Question / Help OBS 2 Streams simultaneously on one computer

[unterpirker-remotion]

Hello,

We have a simple question: Is it possible to stream the webcam and the desktop simultaneously on one computer?

The requirements are the following:

A big gaming event is going to be streamed. Now we need to know if it is possible to stream the webcam and the desktop of each gamer on one computer simultaneously or if each gamer needs two computers. One for streaming the desktop and the other for streaming the webcam. We don't talk about the "picture in picture"-function.

How do the big players are handling this?

We are very grateful about any input we can get!

Thx Rob

 

[koala]

If you need two distinct streams with different content each, you can start two instances of OBS on the same machine. One instance streams the game and the other the webcam. It's somewhat more resource intensive, of course.

 

[unterpirker-remotion]

Hello,

thanks for the fast answer! It is possible!

Here is how:

1.) Go to the OBS shortcut on your desktop and klick on "Properties".
2.) Search for the line "Target" and write the following after the path: -multi. It should look similar to this: "C:\Program Files\obs-studio\bin\64bit\obs64.exe" -multi
3.) Now you can run multiple instances!

The pretty cool thing is, that you can have any other twitch account (for example) on each instance. Simply remove the twitch account from the other instance and log in to another account. Boom! Now you can have multiple streams on multiple accounts.

 

[koala]

You can also add an option to start OBS with a given profile, so you don't need to manually change profiles to change to a different account. See the launch parameters in the help section.

But there is a caveat to have 2 instances of OBS running at the same time. They must not make changes to the same profile or to the same scene collection, because one might overwrite the changes of the other. It should mostly be safe if one instance operates on one profile and the other on a different profile, as well with different scene collections, but there is also a global configuration that may become corrupted with concurrent access.
If you regularly start multiple instances, start them in portable mode and store distinct configurations in different locations.

 

[r3dd3vil]

Hello guys, a related question. Yesterday i was live with obs in a particular way. I had 2 obs opened, one with the main source and one synced with ndi to the 1st obs. The goal was to go up with 2 streams simultaneusly to 2 different locations (youtube and twitch). But i had a very strange problem. The main source went fine with audio and video, the second one apparently was ok (also in the mixer) but checking the output from youtube there was no audio at all. It can be caused because i just open 2 istances of obs without the -multi in the line? Thanks