29 ms·

OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

1518 points by open-source-ux 7y ago

fuball63 7y ago
OBS is commonly used for video game streaming, but it's a great tool for any scenario where you need to take live audio and video from different sources and display them at the same time or transition between them. I've been using it to make a corny music interview show with my local musician friends during the coronavirus shelter in place. Whereas a lot of my fellow musicians are streaming from their phone, I'm able to connect a mixer to my computer and stream the show with really good audio quality.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  The B in OBS hints at streaming, but it's also fantastic for purely recording. It's honestly surprising how lacking that space was before OBS. I remember using FRAPS/Taksi a bit, and stuff like Camtasia, but there were all pretty awful to be honesty and definitely not free or open source.
  - xmprt 7y ago
    It feels like OBS has been here forever but I remember the days when I had to use Camtasia. The software was actually surprisingly good and easy to use but for the amount you were paying, it wasn't worth it, not to mention the proprietary recording format wasn't doing it much good.
  - icelancer 7y ago
    Agreed. I used it just this week to record my screen (have used it in the past for streaming) and was blown away at not only how easy it was to use, but how small the files were and how well it integrated the encoders my system supported.
  - fuball63 7y ago
    I really like using the recording feature to do sound checks. We go through all of our checks, then I watch the video locally in VLC. That way I'm certain when it goes live it'll sound the way it's supposed to.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      I wish more people would do this. Or maybe OBS should have some (opt-out) warnings for when your audio is either unbalanced, too low or too loud. I seen way too videos or streams with bad audio levels.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
yesimahuman 7y ago
OBS is really great, but beware the latest version has some serious crash issues on Catalina. Seems related to password managers and HTML forms with password inputs. Had my stream crash over and over until I stopped using my browser during the session.
- r1ch 7y ago
  This is triggered by secure input causing issues with the hotkey code. We're aware of the issue and should have a hotfix out soon.
simonmales 7y ago
We use it to stream product demo's to Workplace (Facebook product). Works great!
archon 7y ago
I started using OBS when our church moved our services to live streaming due to the pandemic. Our mostly non-technical volunteer media team has had zero issues using it to stream to Facebook or a self-hosted Restreamer instance. Easy to use, straightforward interface. I'm sure we'll keep using it for streaming even after the pandemic is over.
- bigtex 7y ago
  What kind of camera are you using?
- chirau 7y ago
  What's your setup if you don't mind me asking?
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    I know I've been getting a number of questions around livestreaming for churches lately (since I used to do that a lot more in the past), and I've been gathering my thoughts in a blog post here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-livestream-masses-or-other-liturgies-on-youtube https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-livestream-masses... It depends mainly on the budget, but with Easter coming up (probably _the_ major day in many (if not most) Christian churches), it seems many groups are scrambling to find a way to get a decent quality stream set up in time. Many groups on the lower end of the budget scale are using an iPhone on a tripod (but the audio is terrible). Medium range you have one or two cameras plugged into a laptop with OBS, and you can get audio from the church's sound system. High end many places already have PTZ camera systems installed, and they just need someone to control the video system during the event.
- MontagFTB 7y ago
  A blog post about your setup would be invaluable for small churches with a skeleton/volunteer AV crew. Would you be willing?
- JshWright 7y ago
  Yep, same here. Went from zero to a fairly professional streaming experience in a few hours. I had a couple Logitech C920 webcams, and a Presonus Audiobox lying around. Combined with an older iMac, I was able to set up a pretty "fire and forget" rig.
dfee 7y ago
There’s one feature of OBS that’s missing for me, and that’s recording sources to separate files. I believe this is called “multicording”, and it something I’ve only found in paid software, like screen flow. Here is the multi year discussion in the OBS forums: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-separate-video-files.61173/ https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-se...
- chirau 7y ago
  What's the use case?
  - dfee 7y ago
    Exporting to something like iMovie to manage chroma keys (video alpha channels), or manage the two videos separately: zooming in, highlighting in the background recording, effects for the foreground recording etc.
  - foxyv 7y ago
    For editing together screen/face/camera streams later probably.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zbobet2012 7y ago
  If you are using any of the many hardware-accelerated encoders available on desktop today the CPU is not at all limiting. Quicksync can run 9 HD h264 encodes, NVENC can run 4 to 17 depending on the card, etc. Most OBS users don't configure software encode because of the resource issues.
  - eropple 7y ago
    This is very true, but it's worth noting that NVENC requires a Quadro card for more than one or two streams (depending on the model).
jcelerier 7y ago
OBS is a very nice example of developping & distributing a Qt app to Mac / Windows / Linux with rad performance.
- AbuAssar 7y ago
  Telegram is the best Qt cross-platform app i used
  - mappu 7y ago
    Although Telegram is QML, not Widgets - I think they should be compared as different categories.
