Record Your Fights and Learn PVP Faster with Free Open Broadcaster Software (OBS)

As many of you know I stream from time to time on Twitch. I don't do it as much as I should, but in the process of doing it I learned about a Screen Recording Program that works pretty well.

That software is called Open Broadcaster Software and it is a Free Open Source Software that you can use to record you fights and quickly improve your PVP Skill.

There is a new updated Version of this article and video located here.

When I first started making videos it was because I wanted to make PVP videos, but I quickly noticed a side effect... My PVP Skill got better very quickly.

I ended using the Videos (even horrible losses) as teaching tools to help myself spot my errors and look for other ways I could have executed better.

One thing I think you will notice is that when you first start watching your self PVP, you will find TONS of little things you did wrong that you had ZERO idea you were doing.

I've caught my self not managing range, not watching DScan, forgetting to put out drones, and on and on.

Becoming a PRO PVP Pilot requires you get a good fitting, learn the tactics needed to use that fit to it's maximum, pick your fights, and execute properly. Recording yourself is the best way to improve your execution.

Here's the link to Open Broadcaster Software: https://www.obsproject.com/

To help you avoid some headaches with the setup I have created a video to show you how:

Watch Full Screen 1080p

So what's the difference between OBS and Fraps?

Fraps is what I have always used, and I think it's a great program that produces high quality video at a minimal cost to Game Performance.

However, Fraps is a Hard Drive HOG. It uses about 1.5 Gigabytes of space for every minute of video recorded. As a result I have filled up several 1 TB hard drives with PVP footage.

The reason Fraps Video takes up so much space is because it records to Raw AVI Video which is uncompressed and very large.

OBS on the other hand "Encodes On The Fly" and compresses your video in real time to x264 MP4 which is only a fraction of the size of Raw video. So a 2 minute Fraps videos my take up 3 Gigs while the same video in OBS takes up less than 50MB in many cases.

The reason this is important is because so many things in EVE take a long time and thus require tons of hard drive space.

In EVE things tend to take a long time. You may roam 20 jumps to find a fight, or perhaps you have to toy with a blob for 15 minutes before you get a fight. With Fraps I would rarely record the stuff that happened Before the fight, and tend to just record the fight it's self.

In many cases the stuff that sets the fight up is more important than the actual fight, so my only option until now was to run Fraps for 30-60 minutes and use up 45 to 90 Gigabytes of space.

I've only just started to play around with OBS and I can't say it's perfect yet, but I plan to test it more over the next few days and see what I can get out of it.

About the author

In 2010 Abbadon21 was the first person to create Narrated Instructional PVP videos for EVE Online. This started a new era of EVE Online and opened up high level "PRO" PVP to everyone. Abbadon21 is also the Founder of EVEProGuides.com, which is EVE Online's oldest and most trusted source for high quality PRO Guides.