Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iamlemec 1957 days ago
This has been really useful for me when teaching online. Just mirror my iPad to a desktop window, then point OBS at said window (then pipe OBS to Zoom through a virtual camera). I tried to modify the source to output to a v2l loopback device instead, but couldn't quite get it to work.
3 comments

If you have a Mac, you can connect the iPad to it and share the contents of the screen directly (via QuickTime). The latency is lower.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/26/tip-record-your-i...

You can send the iPad screen directly into OBS using NDI. NDI HX Capture is the app for iOS/iPadOS. You'll need the NDI plugin for OBS.

I'm not sure which ends up being more reliable but I've had great success with NDI.

Oh that looks excellent, I'll check it out. Yeah, the latency right now is decent enough for whiteboard writing but could definitely be better. Only tricky thing might be that some apps have AirPlay integrations that will just broadcast parts of the screen, like only the writing surface without the UI elements up top. Not sure if that carries over to NDI, but I could always just crop it in OBS.
Can't you share the iPad screen directly in zoom?
Yes but it's apparently a little complicated. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005890803-iOS-S...

Teams also supports this well.

I kind of assumed it wouldn't work well before trying it, perhaps due to the lingering "mobile devices are low powered devices" stigma. In reality my iPhone can run full AR apps (meaning running the camera and a 3D rendering engine) and stream them to a Teams meeting without breaking a sweat. I wasn't even anxious about plugging in.

Ah yeah, I forgot to mention that I'm on linux, and iPad direct to Zoom doesn't appear to work there. Also, going through OBS lets me do scene switching between full video, slides, and whiteboard, the latter two with video overlay in the corner.