Ingame overlay for recording and (microphone) audio

[Ray1974]

Too often it has happened that I thought I was recording only realizing afterwards that I was not, or that the pause was still on.
Same issue with my microphone. Sometimes it is still muted when I'm recording and all the time I thought it was unmuted.
Checking when you are in the middle of the game is not really an option, because if your recording is running (but you want to check if it in fact is) then it will record a frozen image of the video when you are alt-Tabbing to switch to another application, which looks superweird on the video output, as if it is stuck. And as a content creator on Youtube this is not done.

I would love to have an ingame overlay showing if I'm recording and if my audio/mic audio is turned on or not. It is such a basic but so important tool. After all OBS is made for recording, so you need to be able to see at all times that in fact it is doing what is supposed to do.

Hope this makes sense and thanks for reading.
If someone knows about a plugin as a workaround I'd be very interested!.
Thanks

 

[AaronD]

I don't think OBS can modify what the game itself does...unless the game takes a camera input, and you feed OBS's virtual camera to it.

I'm wondering about putting an audio meter somewhere that you can see easily, that only works if OBS is recording. That would catch both error cases, and then you can track down which it is.

If the game takes a camera input that you're not presently using, then you could make a scene in OBS that just has that meter (there's a plugin for OBS that puts a meter and other effects on the screen, in response to audio), and send that scene to the virtual camera for the game to pick up.

If the game does not take a camera, or you're already using that input and don't want to give it up, then you could do something similar with an additional screen. Send that same scene to a projector on that screen.

Either way, you'll then need to enable the meter only when OBS is recording. For that, I think the Advanced Scene Switcher would be useful:

Advanced Scene Switcher

This plugin will allow you to automate various tasks using "Macros". Macros consist of a list of conditions under which a list of actions will be performed. Examples and guides can be found in the wiki. Feel free to contribute! If you run...

obsproject.com

That screenshot is not complete, but maybe it gets you the idea.

The checkboxes at the top are not the way I normally do things:

• Unchecking the "only on change" one makes it run continuously while the condition is true, to continuously enforce the correct indication. This goes along with the Wait at the end so that it doesn't just freewheel.
• Checking the "parallel" box means that this Wait does not delay any other macros that you might have.

On the General tab, I like to set the scan interval ("Check conditions every") as low as it goes. It takes a *little* bit more CPU that way, but not much, and it's a lot more responsive. Also make sure it's set to always run, so you don't have to remember to start it.

 

[Ray1974]

Hi Aaron

Thanks so much for taken so much time and effort to try and help me out. I'm not so much an experienced user with OBS, but I will try out all the stuff you described here.

I do hope that in the future they will implement an indicator of some sorts in the OBS recorder when running a pc game.

Thanks again!