    - jcelerier 7y ago
      Nope, Telegram is widgets (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/search?q=qwidget&unscoped_q=qwidget https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/search?q=qwidget...)
binarymax 7y ago
Just started using it last week, and we'll be using it for our first virtual meetup next Thursday! It's a great project, but the area that would make it absolutely amazing would be a better layout UX. It requires lots of clicking around to get things lined up and sized properly. Some UX practices from existing layout systems like inkscape would go a long way.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Just found this a few days ago for doing a screen recording. Works really well but the UI could maybe use a little cleanup to make it easier to use.
- kawfey 7y ago
  As a seasoned user, I love the UI. But also I'm a seasoned user. It is a highly complicated software, but it's extremely flexible and surprisingly reliable for all things streaming and screen recording. A dead-simple mode might suffice but if you do anything with streaming or recording it's worth it to learn the deeper idiosyncrasies of OBS.
gw 7y ago
Did anyone report that bizarre OBS bug that Jon Blow ran into while streaming a week ago? It was pretty entertaining... https://www.twitch.tv/videos/575151695?t=00h00m25s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/575151695?t=00h00m25s
- ialexpw 7y ago
  I experienced a similar thing while testing it. Had it on another monitor with an app in full screen and it just locked onto a single frame.
- TehCorwiz 7y ago
  It looks like whenever the scene, source, and audio panels on the bottom of the window are on screen but in the background the frame times become choppy.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  I wish they would have explored what some of the commenters noted: does it happen when you position OBS such that it has to recursively capture itself? (The feed contains a picture of the feed which contains a picture of the feed which …) It seemed like some positions, it would handle 2-4 recursions okay, but the positions where it had to do infinite recursions were the ones that the frame-rate plummeted.
  - dodgepong 7y ago
    Recursion would have nothing to do with it. Recursive capture does not add any load, it just looks weird.
- ckdarby 7y ago
  Wish Jon didn't bash so much and contributed to the project instead :(
thomascgalvin 7y ago
I use OBS to record training videos for our engineers. I used QuickTime for a while, but jumped ship when QuickTime crashed and ate an hour-long session, with no recoverable backup.
acidburnNSA 7y ago
Love it. I've been using it on Linux with v4l2loopback to get it into things like Skype, zoom, jitsi, and teams. Really slick. For quarantine levity, this combined with live audio effects possible with JACK rack like voice changers and echos is hilarious. Maybe today's a good day to try that out on the engineering managers meeting.
- preek 7y ago
  That sounds like a great setup. I use OBS for recording and PulseEffects for some features like a noise gate. However, the latter doesn’t work well for me. Do you have some docs you could share on the setup you describe above, please? In any case, thanks for sharing your setup so far!
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    I have a video about the JACK Rack setup at least from a while back but haven't written anything about the OBS/v4l2loopback stuff. It's probably a good time to write something like that up, eh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igca1qT8Sjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igca1qT8Sjs
lvh 7y ago
If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland, and screencasts on that have long since been a complete pain in the neck with per-compositor "solutions" that mostly don't work quite right. Fortunately someone who works on Gnome wrote the obs-xdg-portal plugin that should fix this, at least for Gnome and hopefully soon for wlroots and KDE once they fully support the underlying portal API. Until then, the easiest way to get screencasting working is just to run in X11. (Ask me about ffmpeg raw GPU buffer capture one day; running a bunch of codec code as root is always exciting.) OBS Plugin: https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal/ https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal/ For GTK: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk For KDE: https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde For wlr: https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
- cycloptic 7y ago
  Those will cover the capture plugins, but OBS still needs XWayland to run due to a dependency on GLX for rendering. For those interested, there is an open PR here to add native EGL/Wayland support: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 For wlroots compositors there is also the wlrobs plugin, which can be used if you don't need pipewire: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
  - Jnr 7y ago
    There is an even cooler pull request that adds zero-copy screen capture. https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 I think this is a better way to go to get the same performance and low latency gaming capture as on Windows with gaming GPUs. The guy who made that PR frequently streams coding sessions on Youtube. I think he made it because he wanted a better way to stream some cool live opengl coding sessions. And even though that code isn't production ready, he has used it for some time now and it seems to work great. If there is some company that slightly cares about Linux desktop and gaming on Linux, I would suggest helping with that pull request and getting it merged. (Anyone from Steam, AMD or Nvidia here?)
darzu 7y ago
My team loves OBS! We’ve been using it to live stream “learn to code” sessions for kids 4-5x daily after the world went into lockdown. Shameless self plug: https://makecode.com/online-learning https://makecode.com/online-learning
technofiend 7y ago
I've been using it to create videos of an infrastructure provisioning product. One of the most useful things so far is being able to record a process that may take 15 minutes to fail but only has an error for a few seconds before clearing the screen, rebooting, hanging, etc. Much easier to rewind and grab the failure from a stream than to hang poised over a keyboard waiting to bang print screen at the precise moment needed.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  ...shouldnt you just log errors as you go and check the log?
