Can someone help me figure out what it even is I'm trying to do? I'm a tech savvy kinda persons and if someone just gives me the general idea/right keywords to search for I can probably figure the rest out myself, but I'm caught in a real X/Y problem.
JUNK: Arch, KDE (X11), 3080 (proprietary drivers), OBS, Elgato HD60 X, 3440x1440 ultra widescreen
I just want to do some simple streaming to Twitch/Youtube and game recording.
The Elgato obviously doesn't support my ultrawide so my original thought was to leave the UW monitor plugged in with DisplayPort (as it already is) and then plug in the Elgato with HDMI and then switch the monitor input when I'm ready to stream. The UW stretches the 2560x1440 out though, how do I configure the viewport to keep the proper aspect ratio and put black bars on the side? Alternatively, can I configure the UW to 2560x1440 with black bars and simply mirror the display, or will I take a performance hit when streaming like that? And how do I change the xconfig on the fly, is that something I'd want to write a script for?
I inherited the Elgato from a friend who gave up on streaming and while I'm not entirely opposed to spending more money on potentially more appropriate gear ....... I'd really rather not.
Like I said, if someone can just explain to me what I should be doing and give me a swift kick in the ass towards the right direction, I can do the heavy work of putting all the pieces together, I'm not looking for a total solution π΅π΅βπ« Thanks!
... What exactly do you need the Elgato for? All the Elgato does is capture external HDMI signals.
If you had 2 PCs, you would use the Elgato to send the gaming PC's screen to the streaming PC. If you had an Xbox, you would use it to capture the Xbox's screen on your PC for streaming.
If you have 1 PC, you don't need an Elgato, KDE already knows what your PC screen looks like, it is laying it out.
What you should be doing is just "open OBS and set up your scenes and start streaming." The only thing you might want to do is go into the video settings and set it to use NVENC (I think you can do that on Linux) to offload the encoding to your GPU (which has dedicated encoding hardware) instead of your CPU.
Everything else should just work the same as it does on Windows.
To be clear: The Elgato HD60 X does not do any streaming.. it is a video capture device. OBS does all the streaming, and it already has access to all the things it needs to capture by nature of being on the PC. You can just capture your desktop in OBS without the Elgato.
A capture card also makes sense if you have a camera that feeds into HDMI (vs a normal webcam that already provides USB).
They can. But Elgato also makes a "Camlink" in addition to the "HD60" series. And the Camlink dongles create a UVC device, which can be used as a webcam with no further tweaking necessary. Using a full desktop capture card for a webcam is slightly overkill, but absolutely works.