2018-10-06 Saturday - Evaluating Open Broadcaster Software

This weekend I'm evaluating OBS (Open Broadcaster Software, GPLv2 license) - as a possible alternative to TechSmith's Camtasia commercial product.

• https://obsproject.com/ 
• https://obsproject.com/docs/
• https://obsproject.com/wiki/
• https://obsproject.com/wiki/OBS-Studio-Overview
• https://obsproject.com/wiki/OBS-Studio-Quickstar
• https://obsproject.com/forum/
• https://github.com/obsproect/obs-studio 
• https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/blob/master/README.rst
• Capabilities:
• "High performance real time video/audio capturing and mixing. Create scenes made up of multiple sources including window captures, images, text, browser windows, webcams, capture cards and more."
• "Set up an unlimited number of scenes you can switch between seamlessly via custom transitions."
• "Intuitive audio mixer with per-source filters such as noise gate, noise suppression, and gain. Take full control with VST plugin support."
• "Powerful and easy to use configuration options. Add new Sources, duplicate existing ones, and adjust their properties effortlessly."
• "Streamlined Settings panel gives you access to a wide array of configuration options to tweak every aspect of your broadcast or recording."
• "Choose from a number of different and customizable transitions for when you switch between your scenes or add your own stinger video files."
• "Set hotkeys for nearly every sort of action, such as switching between scenes, starting/stopping streams or recordings, muting audio sources, push to talk, and more."
• "Studio Mode lets you preview your scenes and sources before pushing them live. Adjust your scenes and sources or create new ones and ensure they're perfect before your viewers ever see them."
• "Get a high level view of your production using the Multiview. Monitor 8 different scenes and easily cue or transition to any of them with merely a single or double click."
• "OBS Studio is equipped with a powerful API, enabling plugins and scripts to provide further customization and functionality specific to your needs."
• "Utilize native plugins for high performance integrations or scripts written with Lua or Python that interface with existing sources."

I've been using Camtasia for some client work - and while I think it does a decent job - the UI /UX  isn't always intuitively obvious (or, I just need to spend more time reading the documentation and going through their tutorials...) - so I'm hopeful that OBS may be a viable alternative.

These are the Recording configuration settings that I've settled on for the moment (which reduced the recording size from ~6MB to 837 kb)

So far I'm very pleased with the ease-of-use - it took me about 5 minutes to become productive with the tool.