OBS Studio has a nifty feature for switching your displayed scene while a particular window is active, the Automatic Scene Switcher. I feel it’s an under-utilized feature which is incredibly easy to setup.
In OBS on the top menu select ‘tools’ and then ‘automatic scene switcher’.
You will get a screen similar to that shown below.
So, how does it work?
The first drop-down menu at the top allows you to choose from any currently open windows on your computer and will determine that when that window/program is the active window the scene switcher will kick in.
Make sure the window/program you want to choose is already open/started in the background before you open the scene switcher tool to ensure that it shows up on the drop-down list.
The second drop-down is to choose which scene OBS will switch to when the appropriate window is active.
After you have both your program/window and scene chosen, just click the plus symbol ‘+’ midway down the window and you will have your first automatic scene switcher ready to go.
When no windows matches: You can choose to either have the scene switch do nothing and keep the active scene it’s currently on, or you can have it default to a specific scene.
Check active window title every: Time in milliseconds on how often OBS will check the current window title. The default is 300ms and I have found this to be quite snappy.
Scene Switcher is: Inactive/Active, the current state of the scene switcher.
Start: Press this to make the automatic scene switcher active during your live stream/recording. Pretty straight forward.
When would you use this tool?
You can get creative and use this for just about anything to save time from manually switching your scenes during certain events. For example, some people do full-screen webcam social interactions prior to starting a game on
stream, ending a stream or even when waiting in a long queue for a game to start. If you set up the scene switcher to change to your “social” scene when the game windows are not active, you can save time on doing that manually once you are in a game queue or finished with that game.