How to display keystrokes in OBS?

Question

I need to display the keystrokes while recording or streaming a game.

I am using OBS Studio for this; however, as far as I am aware, OBS Studio needs an external software for displaying the keystrokes, in which case I decided to use the open-source KeyViz.

That is what the KeyViz icon is looking in the taskbar:

When I go to Task Manager > Processes, I see the KeyViz executable there and there is 1-level nesting which I can right-click, just as the parent item. According to YouTube tutorials, I could bring the KeyViz application to the front so that the keystrokes indeed appear, but for me, there is no option to do this ("bring it to front"). (Sorry, I can't print this part right now.)

At the moment, I can record the game bitmap and sound, but the keystrokes aren't working correctly.

I've noticed that when I stopped playing the game a bit, a few keystrokes showed up in front of my computer, like Ctrl + S, which I didn't expect.

Here's the Game Source (unfortunately in Portuguese):

What is checked there:

• Enable transparency
• Capture frequency = normal
• RGB10A2 color space = sRGB

Answer 1

There's a few things to consider here:

By default, KeyViz will only show when hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts are pressed. To show all keyboard inputs, you need to turn off the Hotkey Filter option in KeyViz settings.

Keystroke-intercepting applications like KeyViz also have a tendency to stop working when certain programs and games are in focus. Usually, running KeyViz as administrator is all that's required to get it working again.

If you only want to display a certain subset of keys (for game inputs), there is another purpose-built OBS Studio plugin you can use: input-overlay. This can be used to show not only certain keyboard presses, but also mouse clicks and controller inputs.

Answer 2

I have used the Input Overlay 5.x plugin within OBS Studio 64 bits and it worked perfectly.

For example, I was wanting this keystroke layout to demonstrate playing a specific game:

I found this GitHub repository which contains what is enough for me.

To prepare your OBS profile for this keystroke layout, it is easy:

1. Download the above GitHub repository as a ZIP.

2. Extract the ZIP into a folder.
3. Install the Input Overlay 5.x plugin in your OBS Studio root folder. In my case, since it is 64 bits, I have placed it in the Windows path C:\Program Files\obs-studio.
4. Now, close and open your OBS Studio.
5. Choose your desired OBS profile.
6. Add an Input Overlay layer and
7. Set its Overlay image path to the zxc-arrows.png file inside the extracted ZIP.
8. Set its configuration file path to the zxc-arrows.json file inside the extracted ZIP.

Done, now the Z, X, C, and arrow keys are caught by your OBS Studio software in that specific OBS profile.

The configuration file, in Input Overlay 5.x, finishes with the .json extension (the JSON data format). In previous versions, Input Overlay configuration files finish with the .ini extension.