Saturday, April 11, 2020

Online Tools for Education: OBS More Than I Need

One of the tools it has been suggested I use for streaming education in response to the of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, is Open Broadcast Software (OBS). Before I could install the software I had to upgrade the operating system on my laptop, which proved a challenge. But with that done, OBS was easy to install. What was harder to do was work out exactly how to use it. OBS handles video for recording, or as a front end for streaming, but doesn't actually do the streaming. Instead OBS has to send the video to a streaming service such as Twitch. OBS ran a test of my setup to see what I could stream and came up with a recommendation of 767 x 431 pixels, at 30 frames per second. The video would be sent from my computer, and recorded at a higher Standard HD resolution (1280×720 pixels), but then down sampled for streaming. I suspect that OBS is intended a more complex problem than I have, and I would be better off with a video conference  system, such as Zoom.

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