Display with two streams

[jonsolo_23]

My wife and I are working on streaming simultaneously, and are struggling to get the display to show both of our game plays. Any recommendations or help to make this work? We have capture cards, both playing on consoles, and can get game play on the screen just can’t figure out a format to display like we see others do online.

 

[koala]

If you post an example of how exactly "others do online", we would be able to explain how such a stream could possibly be created to mimic that.

 

[jonsolo_23]

If you post an example of how exactly "others do online", we would be able to explain how such a stream could possibly be created to mimic that.

Similar to this setup

 

[koala]

Ok, you want to show both game screens and a webcam picture of both of you all in the same stream.
The easiest thing to achieve this is to dedicate one PC/Laptop for the job. Run OBS on this machine.

To get your consoles into OBS, connect two capture devices to the PC, one for each of your consoles. Choose capture devices with hdmi passthrough, so you still can see the console output on the TV/monitor where you currently see the game.
For the webcams, you need two webcams also connected to the PC. If it is a laptop, you can probably use the integrated laptop webcam, and the other one needs to be an external one.
Having 3 or 4 USB devices of this kind is not easy - you must not overload the available USB bandwidth. You cannot connect everything to one hub and expect it to work. Use all USB connectors of the machine, so the devices get all different internal USB hubs. Try to get USB 3 devices for the capture devices - not USB 2 devices.

An alternative setup could be to run OBS on 2 laptops and choosing one as kind of master and the other as kind of assistant. Both get one capture device and capture one console as well as the webcam image of one player. The assistant sends its video to the master over the local LAN (can be achieved with the NDI plugin). The master receives it and composes the stream from the received video as well as from the local capture device and local webcam. Then it actually streams the composition to the desired streaming service. This looks as if it is the more elegant solution, but having a distributed system like this and getting a flawless ndi transmission is something difficult, so you might fail with this.

 

[jonsolo_23]

Ok, you want to show both game screens and a webcam picture of both of you all in the same stream.
The easiest thing to achieve this is to dedicate one PC/Laptop for the job. Run OBS on this machine.

To get your consoles into OBS, connect two capture devices to the PC, one for each of your consoles. Choose capture devices with hdmi passthrough, so you still can see the console output on the TV/monitor where you currently see the game.
For the webcams, you need two webcams also connected to the PC. If it is a laptop, you can probably use the integrated laptop webcam, and the other one needs to be an external one.
Having 3 or 4 USB devices of this kind is not easy - you must not overload the available USB bandwidth. You cannot connect everything to one hub and expect it to work. Use all USB connectors of the machine, so the devices get all different internal USB hubs. Try to get USB 3 devices for the capture devices - not USB 2 devices.

An alternative setup could be to run OBS on 2 laptops and choosing one as kind of master and the other as kind of assistant. Both get one capture device and capture one console as well as the webcam image of one player. The assistant sends its video to the master over the local LAN (can be achieved with the NDI plugin). The master receives it and composes the stream from the received video as well as from the local capture device and local webcam. Then it actually streams the composition to the desired streaming service. This looks as if it is the more elegant solution, but having a distributed system like this and getting a flawless ndi transmission is something difficult, so you might fail with this.

So we have the capture cards working, but can’t figure out how to format the screen correctly.

 

[koala]

Well, this is something you have to work out yourself. Take inspiration from other streams, but how to arrange things on the screen is your task in the end. It's your stream and your vision, isn't it?

 

[AaronD]

Multiple USB video devices tend to not play well with each other. Sometimes it can work, but it's not guaranteed. USB at present is still a pretty tight bottleneck, and multiple ports often share a single controller internally. That's where the real bottleneck is.

And laptops are notorious for overheating easily and throttling way back, which absolutely kills their performance.

If you're pulling in a bunch of independent streams, I think it'd be much better to use a multi-input PCIe card in a dedicated capable desktop tower. I like these, but there are others too:

ACASIS PCIe Capture Card

Acasis PCIe capture card supports multiple HD resolutions (such as 4K60Hz), bringing crystal-clear visual effects to the audience. It also supports quad HDMI or SDI simultaneous input, allowing you to flexibly adjust between different camera angles or input devices. Solve your professional video...

www.acasis.com

ACASIS CAPTURE CARD DRIVERS

PCIE CAPTURE CARD AC-4HDMI (Quad HDMI-1080P60).zip AC-4SDI (Quad SDI-1080P60).zip AC-4HDMI PLUS (Quad HDMI-1080P60).zip AC-4SDI PLUS (Quad SDI-1080P60).zip AC-VS2583 (2 HDMI-4K60).zip AC-VS2584 (1HDMI+1SDI-1080P60).zip AC-VS007 (Dual HDMI-1080P60).zip AC-VS014 (2HDMI+2SDI-1080P60).zip AC-VS049...

www.acasis.com

These don't have passthroughs, so you'll need to use a splitter for each of the game signals.

If you look for others, be aware that the cheaper ones only have a single converter chip (the expensive part), and a quick-and-dirty switch to send one input at a time to that one converter. That's fine for a security system, but not for what you're doing. The ones I linked here, have a dedicated converter for each input, so you can use them all simultaneously.

Then get two cameras that can output live HDMI, and a tripod or other way to mount each one. Then you've completely filled a 4-input card.

Once you have that, building a scene in OBS has a lot of similarities to a PowerPoint slide. You're just working with live video instead of pre-done pictures and shapes.

 

[qhobbes]

If you want to replicate that, try the following:
Set Base and Output Resolutions to 1080x1920
Set the webcams to a 4:3 resolution just above 540x405 and then crop/resize them to that.
Set the game captures to 1600x900 or 1280x720 and then center them at the top and bottom. Enable Snapping in the OBS General Settings.

Note: the sample setup you provided appears to be 1200x1920 (a vertical 16:10 resolution).