Open Broadcast Software is free and Open Source software for recording or streaming video. The software is available for Windows, OSX or Linux. I’ve tried to use it before to record video in Second Life and my creaking PC couldn’t handle it. The results were crashtastic.
However I decided to give it a go using SL Go from OnLive and found, well it works, to a degree at least. Now I should point out here that I have pretty much no experience whatsoever in recording video footage from Second Life, so the results are not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination.
I was taking a look around A Tattered Page, from Cursed Events, when I decided to give it a whirl. By the way A Tattered Page is an interesting event, currently on round three with a theme of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, it combines literature with Second Life events and is therefore very worthy.
Now what I did here is pretty raw, I’ve engaged in no editing and just dumped the footage to a file.
If you are serious about video in Second Life, then you should definitely look at the Machinima page on the wiki. There are tons of tips there. One of the things you’ll soon realise is that if you want to make good Machinima you need good equipment, good software and a clue about film making. However if you just want to capture some quick moments, then Open Broadcast Software may be for you.
Supported features of Open Broadcast Software include :
- Encoding using H264 (x264) and AAC.
- Support for Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) and NVENC.
- Unlimited number of scenes and sources.
- Live RTMP streaming to Twitch, YouTube, DailyMotion, Hitbox and more.
- File output to MP4 or FLV.
- GPU-based game capture for high performance game streaming.
- DirectShow capture device support (webcams, capture cards, etc).
- Windows 8 high speed monitor capture support.
- Bilinear or lanczos3 resampling.
I’ll be honest, pretty much all of the feature list flies right over my head. However the ease of use at a raw and basic level has impressed me, as has the ability to get it working at any level by utilising SL Go.
Obviously my feature length Dwarfin movie of my army of darkness taking over the world will have to go on hold for a while yet, but for a bit of fun, there’s a lot of potential here. The video I’ve produced is very raw as I said and isn’t really a good example of what can be done, other than proving something can be done. However if you’ve ever wanted to chance your arm at video making in Second Life, Open Broadcast software may well be a good entry level way of trying your hand.
If like me, your PC is creaking, then SL Go may be something you want to consider too.
I hope that one day the SL Go team somehow manages to add easy video recording tools or at least a way for us to directly upload or stream onto youtube.
Giving people the option to record videos in SL with graphics settings set to ultra will flood the internet with lots of videos that finally look good.
The Second Life client used to have a record to disk feature, it was clunky and far from perfect but one wonders if a company could develop a recording feature that could work with the SL client.