Most discussions about OBS, streaming, game recording, and so on tend to focus on a specific
use case - one monitor, one screen of computer desktop or gameplay.
One console input, one 16 by 9 image.
But what if you use multiple monitors for work you wish to stream or record?
What if you display your game across two monitors at once and want to stream that?
What about switching between monitors?
Let’s discuss this in today’s course video.
Any high-tier live production needs a variety of scenes to show and quick, precise switching
between them.
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and welcome back to my OBS Studio
tutorial course.
I have many, many more videos on the software in the playlist linked in the description.
Check that before asking questions, and check the introduction video to learn how this course
works, if you get confused.
There’s 3 different scenarios that I can imagine applying to multi-monitor streaming:
Just streaming with multiple monitors and sometimes needing to show what’s on your
side monitors like I do, running games through surround gaming across multiple monitors at
once, or wanting to automatically switch between different monitors as you record or stream
a multi-monitor workflow.
Let’s tackle these.
Timecodes will be in the video description for the 3 main topics here.
Multi-Monitor Gaming First, let’s start with multi-monitor gaming.
This will depend a little, depending on how you have this set up.
Right-click your desktop and go to “Display Settings” or “Screen Resolution.”
Or, open up your Nvidia or AMD control panel if you have surround set up that way.
You’re looking here to find out whether your system is treating your multiple monitors
as one big monitor for gaming, or just multiple monitors with the game stretched across them.
Take note of this.
If your monitors are treated as one big monitor, then you also need to take note of the resolution
it reads.
For example, 3 1080p monitors combined into one horizontal virtual monitor would be 5760
by 1080 resolution.
If you just have multiple monitors side by side, just do the math for how they’re set
up.
If they’re 3 wide, just add up the horizontal resolutions (i.e. 1920 times 3) and then take
note of the vertical resolution (i.e. 1080).
You’ll need this for OBS.
In OBS Studio, you need to set your resolution to this weird resolution.
For our example here, 5760 by 1080.
Leave the base and scaled resolution the same in the “Video” settings tab.
For your streaming settings, you’ll wanna scale it down a bit.
For example, for our current test resolution, I’d recommend streaming at half resolution
of 2880 by 540.
Now you’ll need to set up the rest of your scenes to properly utilize this wider canvas
than the traditional 16:9 format.
You can probably have fun with placement of your overlay elements, facecam, and so on.
Here’s the kicker, though.
Your stream WILL have what’s often referred to as “black bars” on the top and bottom
because of this.
This kind of setup, obviously, produces a much wider image than what a normal 16:9 or
even a 21:9 ultrawide can display fully, so this is unavoidable.
While you can technically stretch your image to fill a 16:9 box, it will completely trash
your video and no one will watch it, so don’t do that.
If you’re going to commit to streaming this kind of super-wide format, you need to fully
commit and just deal with the issues.
Unfortunately, YouTube currently doesn’t like streaming with oddball resolutions so
it won’t take advantage of the new player’s capabilities.
But if you’re just recording and uploading this way, the new YouTube player will actually
adapt to your video’s aspect ratio and display it nicely on your viewer’s screens.
Just MAKE SURE if you’re editing the video before uploading, you edit AND render in the
specific resolution of your recording, or you will ruin the viewing experience for EVERYONE.
I have a dedicated, admittedly ranty, video about this subject linked in the video description.
We’ll also touch a bit more on this in the next video talking about Ultrawide recording
and streaming and using oddball resolutions.
Multi Monitor Workflow If you just happen to utilize multiple monitors
and just want to be able to switch between them sometimes, depending on what you’re
doing - things are much easier.
Simply make new scenes for each of your monitors and add them via Display Capture.
Add your facecam, if needed, and any overlays.
If you don’t want to have to reposition and configure your overlays again and again
for this, you have two primary options.
Either you can start by duplicating your main Display Capture scene and then replacing the
actual Display Capture source with respective monitors, keeping all other sources in the
scene in tact.
OR, my preferred option, is to actually create a dedicated scene specifically for your overlays
and to “nest” that scene as a source in your other scenes.
So duplicate your main scene and remove any non-overlay elements.
So remove your facecam, display capture, whatever.
You’re left with just your overlays.
Rename the scene to “Overlays.”
Now, remove your overlays from your main scene, add a new Source - Scene Source, and choose
your new “Overlays” scene.
Now you have them all in one source that you can add to any scene, without having to mess
around with repositioning or anything like that.
Super handy!
If your monitors are different resolutions, simply use the transform tools to scale them
all to match your canvas resolution, and whammo.
Then you can set up hotkeys or use something like the Elgato Stream Deck to switch between
your different display scenes as desired when recording or streaming.
