OBS Display Capture from one PC to Another

I got my new hardware from GraphCMS today and wanted to stream the setup of a Windows PC for web development.

The idea was to do a ‘set up a Windows machine from scratch for web development’ and there would be restarts when installing Windows Subsystem for Linux so if I was streaming from that machine I’d lose the stream on restart.

Options

I know there was an option to use a screen capture card but I needed to get the hardware operational (because work) so I asked about on Twitter and did some searching of my own and came across some solutions.

Found this one first:

Which seemed reasonable but I wasn’t that keen on installing the whole suite from NDI so I did a bit more searching.

Then I found this one which doesn’t need additional software outside of OBS:

So the idea is to set up OBS on both machines and have one pipe the output to the other.

The second option I got working after solving the OBS Fix Display Capture not Working issue.

Worked a charm, I could see the new machine on my PC where I was going to do the stream from to Twitch.

Burn

The issue for me was that I didn’t have the Wi-Fi bandwidth to stream it. It wasn’t until I started the stream that I saw the majority of the stream was buffering whilst my Wi-Fi crumbled under the load of sharing the output from the two devices.

Another way

It was only after a totally delightful conversation with Kevin Lewis (hit him up for board game ideas any time) that I discovered I could have done this a lot simpler with Streamyard.

Streamyard if you’re not familiar with it is a web based streaming solution that allows you to stream to YouTube, Twitch and LinkedIn from one place.

If I were to use the Streamyard link from the new machine then host on my PC where I was streaming from, then I could add the new machine as a guest to the stream, do all the work on there and when I needed to restart I could do some talking whilst I wait for the new machine to reboot.

A lot of the time the simpler option is by far the best, I was so preoccupied with trying to work out if I could do it that I didn’t consider the simpler option.

Lesson learned.