Question / Help Is possible to make a 4:3 stream into a 16:9 stream?

[KryZtaL]

Hi,
My screen is old, I know that, but I still love it after all and I not intending to buy a new one soon since this is working perfectly, I decided to start streaming DOTA2 but I wanted to know if its possible to convert a 4:3 display and stream it as 16:9? and if it is how can I do that!?
Thanks in advance.

 

[R1CH]

16:9 is a different shape than 4:3, so your image would be horribly squashed and distorted. You could put text or images on the left and right sides though so make use of the empty space.

 

[Boildown]

Its best to just stream at your native aspect ratio and not worry about the perfect widescreen ratio. No one likes to watch a squished stream.

You could certainly put a static background or something to extend the screen size I guess. Personally I'd rather have the black bars on the sides because even a static background takes away bits that could increase the quality of the actual stream.

 

[KryZtaL]

Ok thanks any suggestions how can I fill that empty space? there's any guide for it? I'm new to streaming. Thanks for all the answers I'm loving OBS so far :)

 

[dodgepong]

You can fill it with an image, a webcam, a window capture of the chat...anything else you can think of.

 

[KryZtaL]

the problem is that when I set up a 16.9 resolution in my OBS display theres no black bars, my game is maxed out but I know there are black bars on the sides I just don't see them in OBS, what can I do? I wanna put some static image on the sidebars

 

[dodgepong]

Can you post a screenshot of what it looks like in the preview when you set it to 16:9?

 

[FerretBomb]

You need to set a custom resolution in the OBS settings, for a 16:9.

Go to Settings->Video and set the Base Resolution to 'Custom' and 1920 1080. Then set an appropriate downscale from there down below in the downscale dropdown box. Hit OK, then after that set up your scene as usual, using the Preview and 'edit scene' to move stuff around and resize it as appropriate.

Personally, I'd do this and slide your 4:3 gameplay all the way to one side, allowing you to unify those black side-bars and put in a capture of your Twitch chat... viewers like seeing their chat on-stream, it can confirm if something isn't getting through, and so on. Also it allows you to put your webcam in there as well (if you have one), without covering any gameplay.


As a final note, it IS possible to disable the locked aspect ratio and squash/stretch your gameplay (hold SHIFT while rescaling from a corner of the selected composition layer). It will look like crap and is heavily discouraged as your viewers will not like it, but you can do it if you are dead-set (or just want to see how bad it would look).