Since I started streaming in March, I have been using a 2 PC setup using NDI Tools for OBS Studio, making my laptop the encoding computer and keeping the desktop for gaming. This tool is amazing as it allows you to use a laptop you might not use (since I bought a desktop) to partake in the tasks of encoding, however, you still need to go back and forth with both computers to make it work.
Fortunately (and unfortunately, this is more an inside thing of mine cause I believe the excess of convenience does more harm than good) convenience exists and you can use a program to control multiple computers on a network.
Program's called Input Director and it is incredibly simple to set up and best of all... 'tis free!
Source: Their website 👇
I essentially found this program out of the need to control OBS on my laptop, allowing me to put Sources directly on the laptop, giving the desktop more freedom for other tasks.
With this software, you can control as many (as far as i'm concerned, there's no limit that i've seen) computers as you want on a network using a single mouse+keyboard. It also has security, meaning you'll need to confirm and accept a computer can be managed through the software, prior to using it. So I made my laptop possible to manipulate via my desktop but not the other way around.
Plus, a thing I think is amazing, is that you can literally still bring your mouse over to, in my case the laptop, and manipulate it even with a game in fullscreen.
Here's some more images of examples and stuff...
Hopefully this helps someone out as it helped me.
Often I tend to think the things I find out about are super straight forward that 'everyone' must already know about them but more often than not I find out that there's a lot of things people can find out about so here it is.
If I find more stuff that is helpful like this I will post about it as well.
Thank you for reading and have a great day.
can you explain what you are streaming, so you need 2 desktops for streaming? O_O are you doing somekind of 24/7 radio thing?
No lol my desktop computer uses an AMD APU instead of dedicated CPU and GPU. In 2018 it was already a cheap alternative and it worked fairly well for Overwatch which was and still is what I play mostly. So I need to use my laptop as the streaming PC in order to be able to stream games decently without hiccups 😊
ow ic now. basically running obs on laptop and the game on desktop. wow. !! smart !
Ye ye, gotta make do with what one has 🤣
Looks like a neat little program to use. I've got sort of a similar setup only I use Anydesk since it can be used on pretty much anything. I just ran everything through a vm and it worked great. Desktop handles all of the workload and I can use my laptop or phone for controlling it as needed.
Noice, I heard VM networks are pretty neat. I looked into remote desktop programs, though in my case I needed the lightest option possible and input director was it as it just runs in the background. 🙂