but to be displayed next to you.
I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events.
It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS.
Easily a top 5 app for me.