Automatic Multi-Monitor Switching There’s another neat trick for multi-monitor
streaming and recording that I like to use from time to time - automatic scene switching.
This will let you automatically switch between your different Display Capture-based scenes
depending on where your cursor goes on your computer.
This is super handy for when I do editing streams and need to quickly switch between
my multi-monitor workflow.
Unfortunately, the built-in “Automatic Scene Switcher” tool in OBS Studio kinda… sucks.
Or rather, it doesn’t work in the way I see most optimal.
So instead, I use an “Advanced Scene Switcher” plugin which I will have linked in the video
description.
Open the zip file, open up to the Windows folder, then the “obs-studio” folder and
copy the “data” and “plugins” folders to your OBS install directory.
In Windows, the default is C:\Program Files (x86)\obs-studio\.
Approve any prompts asking if you’re sure you wanna copy to a program data folder, and
re-launch OBS Studio.
Now the Advanced Scene Switcher should be available under the “Tools” menu in OBS.
Open it up.
Now for setting up automatic monitor switching based on your cursor position, we will be
using the “Screen Region” tab.
Here, we need to set up our different “screen regions” to be detected by OBS for your
cursor positioning.
To get this to work properly, the numbers are going to be a little complicated.
This is only made worse if your monitors are different resolutions, like mine are.
Firstly, right-click your desktop and open up “Display Settings” or “Screen Resolution.”
You need to know which monitor is number 1 for you, as this affects cursor positioning
numbers.
You’ll want to have your scenes set up again for your multiple displays, see the earlier
part of the tutorial for this.
Take a look at your Scene Switcher dialog box again.
You can see for each scene switching command, you need two sets of X and Y coordinates.
We will use the “Cursor is currently at:” feature to get these numbers, just keep in
mind it’s a little delayed in showing your cursor location.
Now, this can be finicky.
Before, you would often need to min coordinates from the bottom-left corner of your screen
and max at the top right.
But now I need the top-left coordinates for min, and bottom-right for max.
So if it doesn’t work consider re-doing this with these coordinates.
The numbers you want to pay attention to first come from the top left corner of your screen
and the bottom right.
Write these down from the display on the Scene Switcher dialog.
So for my main monitor, we want to say “If cursor is in” Min X: 0, Min Y 0 for my display,
then Max X: 3839 and Max Y: 2159 our numbers may be different.
Then, select the scene you wish to assign to this screen.
For me, that’s “Desktop Facecam Overlays” or “Screen 1.”
Then you can choose the transition.
For this, cut works best.
Once that’s set, hit the plus sign at the bottom and it will add that command.
Now, you want to do the same thing for the next monitor.
Find the coordinates for the top left and input them into the dialog, and then the top
right.
For me here, the min is 3840 and 0, with the max being 6399 and 1439.
Choose the scene to assign to this region - don’t skip this step, I do that sometimes
and it screws things up.
Make sure you’re assigning the right scene!
Then hit the plus at the bottom to add it.
Repeat this for however many screens you’re switching between.
When you’re done, click back to the “General” tab.
Towards the bottom it says “Scene Switcher is:” and should say “Inactive” if it’s
turned off.
If so, hit “Start” to turn it on, and close the plugin dialog.
Once it’s running, your scenes should automatically switch between your Display Capture scenes.
If it doesn’t work the first try, don’t panic!
Be patient.
Double check that you have the right coordinates, and that you chose the correct scenes for
it to switch to, and that you hit “Start” on the General tab, of course.
And again, if this set of coordinates isn’t working, try inverting to the bottom left
and top right instead.
Something will work, you just have to be patient with it.
Now, this isn’t going to work out well if you wanna keep using other scenes.
Switching to a webcam scene will put you right back at the scene where your cursor is.
There’s some minor tweaks you can do for this.
In the “Pause Scenes” tab, you can pause the Scene Switcher if you manually switch
to specific scenes.
You can also go to your Hotkeys Settings and set up dedicated hotkeys for starting and
stopping the Scene Switcher, too.
You have some flexibility here.
The plugin also gives you lots of options for switching based on windows, switching
back after a certain amount of time, customizing transitions, and so on - but this is the basic,
main functionality here.
--
So you actually have quite a few solid options available to you when it comes to recording
and streaming multiple monitors with OBS Studio.
Pick what works best for you.
I hope this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course has been helpful for you.
If it was, drop-kick that like button and subscribe for awesome tech videos.
If you like game streaming, come follow me on Twitch and drop a message in chat.
Until next time, I’m EposVox, Happy Streaming!
Thanks for watching this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course.
More videos like this and a full master class are linked in the playlist in the video description.
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