UI needs better use of space

L

Lou Amadeus Gray

New Member
I would like to be able to resize the window to be smaller. Currently the window takes up a lot of horizontal space, and is quite inefficient in its use of space in general. If the Scenes, Sources, Mixer, Scene Transitions, and Buttons were individual movable widgets, it would allow for a much better use of space. Of course the main thing I would do is just stack the widgets top to bottom, instead of left to right, and then put the preview on their right. Instead of making them widgets and movable, simply re-arranging them that way would go a long way.

The best way to explain why the current layout is a poor layout is to point out how the preview window always has completely wasted space on either side. Unless you make the window large enough to allow the preview to fill the whole thing, which is counter-productive to being space efficient. Ideally, the preview should be big enough to see if anything is wrong, but small enough to allow more screen real-estate to be given to other applications you might have open on your "dashboard" monitor.

My 1920x1200 monitor is broken at the moment, and I am using an old 1280x1024 4:3 monitor, and I am really hating the OBS window right now. Even with the 16:10 monitor I have to make everything else accommodate it, but right now, its taking up 2/3 of the screen, and I am having trouble making anything else fit around it.

Here is me trying to make the OBS window take up as little space as possible by making it short and wide. The best use of space is when I make it as short as possible, but then the preview becomes tiny, so I always have to make it a bit taller than I want so I can still see the preview. If the preview were at the right, the window could be made very short.

obswindow.png


could be:

obswindow4.png
 
Last edited:
ConstantFlux

ConstantFlux

Member
While I support the development of a more efficient UI, I'm unsure who would resize the window to have a stamp preview window like that (where you can't really see anything).

Personally, my main issue at the moment (I am displaying the OBS window on a 1280x1024 4:3 monitor like @Lou Amadeus Gray as well) is that I'm aiming to see all scenes (and all sources respectively) at the same time and since I have up to 13+ sources I have to scale the window, then use the middle 'handle', then scale the window again then the middle 'handle' again, scale the window again and so on, to end up with a display that shows as much from my preview as possible while at the same time showing all my sources.
This is due to the way the window scale option handles the upper and lower part of the UI.
Ideal would be: I set the middle handle of the UI to view all my sources and then scale the whole window to show as much of the upper preview part of the UI while the lower part of the UI stays fixed.
Not sure I'm making sense here.
You probably have to add lots of sources to one scene and then play around with both UI scale options to understand what I mean.
 
L

Lou Amadeus Gray

New Member
Oh, I never meant to imply that I wanted a tiny preview window like that. That was sort of just a compromise to make it fit mostly horizontally, which is what the interface seems to be trying to get me to do. Ideally, I would stack the "widgets" top to bottom, maybe even a double column, and then put the preview above or below. This way the entire thing would take up mostly vertical space, have a decent sized preview, and still leave lots of room left on the screen to have a browser open, or chat, etc.
 
L

Lou Amadeus Gray

New Member
the best would be to make each part a moveable widget, so we can arrange it in whatever way works best for our setup. I guess I see that as asking for quite a bit though, so without implementing a whole dynamic thing I was hoping maybe at least any layout that doesn't have empty space.
 
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