I figured I might as well start this thread since nobody else has yet.
I've been toying of the idea of getting back in the video-making and streaming game over the past year. One issue I have is that I find the whole process of capturing video to be a pain. It feels like a dice roll to figure out what combination of OBS settings will work to capture any given game. There's also the issue that my computer is underpowered for many games since it's a laptop that I primarily use for my day job where I don't exactly need incredible 3D graphics capability, and of course there's also tons of shit on there that could dox me. And if the machine broke (say due to overheating while trying to play intensive games) I'd be pretty screwed.
To alleviate all this, I was thinking of getting a second PC to play the games on, and then feeding the HDMI output from that to one of those external video capture devices to the laptop. I wouldn't even install Windows on the gaming PC; just SteamOS, which is a Linux distro with some pretty mature compatibility layers for running Windows games, and of course Steam itself would be running under a new separate account. I'd maybe spend $400-500 for the new gaming PC and just use one of those AMD processors with integrated graphics unless and until I decide I want to stick with this enough to get a full card. The laptop would just take the HDMI feed from the card as an input for OBS, add my microphone audio and whatever other layers it needs to, and stream it out. There'd be no work or other doxable stuff on the gaming box, and if it died I'd still be able to get work done on the laptop. Using an external capture card would also mean I'd be able to dig out and connect up my old consoles if I wanted to stream a PS2 game or something.
Any thoughts from someone more experienced? What would be the downsides to this approach?
I've been toying of the idea of getting back in the video-making and streaming game over the past year. One issue I have is that I find the whole process of capturing video to be a pain. It feels like a dice roll to figure out what combination of OBS settings will work to capture any given game. There's also the issue that my computer is underpowered for many games since it's a laptop that I primarily use for my day job where I don't exactly need incredible 3D graphics capability, and of course there's also tons of shit on there that could dox me. And if the machine broke (say due to overheating while trying to play intensive games) I'd be pretty screwed.
To alleviate all this, I was thinking of getting a second PC to play the games on, and then feeding the HDMI output from that to one of those external video capture devices to the laptop. I wouldn't even install Windows on the gaming PC; just SteamOS, which is a Linux distro with some pretty mature compatibility layers for running Windows games, and of course Steam itself would be running under a new separate account. I'd maybe spend $400-500 for the new gaming PC and just use one of those AMD processors with integrated graphics unless and until I decide I want to stick with this enough to get a full card. The laptop would just take the HDMI feed from the card as an input for OBS, add my microphone audio and whatever other layers it needs to, and stream it out. There'd be no work or other doxable stuff on the gaming box, and if it died I'd still be able to get work done on the laptop. Using an external capture card would also mean I'd be able to dig out and connect up my old consoles if I wanted to stream a PS2 game or something.
Any thoughts from someone more experienced? What would be the downsides to this approach?