How to capture multiple parts of a window especially in the context of PC to PC streaming or how to remix an interface for stream?

[qubitrenegade]

Hello,

What is the most efficient method for capturing multiple parts of a screen without capturing the entire window? In short, I'd like to stream regions of the screen of one computer from another. I've got the PC to PC streaming worked out with NDI, super easy! But I don't want the whole screen.

I can create a dozen Window captures, but this seems to increase CPU usage... Just having two window captures OBS is at 10% cpu usage (though I'm not sure that's an entirely fair comparison as the other NDI sources seem to be sending too). But that would allow me to apply individual filters to each window.

Alternatively, I create a scene with the one window capture. Then created a dozen more scenes that use Scene 1 as a source, then I can apply individual filters to each scene without affecting original window capture. This seems to be marginally easier on the CPU... But if I'm adding dedicated NDI sources for each window, it does seem to increase overall bandwidth usage.

Which leads me to the second question, the most bandwidth efficient seems to be to just send the whole window over NDI, then maybe it's best to do the croping of the NDI source on the streaming machine?

Thoughts? What say you OBS wizards?

Thanks!

 

[FerretBomb]

Create one capture (NDI, Window, doesn't matter).
Crop it down to only show the part you want by holding down the ALT key and dragging the sizing handles. (Alternately, right-click the source in the sources list, Transform, Edit Transform and numerically set the crop size.)
Add another instance of the same capture, using Add Existing. This should duplicate the source without un-due added capture load. Do NOT 'Add New'. Adding New is the one that will cause a ton of extra overhead, as well as performance problems due to capture thread interference.

Do be aware that you can't rename them individually, if you Add Existing. You CAN add each one to its own Group though, and rename each group.