NOVICE NEEDS HELP!

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GeoNovice

New Member
11-30-2022

Good morning:

When I say novice I'm being kind to myself. I just installed OBS for Windows yesterday and I find the OBS interface overwhelming. All I want to do is very simple, I think: I want to be able to record short video clips (from, say, youtube.com or elsewhere)-- for personal and totally non-commercial use-- things like "How to repair a leaky faucet" or "How to make a good sourdough starter" or, say a 10 minute flute solo performance. I don't need professional-quality results but I want results good enough to re-watch and I want them good enough to share with family and friends if desired. By this I mean simply smooth action, no interruptions, no jerky or other distracting elements-- just a good faithful reproduction of what is seen and heard on the video clip from start to finish. I don't need to do anything fancy, certainly not at the very beginning and probably never. To me this sounds like a basic task that should be straightforward to achieve. For the life of me I can't see how to get started with OBS. CAN ANYONE OUT THERE HELP ME, PLEASE?

THANKS SO MUCH.
 
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AaronD

Active Member
OBS is designed to go the other way. It makes those things in the first place. Capturing them is very low on the radar. And the legality of saving YouTube and other clips is questionable anyway, though the general principles still stand, regardless of OBS or any other tool (this is mostly a warning to content creators and distributors, of the inherent risk of convenient delivery to the masses):
  • If you can stream it, then you can download a working copy of it. Period. DRM and other protections only make it more annoying, never impossible. If nothing else, record the stream at a point where the protections are removed, as they must be before human perception. If it's done well, then the server cannot know anything different.
  • If it can be perceived by humans, then you can record an unrestricted copy of it. Period. Again, preventative measures only make it more annoying, never impossible. If nothing else, record the physical light and sound output of the screen and speakers.
This applies to any media at all, and yes I have used OBS as a DVD ripper and online video downloader before, based loosely on the principles above. I'll leave the details to you though, beyond a hint that you should learn its intended function first, see what all the tools do for *that* purpose, and then use that knowledge to make the "erector set" do what you want.
 
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Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
OBS is a complex compositing tool for creating content. It can be used to record as you mentioned, but is overkill, probably
- Windows OS has a built-in screen recorder you might check out
- Or there are way to download entire YouTube videos, and then use something like avidemux to trim without re-encoding downloaded video

I love OBS, but I wouldn't use it for this use case
 
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