These really are advanced options that users shouldn't need to change
normally, so moving them to advanced makes sense, and keeps them away
from users who don't know what they're doing.
Some streamers would accidentally hit start/stop streaming, which on
certain services would send out mass emails to all their followers.
This just adds options to general settings to optionally enable dialogs
that confirm whether to actually start/stop streaming when the button is
clicked.
So certain high-profile individuals were complaining that it was
difficult to configure recording settings for quality in OBS. So, I
decided to add a very easy-to-use auto-configuration for high quality
encoding -- including lossless encoding. This feature will
automatically configure ideal recording settings based upon a specified
quality level.
Recording quality presets added to simple output:
- Same as stream: Copies the encoded streaming data with no extra usage
hit.
- High quality: uses a higher CRF value (starting at 23) if using x264.
- Indistinguishable quality: uses a low CRF value (starting at 16) if
using x264.
- Lossless will spawn an FFmpeg output that uses huffyuv encoding. If a
user tries to select lossless, they will be warned both via a dialog
prompt and a warning message in the settings window to ensure they
understand that it requires tremendous amounts of free space. It will
always use the AVI file format.
Extra Notes:
- When High/Indistinguishable quality is set, it will allow you to
select the recording encoder. Currently, it just allows you to select
x264 (at either veryfast or ultrafast). Later on, it'll be useful to
be able to set up pre-configured presets for hardware encoders once
more are implemented and tested.
- I decided to allow the use of x264 at both veryfast or ultrafast
presets. The reasoning is two-fold:
1.) ultrafast is perfectly viable even for near indistinguishable
quality as long as it has the appropriate CRF value. It's nice if you
want to record but would like to or need to reduce the impact of
encoding on the CPU. It will automatically compensate for the preset at
the cost of larger file size.
2.) It was suggested to just always use ultrafast, but ultrafast
requires 2-4x as much disk space for the same CRF (most likely due to
x264 compensating for the preset). Providing veryfast is important if
you really want to reduce file size and/or reduce blocking at lower
quality levels.
- When a recording preset is used, a secondary audio encoder is also
spawned at 192 bitrate to ensure high quality audio. I chose 192
because that's the limit of the media foundation aac encoder on
windows, which I want to make sure is used if available due to its
high performance.
- The CRF calculation is based upon resolution, quality, and whether
it's set to ultrafast. First, quality sets the base CRF, 23 for
"good" quality, 16 for "very high" quality. If set to ultrafast,
it'll subtract 2 points from the CRF value to help compensate. Lower
resolutions will also lower the CRF value to help improve higher
details with a smaller pixel ratio.
CBR is now always on by default for streaming, so there's no reason to
have a setting for this in particular. Still available in advanced
output settings of course, but simple output mode really should be kept
as simple as possible.
This is mostly just to remove the unnecessary clutter from the output
sections. The reconnect settings are generally rarely modified by users
as it is.
I added stream delay options to advanced settings not just because I
feel it's an advanced option, but also to reduce clutter in the outputs
section and its sub-sections, which already have far too many options as
it is.
This changes the way the advanced output section's FFmpeg output
settings work by allowing the user to select whether they want to output
to a file or output to a URL, and makes it so file names are
automatically generated like other recording outputs.
If they choose to output to a file, it'll only require an output
directory similarly to how other recording outputs work. They can
select a directory to output to rather than being required to type in a
full path and filename; the filename is automatically generated. The
extension is also automatically retrieved from libff depending on the
format selected.
Otherwise if they have Output to URL selected, it'll show a simple edit
box where they can type in the target URL.
Non-NV12 video formats are primarily intended for recording. For
streaming, if the libobs color format is not set to NV12, it's likely
that the video frames will have to be converted to NV12, which will use
extra CPU usage. Due to that fact, it's important to warn the user of
that potential extra increased CPU usage that may be required when
streaming.
This allows using NV12, I420, or RGB output video formats. This option
will set what obs itself outputs frames as.
It's important to note that this is only ideal for specific FFmpeg
encoders that support the desired video format; for example, if you use
RGB and use the huffyuv encoder, huffyuv will now properly output in RGB
instead of YUV NV12/I420.
I420 is useful for eliminating the NV12->I420 conversion for the
AVerMedia encoders, as AVerMedia encoders only support I420 input.
A second even more important note about RGB is that if the encoder does
not support the format you are using, it will be converted on the CPU to
a format that the encoder supports as it's encoded; so for example
setting the obs output format to RGB and then using x264 will be futile
and end up using needless amounts of extra CPU than if you just had obs
set to NV12, which is the most common and ideal format for x264.
In the future, native output of other YUV formats might be implemented
(such as YUV 4:2:2).
OBS will offer the user a list of themes which are .qss files inside
data/obs-studio/themes. If no theme is found in the configuration, it
loads the default theme for the system.
Currently, this allows the setting of values such as:
- Audio buffering time
- Color format (still somewhat unsupported)
- YUV color space (if a YUV format)
= YUV color range (if a YUV format)
More color formats will be added in the future, such as RGB and YUV
4:2:2 formats.
Add a checkbox named "Enforce streaming service encoder settings"
checkbox to advanced output. Disabling this checkbox allows the user to
optionally disable the enforcement of streaming service encoder
settings. I had a user complain that they didn't want to always have
the service's preferred encoder settings forced on them.
clicked() is the wrong signal to use, it only activates on actual user
click, not when the value is changed. toggle() activates whenever the
value itself is changed.
