OBS for Dummies : How to Record Your Screen

Wait... OBS..I have heard it somewhere.

The Internet is filled with every sort of question and one of the most asked questions is about screen recorders.

What is the best screen recorder? How can I emulate my desktop screen as a webcam and what not?! Also, here's a short glimpse of what people have been actually searching :

And this itself proves that everyone has this question, which is the best screen recorder? 🤔

My answer would be OBS, a free software that gets the job done and it is not worth paying a penny to the paid software unless they have a feature that you cannot miss.

Also, OBS is driven by an active developer community where lots of features are added day by day and make your work 100 times simpler.

You'd wonder, what the heck is OBS?!

What is OBS?

OBS or Open Broadcaster Software is a free of cost open-source program for recording and live streaming.

To get started, you can download OBS from obsproject.com by selecting the platform you are downloading.

And yes, It supports Windows, Linux, and macOS. Thereby the steps I share with you below are the same across all the platforms. 😁

So, once you download OBS, this will be the screen you will see :

Wait, don't get scared yet. I will take you through each one of the mentioned tags in the screen shot.

Scenes: A place where you can add different scenes. In simpler terms, you can set one as 'Desktop recording' and record your desktop alone. Or anything of that sort to keep your recording/streaming scenes organized.

Sources: Here, you can find & add different types of sources right from your webcam to your display to adding fancy text and whatnot. Here, we will add our main source i.e. the display to record the screen.

Audio Mixer: Once you have added a scene to your 'Source' tab, an audio mixer will appear which will let you control the audio levels. For example, if you are recording your screen and narrating it and want your microphone audio more audible than the desktop audio, then you can simply reduce the desktop audio.

Before going further, this article is mainly to show you how you can record your display using OBS and will be limited to this topic. There are tons of things that you can do with OBS and it will be covered in the topics I cover in the upcoming days.

How to record screen with OBS?

Recording your screen with OBS is super simple. The first thing you have to do is to add a source. To add a source, right-click in the Sources tab and add a Display Capture.

Once you click on the Display Capture option, another tab will pop-up. Asking to name your source a.k.a Display Capture. You can rename the source as you like. Once you rename and hit on 'OK' there will be another tab where you can select the display you want to record.

In case you have multiple displays, you can simply click on the dropdown and select the display you wish to desire.

And there we have it. Your desktop screen is all set for recording now.

What next you'd wonder.

Well, if you want to record your desktop audio, there's something that you need to do. Like earlier, we have to add another source but this time it is 'Audio Output Capture Source' and what this basically does is that it will also capture your Desktop audio while recording.

The same way, for recording your microphone audio while recording your desktop screen, you need to add another source. And this time, it is the 'Audio Input Capture Device'.

Woohoo! You're almost done. But before that, here are some FAQs we'd like to answer.

Where do the OBS recordings get saved? 🤔

By default, the location is set to 'C:\Users\YourProfile\Videos' and it can be changed by clicking on the small browse button next to it.

How can I change the quality of my OBS recording?

You can change the quality of your OBS recordings by heading over to Settings > Video > Change the resolution and set FPS to 60.One other thing you can do to increase the quality of your video is to increase your bitrate. You can change that by going to Settings > Output> Video bitrate. I'd personally recommend around 4500 to 5000 bitrate which would be ideal for a 1080p 60fps screen recording.

There you go, a simple guide on how you can record your screen using OBS. If you have any queries, you can reach out to me at [email protected] and I will be more than happy to help you out. ✌