Open Broadcaster Software Tutorial

[Karaya]

Hello everybody, I thought why not make a tutorial on how to record videos in Cliffs with this awesome piece of software.

It's free of charge, highly customizable and can be used for both live streaming to a service like twitch.tv or YouTube or for local recordings (the way I use it)

http://obsproject.com/

Older Tutorial



Updated Tutorial



Almost all of the videos found on my channel have been recorded using OBS. Funnily the OBS tutorial I recorded using FFSplit, but thats just a sidenote...

[DUI]

Thumbs up!

Thanks to Karaya I am using the software as well.

[9./JG52 Reinhart]

Thanks for referring this to me Karaya, love how it records for hours and barely uses up any data

[9./JG52 Lopp]

Thanks for the great tutorial!

[Gladio]

Thanks for sharing Karaya. Do you think OBS it's better than Fraps ?

[RugbyGoth]

Thank you, great tutorial!

[ATAG_Lolsav]

Thanks for sharing Karaya. Do you think OBS it's better than Fraps ?

Two main advantages (or even 3)

1. Its free
2. It uses x264 encoding
3. It can be used to stream live if ones has enough bandwith for it

[Karaya]

What Lolsav said!

For livestreaming you should at the very least have a 2MBit upload speed (for 720p) or better yet 3 or more (for 1080p). As said OBS is very easy on the system whereas Fraps for me personally has always resulted in huge performance drops while recording and the file capture size is huge as it records uncompressed .avi files.

You can adjust the quality of OBS footage directly via the bitrate which is very nice and straightforward. At 5000kbit which I use to record locally a 1h flight comes in at roughly 2GB, with Fraps you'd have the same file size after barely a few minutes!

The only feature I can see that OBS lacks as compared to Fraps is that it does not include a framerate counter but I can live with that, besides Cliffs has its own inbuilt frame counter just for that.

[hnbdgr]

This is awesome, thank you I just did a PS tutorial for one of my clients with this. Super easy to set up and record.

[Wulf]

Thanks Karaya. This is very helpful.

[Otyg]

awesome guide! but.
The launcher(clod) keep crashing when i tab out to see the preview. when it works it works really good but restarting clod is a real pain. Any ideas? my google skills where sub-par on this subject apparently .

Problemsignatur:
Problemhändelsens namn: APPCRASH
Programnamn: launcher.exe_Launcher
Programversion: 1.0.0.0
Programtidsstämpel: 4d6e3d08
Namn på felmodul: d3d10core.dll
Modulens version: 6.1.7600.16385
Tidsstämpel för felmodul: 4a5bd9a3
Undantagskod: c0000005
Undantagsförskjutning: 00027347
OS-version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Språkvariant-ID: 1053
Ytterligare information 1: 0a9e
Ytterligare information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Ytterligare information 3: 0a9e
Ytterligare information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

edit: the text is not in english......

[Karaya]

More info pls!

What OS are you running, do you use any overlays or graphics injectors (TS plugin, Steam overlay, SweetFX,...)!?

Disable all of these and then try again and see if it works

[III./ZG76_Saipan]

keep getting error about server thinks I am still logged in or bad key.... any ideas? thanks and all I have is the black box even after alt tab back from the plane. very frustrating.

[Karaya]

Are you trying to make a live stream?

For the black screen issue: Try deleting the global source and setting it back up the same way as shown in the tutorial. It is extremely important you first get into an aircraft and then go out to pick the source, else you will hook OBS up with the GUI rather than the game itself!

[III./ZG76_Saipan]

ok, lolsav got it going.... make sure fraps is off and the ts3 overlay ( not the tf one the generic one). thanks guys!

[Incog]

Something to throw out there, just in case. I made this mistake and rectified only recently, after doing some research / getting help from others. So I might as well share:


If you're using OBS, which uses x264 to encode, then you get a substantial performance boost if you have AVX instructions. For windows 8, I think avx comes with "stock" W8. For W7, you need to get microsoft's service pack 1 to get it. If you're using a very fresh install of W7 you might not have it. This service pack does not include the KB2670838 which is known to mess with cliffs of dover.

using AVX, I got a 46% performance boost:

before avx: http://i.imgur.com/ixoa9Y0.jpg
after avs: http://i.imgur.com/lvESbZL.jpg

this is where I downloaded the service pack from: http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/Operating_System/


the benchmark/stress test is the 295 mb file from this post: http://www.overclock.net/t/1411077/h...#post_21941059




PS: check out karaya's channel! he flies the 109 very well, is an excellent shot and you often see strong element flying from them. he's currently doing the 50 mission sortie challenge. it's a pleasure watching his vods. there are also time stamps if you don't feel like going through the entire sortie, as they are a bit less than an hour long most of the time (historical 109 mission time, am i right?)

[Karaya]

Interesting!

Did not know about that AVX thingy.

Also thank you for the kind words about my channel. I try to add annotations as best I can but it takes time which means that some videos only get them added in after a few days time...

