# Pause Recording Feature Request



## Scorge120 (Jan 30, 2018)

Not sure if this is the right place to post feature requests. 

The ability to pause recordings would be very handy.


----------



## dodgepong (Jan 30, 2018)

Thanks for the suggestion. This has been requested many times before, but unfortunately it's pretty low priority. It's still on the to-do list, though.


----------



## Scorge120 (Jan 30, 2018)

Everything else seems amazing. Thanks to the developers for making a great piece of freeware.


----------



## Kane (Feb 3, 2018)

Hey I have not seen this requested for a bit hehe. Yeah there is something like 30-40 separate posts on this. But the current devs have it very low on their list but it does not mean one will not someday say I want that feature and add it. I think the big thing is most devs have worked on it as a streaming program mostly first. I myself use it for video recording as I think it's one the best out there to have it pre encoded, etc.

Sadly for now I been using ffmpeg you can use it to join 2 parts but it still gets a bit messy and mixed up a times but it works.


----------



## TradeUp (Feb 23, 2018)

I signed up just to request this feature. Otherwise, it's awesome. To be honest, I'm stunned it doesn't have pause recording already built in since it has so many advanced features and this seems to me to be a rather obvious/simple one. I'm a day trader and having long videos for no reason is not what I'm really looking for. I'm currently doing multiple short videos, but that isn't exactly what I want either. The ability to just hit pause until  the need to record would be perfect. Hopefully you can bump that up the priority list  a few notches! :) 
Otherwise, this is a top notch program! Thanks for the program and for listening to my feedback!
:)


----------



## Eirik GM (Feb 26, 2018)

Hi!
(Signed up for this featurerequest only.:) )
Just wanted to join the friendly team of featurerequesters and sing my praises over this program! If someone in the development-team someday wishes to implement the pause-feature I can surely say that a flow of teachers would turn to OBS-studio as THE standard recording-program! I love the opensource, flexibility, performance, workflow and probably a lot of other brilliant features which is jet to be discovered:)

I'm one of the teachers, and record all my classes to let my students replay and go back if they need to. Sometimes we run livestreams if the students are somewhere else than in my physical classroom. OBS is an amazing program for excactly this kind of purpose! But usually I teach for 10-20 minutes and then let the students work on problemsolving, before a 5 minute short summary, followed by a little pause, before jumping back on the theory...... In other words: lots of pauses in between each chunk of theory. maybe the ratio "teachertalk" vs "problemsolving/discussion" is around 60-40%...?

When livestreaming, I "pause" the video using "be-right-back"-scenes, but if the students need to check some of the material again later, they will need to find their ways back through lots of empty spaces in the video. So I usually trim my videos before uploading, rendering every video one more time, then uploading.....! Using perhaps 5 minutes per video (+rendering in the background). 8 classes with 1-2 videos per class each week, eventually consumes a bit too much time for me.

But this "simple" feature (as I've understood maybe is not that simple to implement) would make OBS extremely attractive for tons of teachers like me! I wouldnt use a single second on post-production before uploading it to my channels (mainly youtube) and learningplatforms on the web. Ending up with giving my students the opportunity to study for themselves.

Again, a great program, and I'm very thankful to the development-team who spends lots of hours trying to give us the best possible software on the planet!:) But wanted to leave a note to say that I also whish for this feature to be implemented...

Another thought: maybe a poll-system could be an idea for the development-team? Could that help you guys in selecting which features to be implemented first?


----------



## dodgepong (Feb 26, 2018)

Eirik GM said:


> Another thought: maybe a poll-system could be an idea for the development-team? Could that help you guys in selecting which features to be implemented first?



We've been looking into some options for this within the last couple months and have found something that I think will work. I can't promise anything in terms of when it will go live, but it's something I've wanted for a while.


----------



## Eirik GM (Feb 27, 2018)

dodgepong said:


> We've been looking into some options for this within the last couple months and have found something that I think will work. I can't promise anything in terms of when it will go live, but it's something I've wanted for a while.


