How to differentiate multiple cameras in Mac OS 13...

[tripletopper]

I did a little more research and I found What might have been a solution that didn't work, and may have found a solution for OBS to differentiate multiple cameras in Mac OS when the Mac OS does not do it on the USB name alone.

First I tried to put some memory in my cameras all it did was it has a separate hard drive and webcam so therefore you cannot change the name of the webcam though you can change the name of the hard drive it records to.

That does me no good because the OBS Taps the USB name of the webcam directly and there's no indicator to indicate that name is different than any other one though now there is memory to save the name on the sd card. But it doesn't affect the name of the camera.

However in going with troubleshooting with my Mac technician I went to about this Mac then clicked on said more info then went to the bottom of the general page where there was something called a system report.

I clicked on that then clicked on USB on the side and I noticed that different cameras have different Location IDs.

Each camera has a unique location ID. If there was some way for OBS to be able to read the location ID and assigned a preliminary postscript number to each camera with the same USB name, then we can finally get these cameras to identify themselves to OBS and differentiate them.

However I don't know anything about programming at this level and I don't know if the average programmer has access to the Location ID of the USB devices, especially if they're on a Thunderbolt hub.

But each ID has a unique set of numbers and could be indexed by those numbers.

And then OBS could have a camera rename function so that instead of identifying them by the location ID you give them a descriptive name and it will hold that in storage.

I would show evidence of this working but I don't know if location IDs are sensitive personal information or not, meaning you need to each computer or user.

 

[Babs Johnson]

I have never used USB camera but I'm sure you can achieve this by creating individual scenes for each camera(name the as you see fit) then add the source(cameras) to each scene. Then put a paper sticker on each to identify the camera. Sorry if I misunderstood you.

 

[tripletopper]

"I have never used USB camera". The thing is I got eight USB cameras and they're all identically named and there's no way you could differentiate them by anything other than their USB name even though the operating system has an ID location attached to eight identically named USB cameras.

Going by USB name alone is not enough it needs to also differentiate them by location ID so that when I turn off my Macintosh and turn it back on it doesn't lose track of which camera has which USB camera.

Why should each camera have to be a separate scene? Isn't that like wasting memory and processing power and time?

Unfortunately in Mac OS Apple requires the camera manufacturer to have a camera rename function and the makers of the sq11 don't seem very generous on let you know who they are let alone letting you change the camera name. All I see is "general-uvc" for eight identical cameras. I have to manually switch between them every time I want to shift scenes.

And even if I did make each of eight separate cameras a separate scene how do you know that it won't lose each of those eight separate connections when I turn off the computer and turn it back on?

 

[tripletopper]

By the way Babs Johnson if you never use the USB camera then how do you show yourself on stream, or do you just take the game footage directly with no editing?

 

[Babs Johnson]

By the way Babs Johnson if you never use the USB camera then how do you show yourself on stream, or do you just take the game footage directly with no editing?

I capture via a Sonnet Echo Express SE IIIe with a Blackmagic Duo 2 card inside. I don't do gaming, mostly church events, conferences and stream for YouTubers.