Suggestion: Chapter/menu hotkey for local recordings

[Weylander]

Say you are recording locally. One hour of gameplay, not all of it very interesting. Some parts are interesting though. Trying to find/remember these parts days after gameplay can be a pain though.

What if there was a feature that allowed you to bind a hotkey, say "Ctrl+c" for example. When you press this hotkey while recording video to local file, a chapter/menu marker is added to the mp4 metadata at that time in the video.

Now the next time you want to edit stuff you just open a OBS recording, look for those little markers on the timeline that will indicate "around/previously to this chapter marker something cool happened". So much time would be saved that could be spend playing games instead of digging through footage to find stuff.

The above would make my day and make me so happy. An extension of above feature would allow you to define several hotkeys. Say you have both Ctrl+c and Ctrl+d. Ctrl+c adds a chapter marker with name "Saw blue car". Ctrl+d would add a marker with "Killed yellow airplane".

 

[Jack0r]

Not sure how you want to implement the last part with different chapter titles, unless you know before killing the yellow plane and even starting the game, that you plan to kill a yellow plane :D
But the general Idea is not bad and I think this will be possible with the rewrite of obs. So stay tuned for this, but be aware someone will have to take the time to add it as well :)
(if you are familiar with programming you can of course volunteer to do it)

 

[dodgepong]

The main issue I see with this is that it will only work if you're recording to MP4. The OBS rewrite will have the ability to save in many different formats and containers, not all of which support chapters and such. It might even need different implementations for each container. I'm not sure how well that would work.

A more portable solution would be to save timestamps to a text file so that you can seek back to it later, which has been suggested in the past.

 

[Weylander]

I may have made it confusing there with those specific chapter titles. Better examples could have been "Killed", "Boss fight", "Died". Your own named chapters based on the game you are playing to make it more easily to figure out what happened at every marker.

A text file would work just as great if not even better than chapters. This In order to support whatever containers and formats the future may hold.

With a text file this could also be taken further. Make a script that reads text file and uses ffmpeg to cut 30 seconds before marker to 30 seconds after (1minute total). Put a chunk of recordings and text files into an input folder, run the script when you are not playing and end result is an output folder with following files:

Recording_2014-04-25(14)_kill_00.30.00_00_01_00.mp4
Recording_2014-04-25(14)_kill_00.38.00_00_01_00.mp4
Recording_2014-04-25(15)_boss_fight_00.10.00_00_01_00.mp4

[recording_name]_[chapter_title]_[marker in video minus 30 seconds]_[1 minute].mp4

You get the picture :) Exiting stuff this!

I do work with web development. I grasp the c syntax very well and have spent minor time with java, c/c++ is a huge difference from php. The compiling and just trying to understand how a c/c++ application is created and how/why it runs. I admit it would be fun to learn.and even though the quality of creation would not reach levels where someone else would use it, the experience in trying and learning would be rewarding enough. It's just that issue with "time".

I can't wait for the obs rewrite to become available. I will beta test for sure and run once stable.