Video tower · floor

OBS screen recorder, and the blank scene it opens with

The single most confusing thing about this program is documented in one sentence by the people who make it, and it explains a first attempt that records nothing at all.

Everything else follows from that. OBS is built around a stack of Sources that you assemble — a screen, a window, a webcam, a picture, some text — and a recording is whatever that stack adds up to. The program that records your screen is the same program that runs a broadcast with four cameras, which is why it opens empty rather than ready.

Step two is the one with a real decision in it, and the wrong choice there produces a recording of the wrong thing — or of nothing. OBS lists its sources by what they capture and by which systems they work on.

One line in that list deserves to be pulled out, because it dates every set of instructions written about this program.

There is a second thing worth knowing about the Sources list, and it is not obvious from looking at it: the order is the stacking order. OBS states it plainly — “Sources that are above others in the Sources list are also located above other Sources in the preview”, and “a Source that is listed above another Source in the list will be on top and might hide what’s beneath it”.

That is the answer to a whole category of confusion — a webcam that has vanished, a screen capture that covers everything. Nothing is missing; something is in front of it. OBS says the list can be reordered “by using drag and drop in the list, or using the up and down arrow buttons”, and the same fact is useful deliberately: it is how you put a webcam on top of a screen recording rather than behind it.

The audio step is worth taking seriously rather than assuming, because OBS phrases it as a default rather than a certainty. It says the program “is set to capture your desktop audio and microphone”, and then immediately tells you how to check — the meters — and what to do if the check fails. A default that comes with its own verification instruction is a default worth verifying.

The instruction OBS puts at the end, in its own words. “We strongly encourage running a test for a few minutes to make sure that there are no issues, rather than just jumping in to your first stream or recording.” It is the difference between finding a silent microphone in two minutes and finding it after an hour of talking. The audio meters are the thing to watch during that test: OBS has already told you they should be moving.

What this page will not do is give you the settings. Settings → Output is where the quality and format decisions live, and the right values depend on the machine, the screen and what the recording is for — which is exactly why OBS ships the Auto-Configuration Wizard and why the first step above is to let it run rather than to type numbers into boxes.

Nor will it compare OBS with anything else. Both Windows and the iPhone have screen recorders built in, and they need no installation and no scene to assemble; the floors below cover them, and each is written from its own maker’s documentation. Which of the three suits you is a question about what you are recording, and none of them needs to be bought.

The floors below take it three ways: the blank scene and how to fill it, the recorders already on your machine, and what to do with the file once it exists.

What this tower will not do

It will not give you output settings. OBS ships a wizard that sets them from your own hardware, and numbers copied from somebody else’s machine are numbers for somebody else’s machine.

It will not tell you OBS is the right tool for a two-minute capture. Windows and the iPhone both have recorders already installed, and for that job they are less work.

And it will not repeat instructions that name Display Capture on a current Mac. OBS says that source is for macOS 12.6 and earlier, and following it on a newer system is following a guide written for a machine you do not have. What holds instead is simple: the statement that OBS Studio starts with a blank scene, the description and location of the Auto-Configuration Wizard, the sources listed for each operating system including the split at macOS 13, the note that the newer macOS source includes desktop audio, the default capture of desktop audio and microphone with the instruction to check the Audio Mixer and set devices in Settings → Audio, the Start Recording control, the stacking behaviour of the Sources list, and the encouragement to run a test for a few minutes are quoted from OBS Project’s own documentation, listed below.