Question / Help Project involving multiple recordings; Best way to proceed?

N

Nick Colombia

New Member
I have a project that I am trying to complete for my office by Jan 10th. Currently there is a software limitation on a key piece of software that we use, and the development timeline to resolve that limitation is unknown. As a result, we need near continuous recordings of a minimum of 6 1920x1200 windows (or displays) with a potential maximum of 10 1920x1200 windows (or displays) at 30 FPS. The "Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size" setting on OBS Studio provides the same quality that we are looking for. I need the recordings to be split into 1 hour segments. These recordings do not need to be done on the same machine, but fewer machines are preferable.

I have experimented with several potential solutions. I've ruled out any kind of cloud setup-- none worked well. I tried both Windows and LInux, and both OBS and ffmpeg. I also tried running ffmpeg on a bare metal Linux server that we had with the same result. The only thing all of these setups had in common was the Xeon processor. I was surprised that even the bare metal dual Xeon machine struggled.

I am now using an AMD Threadripper 1950X with 3 GPUs as my test machine. OBS runs fantastically well on the physical machine -- 1.6% CPU at 30 fps. This led me to try a Hyper-V setup. That worked surprisingly well too (did not think that would be the case after the cloud experiment). Each entire VM uses 7% CPU while recording at 30 fps. On both setups, I was able to use the OBS Web Socket plugin and the OBS Command Line tool to automatically stop and start the recording every hour (via Windows taskscheduler). At one point I even had 3 VMs running, all recording, with no noticeable degradation in performance.

Here are the two solutions I'm now considering:
  1. Use a single AMD Threadripper workstation (1950X or better) for all of the necessary recordings. Possible problems:
    1. Would I need to have 6-10 physical displays to do this? Or can Window Capture record windows that are maximized yet behind other windows? Alternatively, could I use RDP to create a "virtual dipslay"?
    2. Would I be able to run / control multiple instances of OBS with different settings on the same machine? I have seen a few different ways of doing this, but I'm not sure any of them would allow me to automatically start / stop recordings via a script as I've been doing with the Web Socket plugin and the Command Line tool. Maybe I could just install multiple instances of OBS in different directories?
  2. Use 2 upgraded workstations, perhaps the highest end Threadripper, and Hyper-V VM's. Possible problems:
    1. It's possible that the surprising performance I saw with running OBS on the Hyper-V VM's was not due to the processor but rather the GPU's, and so maybe an upgraded processor won't get me any more performance. According to everything I've read on running Hyper-V, this doesn't seem to be the case. I don't have "GPU Passthrough" enabled on my test machine (it doesn't even have that option as it is Windows 10, and not Windows Server).
    2. Obviously, this would cost more than option #1.
As of now, option #2 seems like the easiest way to go. It would probably be easier to setup and easier to maintain. The downside is the cost.

Am I missing anything here? Am I way off, or is there a better way to do it? I am open to any advice.

Thanks!
 
It's not clear what kind of source you actually want to record. Currently it seems you intend to display that material on several monitors and capture these monitors for recording. OBS is able to read a large variety of source types directly, so it might change the whole scenario, if this is possible with your sources. Capturing monitors is as elegant as recording a movie by filming the big screen with a camera.
 
Thanks for the reply!

Each monitor has 2 windows on it. It's the same computer program, just 2 different windows. They are basically graphs. I am able to rename the title of each window using the program-- I verified that with Window Spy. That title change saves, etc, I have tested that as well. So, if there was some way to capture 2 windows by title, that would definitely work.
 
OBS is able to select windows to capture by title. Look into the properties of the window capture source. With Aero active (it's always active with Windows 8 and above) it should also be possible to capture the contents of a partly obscured window. It depends on the application, however. Some detect if their window is minimized or completely obscured and stop updating their window. In this case, this is no OBS issue but an application issue. This is something you have to trial&error.
 
Got it, thanks again. I was able to run a test today to confirm that the window continues to be updated when obscured. This is a much better direction than I was moving in previously.
 
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