Multiple USB cam assignments getting scrambled

ZeroLabs

ZeroLabs

Member
I've moaned about this before but I'm pretty sure I stumbled on a smoking gun that might help if any of the devs care to take a look. I've got 5 USB cams attached to my live streaming computer, spread across the buses to accommodate the bandwidth. It's on Xubuntu 22.04LTS now with the stable branch PPA. The problem I have is when I reboot, the camera assignments were getting scrambled so all my scenes and sources had to be renamed. It was very frustrating.

What I discovered today is that the order in which OBS assigns cameras to sources depends entirely on which scene/source was last active at the time of program exit. The assignment source order changes, based on which source was last active at program exit, is 100% repeatable. Going forward, I now have a sticky note on one of my monitors to remind me to switch to a default scene/source before I exit the program. That way my assignments don't get scrambled.

It's obviously not a critical bug, but it would be nice to not have to concern ones' self with such things. And I can't be the only one to have noticed it.

FWIW,
Z
 
A

AaronD

Active Member
Hmm...I have a rig that is still on v25 (yes, I need to update it, but since it's an active production machine, I need to make sure that I'm not going to kill it before I do anything), and it occasionally does this too. Sometimes only 2 of the 4 USB capture cards are swapped, and sometimes all 4 are mixed up, but most of the time it keeps the same order. So if that is indeed the problem, it's at least that old.

It's easy for me to "unswap" them in the source Properties, and I usually have to undo that the next time (we almost always end the same way...almost), but it'd be really nice to not have to train someone else to do it!
 
ZeroLabs

ZeroLabs

Member
Yes, this has plagued me for a very long time. Goes back many years. Only now did I just find a workaround. But it does work. I created a scene called "shutdown" and gave it one source. Always make it active on program exit. That way, when the program restarts on that same scene/source, all the others keep the same order.
 
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AaronD

Active Member
Does it also work to specify a scene on startup?:
obs --scene "Startup"
(shutdown with a random scene, then start with that)
 
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