Cool! I would guess some of developers in the team can be motivated to implement some specific features if they get some numbers on how many in the community who actually have the desire for them! If I had some coding-skills I would probably spend my sparetime (+ some of my workhours:P ) to get the pause-feature-thing done, especially if I knew that excactly 1548 other teachers wanted the same feature :D

But I understand that OBS is specifically designed for streamers, and not teachers, so I'm very patient (but hopeful...!), but will definetely check back in here to vote when the poll pops up! Thanks again!


----------



## GoldenSun3DS (Mar 10, 2018)

dodgepong said:


> Thanks for the suggestion. This has been requested many times before, but unfortunately it's pretty low priority. It's still on the to-do list, though.



Why? I saw requests for this as far back as 2013. Even my phone has a pause/continue feature. Why is such a basic, quality of life feature ignored for so long?

It's not as simple as just stopping and restarting and then editing it later. Unless you know of a free video editing software that can edit/combine 4K video clips without degrading the quality. Even when YouTube had a video editor, it would downscale it to 1080P first.


----------



## Kane (Mar 14, 2018)

dodgepong said:


> We've been looking into some options for this within the last couple months and have found something that I think will work. I can't promise anything in terms of when it will go live, but it's something I've wanted for a while.


Jerk :P I at first I read your message before the quote and cheered up in the air and then realized it was for another feature haha.

But I do agree a poll feature is not always a bad idea if the developers don't mind it. The downside is it can burn out devs for example let's say Pause becomes a big hit feature request but the current dev who might be doing a lot the work is really working on streaming enhancements / features it could be a bit daunting on them.


----------



## dodgepong (Mar 14, 2018)

For some background on why this is difficult, there was a developer who did spend some time working on this and ran into a roadblock in the situation where a user was streaming and recording at the same time while the stream and recording were sharing an encoder or audio tracks (which is an extremely common use case). If the user tried pausing the recording in one of these cases, the stream would also end up pausing. This would explain why it might be easy for a phone recorder or a dedicated screen recorder could accomplish this, but a program like OBS that supports multiple outputs would run into problems.

The naive response to this would be "then don't let users pause recordings in those situations," but then that presents some UI challenges. How do we effectively communicate to the user in a way that isn't clumsy that the reason they can't pause right now is because they are sharing an encoder? Furthermore, this problem will only become harder once multiple outputs are supported that let you stream to multiple locations or have multiple simultaneous recordings. As the people who make and maintain this program, we also have to deal with the people who come in with support requests, and the more we can do to communicate why something is isn't working as expected without them having to come to a support room, the better.


----------



## TreeWizard (Jun 21, 2018)

Although we would prefer to use OBS we are having to use Xsplit. When we asked them for a pause button for recording they got it to us within a week. We record and stream at the same time and have been using this for years now. Pausing is a make or break situation for us as we have to maintain a stream for live situations and use a break plate for users to know we are still on. Stitching a recording together is too much of a time killer, and we have to eliminate dead recording time.


----------



## Kane (Sep 30, 2018)

TreeWizard said:


> Although we would prefer to use OBS we are having to use Xsplit. When we asked them for a pause button for recording they got it to us within a week. We record and stream at the same time and have been using this for years now. Pausing is a make or break situation for us as we have to maintain a stream for live situations and use a break plate for users to know we are still on. Stitching a recording together is too much of a time killer, and we have to eliminate dead recording time.


This a bit old but not really in timeline of things. Xsplit people get paid a lot where OBS is a 100% free, etc. The dev said if you want to hire someone to create it and throw on github then they be happy to do it as long as it's done right.


----------



## Chuzz (Oct 23, 2018)

The lack of a pause button is a problem. Otherwise, I love OBS. Bravo on a great software... oh except there's no pause....


----------



## webmutation (Jan 21, 2019)

+1 this is an amazing piece of software with one very useful feature missing. Not sure how issues are being tracked but I am pretty sure this would get the most votes if you used something like a feature tracker with votes.


----------



## dodgepong (Jan 21, 2019)

You can show your support for this feature here, as well as read an explanation from Jim on the status of this feature.

https://ideas.obsproject.com/posts/11/allow-for-recordings-to-be-paused-and-resumed


----------

