OBS will not record what i see on my monitor

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TamTroll

New Member
This is something I've been struggling with for the past few years, and so far nothing has worked.

I want to record a remaster of an old game in it's native 800x600 resolution. What i see when i play the game is a beautiful full-screen game. What OBS records however (no matter what i try) is a tiny little box that is not fullscreen.

I've made this video to try and show what exactly the problem is, because all past attempts at explaining it through words or pictures have not been understood. I just want OBS to record what i see, but for whatever reason, that just doesn't happen. Can anyone help?


No log file because this is not a OBS mechanical issue, this is a "How do i make OBS do what i want it to do?" issue. if this thread would better fit somewhere else in the forum, please let me know.
 
You describe 2 issues. As far as I understand, one is with OBS recording to the top left corner of the video. The other is your apps moving to the 2nd monitor to improper locations as soon as you start the game.

The apps moving to the other monitor to improper locations is done by Windows. It's not something OBS has to do with. It happens, because the game switches to fullscreen mode, and this fullscreen mode is pushing the apps from the monitor they were previously. I don't know what to do about this. Probably close or minimize everything you don't need to see while gaming. It's Windows doing this, not OBS. Modern games usually don't result in this, because they don't use exclusive fullscreen mode any more.

OBS recording just to the top left corner of the video can be fixed. If your game switches to 800x600, you should record only this 800x600. You need to create a 800x600 video, since this is what the game produces. To do this, go to Settings > Video and set Base (Canvas) Resolution and Output (Scaled) Resolution both to 800x600. With this setting, any 800x600 sized source will occupy the whole video canvas.
If you do this, you will get a 800x600 video. It's the job of the video player to scale this to your current display. Load it into any video player app and use the app controls for fullscreen.

There is an additional issue you didn't notice. 800x600 is 4:3 aspect ratio, which just cannot be displayed fullscreen on a 1920x1080 (aspect ratio 16:9) monitor without distortion. 800x600 is taller than 16:9, so it will have vertical black bars on the sides when properly displayed on a 16:9 monitor.
You see it fullscreen on your monitor, but it seems you forced your monitor to fit the image, so it stretched (distorted) the video to make it fit the whole screen. Your monitor image is distorted. It's not correct.
Also see https://obsproject.com/kb/aspect-ratio-guide

If you want undistorted display, you should apply one of the 16:9 workarounds to run the game in 1280x720 or 1920x1080. See https://steamcommunity.com/app/13250/discussions/0/846940248306761469/ for example

edit:
It seems you asked the same thing 3 years ago, and I answered the same thing 3 years ago. It didn't change. About the black bars: check the game patches to run the game in 16:9 aspect ratio to avoid this.
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Thread 'Recording old games, and dual-monitor setup.'

I've been looking for a solution to this problem for quite some time now, and so far i haven't been able to find any, so i was hoping i could get some help here.

in the simplest possible terms, i am trying to record the game "Unreal Gold" using OBS. It's an old game, so it natively looks best at like 800 x 600 resolution at most. There is a patch to make it 1080p, but that just looks awful.

So when i run the game in it's lower resolution, i find myself with two problems.

1. Running the game full-screen on one monitor causes every window (including obs) on my second monitor to shunt over...
 
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Oh shoot, sorry about that, i completely forgot about that previous thread.

So i DID change the video settings to 800x600, but it's still recording as this tiny box in the corner rather then filling the screen.

Even bringing the video into a video editing software still shows it as a tiny box rather then a larger image. So it doesn't look like it's a video-player thing, somehow it's just being recorded with all this empty space around it.

Looks like last time i was able to somehow get a decently sized image at least, but I'm not sure how i got there as trying to re-create those steps just got me the tiny box again.

I even tried shrinking the red selection-box section of OBS so that it was entirely within the screen rather then being partly out of it, and that still didn't change anything, it's still just a tiny box in the corner rather then any kind of reasonable image.



Is there really no option to just show what my screen shows? Because i LIKE what i see on my monitor. i want to copy that image and paste it onto video form without any of this weird finagling about with boxes and black bars.
 
Okay, yup that gets it to at least a decent size that fills up most of the screen.

Still not showing off what i actually see but i guess this is as good as it gets h'uh?
 
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