Question / Help Use OSX Spaces as multiple displays?

[CaseyCor]

Is there any way to have OBS see different desktop spaces in OS X as separate displays? I'd like to use display capture instead of window capture for my game cap due to the delay it causes. When I start streaming, my game cap is around 4 seconds behind the game. Webcam and mic are fine, and it's fine when not actively streaming.

Display capture seems to work better, but it's not feasible as I'm using a MacBook Pro and don't have a second display. My setup has OBS and a popout chat window on Desktop 1, with my game cap window on desktop 2. The display capture only shows the currently active desktop, so this method won't work. If OBS could treat each desktop space as a separate display, I could assign the source to a specific desktop space and avoid the issue.

Does anyone know if this is possible somehow? Or maybe this is something that could be implemented in a future build? It would save me and many others from setting up even more equipment that I don't really want to use.

Also, OBS crashes whenever I try to use the FreeType source. I'll make another thread about that later, with a log included. I'm on mobile now.

Thanks.

 

[TickleMeOzmo]

Hmm. It has to be somewhere in graphic memory, but there is literally nobody on the web that has posted anything about grabbing an image or video from a different space.

I don't think it's possible.

 

[Doug Daniels]

I'm trying to get this to work as well. It really would be useful if spaces could be treated as Displays (or separate Windows or something to be selected from?)

I've tried seeing if something like this could be helpful https://github.com/andreacremaschi/Syphon-virtual-screen. But the Syphon Virtual screen just renders things off-screen (you can preview using the Syphon Simple Client).

Windows in other spaces do seem to render as I've had luck dragging popout chat windows to a separate space and then including them in the OBS scene as a cropped window (useful for streaming the chat window without having it actually on my screen)

 

[TickleMeOzmo]

The problem is that OSX does not treat spaces as "Displays", thus, tricking an application to do the same thing could be hard.

OSX does not see Display 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 (for three spaces on two monitors); it sees "Display 1", and "Display 2". I wouldn't expect 6 dropdowns, I'd expect 2. But I agree, 6 dropdowns would be awesome.

You are already doing the best thing you can, dropping already captured windows into another space, without them taking up actual display space.

 

[RetroKyth]

I actually just ran into the same issue here...are there any updates to this?

 

[marcow]

I've noticed something odd which actually worked:

- start OBS
- add window capture
- start target application in windowed mode
- set the window capture to capture the correct application window
- test if it captures it
- maximize the target application window to a full desktop

The capturing should still work. Opening the properties of the Window Capture will show the selected window as greyed out, but selected.

 

[Narcogen]

The OP started by saying they didn't want to use window capture due to performance issues. Which is understandable, because window capture on MacOS has serious performance issues.

 

[AJW_]

Is there any way to have OBS see different desktop spaces in OS X as separate displays? I'd like to use display capture instead of window capture for my game cap due to the delay it causes. When I start streaming, my game cap is around 4 seconds behind the game. Webcam and mic are fine, and it's fine when not actively streaming.

Display capture seems to work better, but it's not feasible as I'm using a MacBook Pro and don't have a second display. My setup has OBS and a popout chat window on Desktop 1, with my game cap window on desktop 2. The display capture only shows the currently active desktop, so this method won't work. If OBS could treat each desktop space as a separate display, I could assign the source to a specific desktop space and avoid the issue.

Does anyone know if this is possible somehow? Or maybe this is something that could be implemented in a future build? It would save me and many others from setting up even more equipment that I don't really want to use.

Also, OBS crashes whenever I try to use the FreeType source. I'll make another thread about that later, with a log included. I'm on mobile now.

Thanks.

Found this thread with the same issue myself. I'm not sure how this will work when i go live but I don't see why not.. Bring the app you want to capture into the same window as OBS... create the Window Capture then move the app to a different Desktop Space and it still appears on the Window Capture.