I can say in a "just playing around" setting, I've had some instability and crashes in OBS if I try to feed too many inputs/sources into it simultaneously, and that probably only gets worse with higher resolutions.
You must have had an underpowered or poorly cooled computer for handling live video. A lot of modern machines won't do it, and a fair number of slightly older ones will. It's not about technological improvement, but the design itself.
Most laptops don't have adequate cooling. It would make them less portable if they did. But they do work well for their intended use, because all they *really* need to do is load something quickly, and then sit and cool off while the user looks at it. The most demanding thing they're actually *designed* to do from a cooling standpoint, is play back a commercially-released movie.
Very few people want to *make* movies, and so those machines are not designed to do that. If you try, it'll heat up, throttle back, and *that* kills the quality. It's not OBS that doesn't work; it's the amount of data that you're trying to shove through a machine that's not designed to do that.
You'd probably still want to use a switcher for all of your inputs and mix that down to a single source into OBS.
That just complicates things, if you have an actually-capable computer...unless you really value a *physical* interface. It *is* kinda hard to beat that. Otherwise, no, just bring everything directly and individually into the computer, and do it all in there.
For audio, yes, you want to do that outside of OBS, and bring in a single, finished soundtrack to pass through unchanged. For one rig, I use a DAW on the same machine as OBS. (Digital Audio Workstation: essentially a complete sound studio in one app) For another, I use an auxiliary mix in the Front-of-House digital console.
The other part is that OBS's built-in media player absolutely sucks. It'll play a video, but as of the last time I used it, it will do absolutely nothing else. You can't cue it up, you can't pause it, you can't fast forward to certain points. It's just a box with a video in it and whoops it is already playing.
Uhh...yes? That's kinda what it's for? "Studio mode" in OBS allows you to "cue up" a scene, which might have a video in it, and then take that scene when you're ready. The video starts when you take it.
To jump around, there's a playhead now, when you select the video source, that you can drag around, and the playback follows that. But the general effect - regardless of how it's done - doesn't seem like something you'd want to do live. It creates a kind of jarring, unprofessional appearance. If you want to skip around, use a video editor to create the clips you need, and then play those like you meant to. (yes, this means you need to plan ahead)
I can only speak for my own experience at a very large broadcaster with a kind of "price is no object" mentality for needing solutions that just work, but when it comes to pro shows, 25% of the price of a product is the service it provides, and 75% is having someone they paid to yell at when it doesn't work flawlessly. So maybe the biggest pitfall is potentially and very suddenly becoming that person if something goes wrong.
That's certainly true...but if you have that attitude, is it really something worth sharing? Blaming others for your own shortcomings? Because it *will* come through the camera and screen at some point.
Learn the tools for yourself, and use them well. Take the time and spend the effort to actually do that. Lay the foundation that nobody looks at, so then it can support you later.
