# Performing OCR on input or output



## mintograde (Jan 16, 2015)

To preface, I don't have any experience working with OBS in a development sense, or with OCR in general, and I'm using this small project as a way to learn both. In other words, this is more of an "is this even possible" kind of post.

My goal is to generate a timestamped log of post-game stats (example here), so I can more easily keep track of when I play games and with whom. The game itself is on a console, and the official stats website does not contain any of the stats I'm looking for, so I believe my only option is to process the video through OBS while streaming/recording.

I'm less concerned about the actual OCR part, as I see that as the "fun" part to learn. My first concern is just getting the image data from OBS so I can start playing with/manipulating it.

I'm not sure where to start, though, so here are some initial questions:

Is the OBS stream output exposed to external applications through some API already?
If not, should I start by making a plugin that, say, takes a snapshot N times per second and either dumps out an image file or allows communication with external applications?
Should the OCR functionality even be developed as an application external to OBS, or would it be easier to do the OCR stuff as a plugin within OBS?


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## Fanatic (Jan 17, 2015)

Don't really need OBS for this do you?  You just need a screenshot of the scoreboard, then some OCR software to read it the scores off of it.


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## mintograde (Jan 17, 2015)

Well, I plan on recording/streaming all the games I play anyway, so OBS will already be open and grabbing video. The goal is to record data when a new scoreboard is detected, so I'm trying to avoid taking screenshots manually.


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## Fanatic (Jan 17, 2015)

You say "manually" like it would be a complicated thing :).  Just need to press 1 hotkey when the scoreboard appears.  Can probably even have the screenshot file named with the date and time.

Having some OCR software constantly scanning to detect a scoreboard would add a lot of processing requirements I would think.

Would be nice if OBS had some screenshot functionality.


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## JonyGreen (Sep 11, 2015)

I find another free online ocr, it's using tesseract ocr 3.02.


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## hayak (Sep 6, 2017)

Hi, everyone,

Just wanted to share our progress with Scoreboard OCR application that we have been developing for last several months. 

Here is a small demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYaEx6PFN1M

If this is something you migth be interested in, try out the Scoreboard OCR yourself at IBC (Hall 6, Stand C12, opposite of Bird-dog and vMix) !

Arturs


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