Adds an 'advanced' mode to the output settings to allow more powerful
and complex streaming and recording options:
- Optionally use a different encoder for recording than for streaming to
allow the recording to use a different encoder or encoder settings if
desired (though at the cost if increased CPU usage depending on the
encoders being used)
- Use encoders other than x264
- Rescale the recording or streaming encoders in case the user wishes to
stream and record at different resolutions
- Select the specific mixer to use for recording and for streaming,
allowing the stream and recording to use separate mixers (to for
example allow a user to stream the game/mic audio but only record the
game audio)
- Use FFmpeg output for the recording button instead of only recording
h264/aac to FLV, allowing the user to output to various different
types of file formats or remote URLs, as well as allowing the user to
select and use different encoders and encoder settings that are
available in the FFmpeg library
- Optionally allow the use of multiple audio tracks in a single output
if the file formats or stream services support it
Implement the 'file path' in output settings, and implement the 'start
recording' button, though for the time being I'm just going to make it
use a directory rather than allow custom file names.
This file output will actually share the video and audio encoder with
the stream.
I don't really know what to do about MP4 -- I don't really like the idea
of saving directly in the program, if you do and the program crashes,
that MP4 file is lost. I'm contemplating making some sort of mp4 output
process stub. So no MP4 file output for the time being.
If you need MP4, just remux it with FFmpeg:
ffmpeg -i flv_file.flv -acodec copy -vcodec copy mp4_file.mp4
Add a 'source selection' dialog to replace the 'enter a name' dialog.
This new dialog allows you to make new instances of pre-existing sources
so that you can add a pre-existing source to a different scene, or in to
the same scene more than once.
Also started implementing locale.
Comtemplating switching to JSON-based locale later, so we can add things
like descriptions/disambiguation, and so we can use jansson's built-in
hash table when doing the string lookup.
- Add volume control
These volume controls are basically nothing more than sliders. They
look terrible and hopefully will be as temporary as they are
terrible.
- Allow saving of specific non-user sources via obs_load_source and
obs_save_source functions.
- Save data of desktop/mic audio sources (sync data, volume data, etc),
and load the data on startup.
- Make it so that a scene is created by default if first time using the
application. On certain operating systems where supported, a default
capture will be created. Desktop capture on mac, particularly. Not
sure what to do about windows because monitor capture on windows 7 is
completely terrible and is bad to start users off with.
It didn't really look very nice in most cases and the controls were
always compacted, doing this makes it look a bit better.
Also change it so the properties window shows the properties on the
bottom below the source rather than to the right, seeing as in most
cases the source has a greater width than height, and it feels just a
little bit better to look at (thought that's just my opinion).
Controls still stretch really far sometimes though, I wonder what should
be done about that to be honest. Maybe prevent it from scrolling to the
right?
- Updated the services API so that it links up with an output and
the output gets data from that service rather than via settings.
This allows the service context to have control over how an output is
used, and makes it so that the URL/key/etc isn't necessarily some
static setting.
Also, if the service is attached to an output, it will stick around
until the output is destroyed.
- The settings interface has been updated so that it can allow the
usage of service plugins. What this means is that now you can create
a service plugin that can control aspects of the stream, and it
allows each service to create their own user interface if they create
a service plugin module.
- Testing out saving of current service information. Saves/loads from
JSON in to obs_data_t, seems to be working quite nicely, and the
service object information is saved/preserved on exit, and loaded
again on startup.
- I agonized over the settings user interface for days, and eventually
I just decided that the only way that users weren't going to be
fumbling over options was to split up the settings in to simple/basic
output, pre-configured, and then advanced for advanced use (such as
multiple outputs or services, which I'll implement later).
This was particularly painful to really design right, I wanted more
features and wanted to include everything in one interface but
ultimately just realized from experience that users are just not
technically knowledgable about it and will end up fumbling with the
settings rather than getting things done.
Basically, what this means is that casual users only have to enter in
about 3 things to configure their stream: Stream key, audio bitrate,
and video bitrate. I am really happy with this interface for those
types of users, but it definitely won't be sufficient for advanced
usage or for custom outputs, so that stuff will have to be separated.
- Improved the JSON usage for the 'common streaming services' context,
I realized that JSON arrays are there to ensure sorting, while
forgetting that general items are optimized for hashing. So
basically I'm just using arrays now to sort items in it.
- Add some temporary streaming code using FFmpeg. FFmpeg itself is not
very ideal for streaming; lack of direct control of the sockets and
no framedrop handling means that FFmpeg is definitely not something
you want to use without wrapper code. I'd prefer writing my own
network framework in this particular case just because you give away
so much control of the network interface. Wasted an entire day
trying to go through FFmpeg issues.
There's just no way FFmpeg should be used for real streaming (at
least without being patched or submitting some sort of patch, but I'm
sort of feeling "meh" on that idea)
I had to end up writing multiple threads just to handle both
connecting and writing, because av_interleaved_write_frame blocks
every call, stalling the main encoder thread, and thus also stalling
draw signals.
- Add some temporary user interface for streaming settings. This is
just temporary for the time being. It's in the outputs section of
the basic-mode settings
- Make it so that dynamic arrays do not free all their data when the
size just happens to be reduced to 0. This prevents constant
reallocation when an array keeps going from 1 item to 0 items. Also,
it was bad to become dependent upon that functionality. You must now
always explicitly call "free" on it to ensure the data is free, and
that's how it should be. Implicit functionality can lead to
confusion and maintainability issues.
FFmpeg test output wasn't make any attempt to sync data before. Should
be much more accurate now.
Also, added a restart message to audio settings if base audio settings
are changed.
jp9000
Palana
shousa
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