Question / Help How to display only one desktop on Mac

[Lucrecious]

Hi!

So I'm on a Mac laptop and I want to stream only one desktop (to keep everything else private I guess). I'd like to switch between two desktops ("private" and "public") while streaming, but have the stream only show the "public" desktop even if I'm not directly on it.


Am I able to do this? If so, how do I do this?

If I could also only stream an application (with it's children, i.e. windows that spawn from the original application) that'd be good too.

 

[Narcogen]

The 2nd is not possible. Capture is done either on the basis of a display (entire display, you can crop to a specific window or crop manually) or a window (you must choose one specific window).

On the mac side the only equivalent to application capture (or game capture) is Syphon, which works only on OpenGL applications and also captures a single, specific window. There's no way to tell OBS to capture "any window this application opens". Each source is a specific, named window, or else an entire display (cropped either manually or to a specific, named window).

The easiest way to do the first option is to connect a 2nd display to your laptop, designate the external as public, the internal as private, and then set OBS to capture only the 2nd display. I don't believe there's a way to tell OBS to capture a virtual desktop or space; it only looks at physical output devices.

So if you use only the internal display and set up a public and a private space, but when you switch between them, OBS will stream whichever one you're looking at on the internal display-- there's no way to tell it to ignore that.