[ATAG_Lewis]

Thanks for this tutorial and headsup Karaya...~S~

I have been looking for a good alternative to Fraps.....and its good that this has more options....

I'm downloading it now...

[sw1ive]

.
very very very good program... I just use... OBS for two months

but if you not use two monitors, you got a problem

I use two monitors. No1 for Cliffs of Dover, no2 for OBS window and TS3 window

with 12.000 bit rate it was very hard program but with 5.000 it work very well...

with Fraps you got 4 times bigger files, and OBS are 4 times smaller...

[Broodwich]

Hey guys, just thought I should let you know about shadowplay. It's a free addon for any nvidia owners, and has a very small impact on performance. File size is also tiny compared to what fraps puts out. It also has twitch support built in. The latest release has push to talk now too!

Google it for more details

[Karaya]

Hey guys, just thought I should let you know about shadowplay. It's a free addon for any nvidia owners, and has a very small impact on performance. File size is also tiny compared to what fraps puts out. It also has twitch support built in. The latest release has push to talk now too!

Google it for more details

Not intended to crash the party but since a few updates OBS supports the very same encoder that Shadowplay uses (NVENC). It can be enabled in the settings under "Video" on the very top of the window. There should be three choices: x264, Quick Sync & Nvidia NVENC. Nvidia users should have at least 2 of these three for choice. I'll try to give a very basic overview of these three right here:

x264: a very powerful open source video encoding codec for output in MPEG-4 format. Out of all three options this will provide the best quality for a given bitrate!

Quick Sync: This will ONLY be available if you own a Quick Sync capable motherboard & at least a Sandy Bridge type CPU. This option should have the least impact on game & system performance as the encoding is taken over by the onboard GPU incorporated into the Intel CPU, however image quality is decidely lower than x264.

NVENC: This is the same encoder used by Shadowplay and there is very little to choose between this and x264 though most people will tell you that for a given bitrate x264 gives better quality than NVENC. If you experience performance issues while recording on the fly give this a try and see if it works out for you.

Overall I would recommend staying with the standard x264 codec as it simply provides the best video quality and I have never really noticed much of a performance hit recording at 1080p, 30fps & 5000kbps! I really recommend OBS to anybody interested in recording game footage, it's highly customizable to your personal needs and fairly intuitive. You can start recording after just a few tweaks, most of the advanced settings are of no importance to the average Joe...

[IIJG27Rich]

I heard of OBS from someone quite some time ago but it was this post that finally convinced me to try it. Thanks Karaya

[Broodwich]

Interesting, although there isnt much reason for a small increase in quality when youtube takes a huge chunk out of it already.

The other big selling point for shadowplay is you can press a button and the past 1-20 minutes of play is saved. It really makes it convenient recording because I dont have to worry about starting it at the beginning of an engagement, or recording the whole sortie. Does the OBS do that too?

[TWC_NINja]

I just tried OBS today - and ran into a problem... mind you, it's my first time trying to make any vids.

Anyway, I recording my flight and used OBS to encode the .trk file on playback. The video quality is great but I get no sound at all. Am I going about this incorrectly?

I tried all the different settings from the "Audio" settings, but nothing works.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

NINja

[Karaya]

Make sure you have your speakers selected under "Desktop Audio Device:" and that they are not muted on the main program window (more red bars means louder, no red bars means muted)!

[TWC_NINja]

Thanks for your reply... I have Digital Audio (HDMI) selected as my desktop audio device and the red bars are full right. I play CloD on a TV via HDMI from my computer.

EDIT: I just restarted the program as well as CloD, and now the sound is coming through, but very softly. I have to turn my volume all the way up to hear it.

[Karaya]

Make sure you have something selected like "Speakers", "Television" or some such. You can see what your correct audio device is by right clicking the speaker symbol in the low right, right click, choose playback devices and then play something like music or a video. The active audio device should show green bars dancing around as volume goes up & down...

As for volume: I have the speaker volume set all the way to 100% for recording

[JimmyBlonde]

I'll be checking this out, thanks Karaya!

[Keenable]

Thank you Karaya for this brilliant tutorial. After realising that running fraps and CoD together was a bit too much for my PC, I had given up hope of ever being able to record live sorties unless I upgraded my build. Making vids of one's exploits from recorded tracks has several issues like certain cockpit instruments not showing accurate readouts and the 'lean to gunsight' action not being recorded.

Thanks to OBS I can easily record without my system throwing a fit and the file sizes (with Karaya's settings) are a fraction of what fraps generates.

I have learned, and am still learning, to fly and shoot from Karaya's vids and now he has taught me how to use OBS. You are a true master sir!

Just a heads up to anyone facing launcher crashes.

I had the game crash at random intervals especially after entering the aircraft or just after taking off. I then minimised the OBS window and that seems to have solved the problem.

[klu.peete]

I tried this obs in War Thunder all i goth was a black screen... looked it up on the web.. lots of complaints over obs and black screens.. so il wait .. til my control settings of my bf109 are good again.. ggrrrr...