  - technofiend 7y ago
    Absolutely. However this isn't my code and it can fail in strange ways with an ephemeral error message. If I can't change the code, this is my workaround.
  - carapace 7y ago
    If you think about it, that's exactly what they're doing. ;-)
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Sounds like a perfect fit for OBS Replay Buffer.
SN76477 7y ago
Used it with windows for years. I use it to record my screen for training my outsourcers. Works great and is simple.
turdnagel 7y ago
Love OBS. Does anyone know if there is a way to use the hardware encoder with a Radeon GPU on Mac?
zo1 7y ago
If anyone is wondering how they can use this with something like zoom, I found this really handy blog post about it: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebcamVideoCallsToTheNextLevelWithOBSNDIToolsAndElgatoStreamDeck.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...
bnycum 7y ago
If you are looking for a more robust solution Streamlabs OBS[1] is more popular in the livestreaming community, it's OBS on steroids. It is also open source, and just released a beta on Mac like this week. [1]: https://streamlabs.com/ https://streamlabs.com/
- songshuu 7y ago
  Oh snap, it's out of Beta!? Downloaded!
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  Is this a fork of OBS or another project. If it's a fork, why not work on the OBS project to implement these enhancements there? Is there backlash to that sort of thing from the OBS maintainers?
  - ihuman 7y ago
    I think one of the reasons why is because Streamlabs sells premium add-ons https://streamlabs.com/goprime https://streamlabs.com/goprime
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      That aside, I think it specializes OBS in a way that is too specific for OBS, which tries to be more generic. I think they both have their place, but personally I use OBS for recording videos and SLOBS adds no value for me.
      - joking 7y ago
        I didn't know about slobs, but the idea of a "theme store" maybe would be something worth to explore on obs, It actually could be a revenue stream, just like wordpress, where the core is open source but you have several theme stores.
  - timdorr 7y ago
    It's a frontend for OBS. This is the Electron app: https://github.com/stream-labs/streamlabs-obs/ https://github.com/stream-labs/streamlabs-obs/ This is the wrapper library for Node: https://github.com/stream-labs/obs-studio-node https://github.com/stream-labs/obs-studio-node
xwowsersx 7y ago
Is there some news with OBS or just sharing this wonderful piece of software?
bonestamp2 7y ago
Is there anyway I can make it pretend to be a webcam so I can use the output as a "camera" source for skype, teams, etc?
- dashesyan 7y ago
  Yes there’s OBS Virtual Camera and there’s NDI tools See the setup section here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebcamVideoCallsToTheNextLevelWithOBSNDIToolsAndElgatoStreamDeck.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...
  - jsilence 7y ago
    Zoom on Windows 10 does not seem to recognize the obs-cam virtual camera. Unfortunately. If anyone has a solution for this, I'd love to get a hint.
    - r1ch 7y ago
      Their latest Windows version has some weird DLL blacklist which blocks the ffmpeg DLLs used by the virtual camera. I made an inert version of the DLL[1] but this will break screen sharing due to a set of digital signature checks Zoom does before screen sharing. https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1243734261628383232 https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1243734261628383232
    - sorryitstrue 7y ago
      didnt work for me either, I had to use NDI tools
    - bentcorner 7y ago
      You need to downgrade Zoom to 4.6.7: https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam/issues/78 https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam/issues/78
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    Thank you! It looks like virtual camera only works on Windows for those who are interested.
jimhefferon 7y ago
College professor here. This software has been a big help in the current situation. Applause for the developers! (Anyone know how to fix that it changes red to blue and blue to red, when grabbing Firefox? I'm using Ubuntu MATE, Bionic Beaver.)
- superhuzza 7y ago
  Give this a shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnLtc63XJQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnLtc63XJQ&feature=youtu.be
  - jimhefferon 7y ago
    Well, I'll be damned. Thanks.
adamfeldman 7y ago
I've been trying to find a way to easily use my green screen outside Zoom. Have been tinkering with OBS: https://www.rightpoint.com/thought/2017/12/19/improving-your-video-meetings-on-skype-with-green-screens https://www.rightpoint.com/thought/2017/12/19/improving-your..., https://streamshark.io/blog/chroma-key-software-live-streaming https://streamshark.io/blog/chroma-key-software-live-streami... I'm looking for an actively-developed macOS virtual webcam tool, as CamTwist's website is showing a PHP error, and their Mac software doesn't seem to be notarized: http://camtwiststudio.com http://camtwiststudio.com.
- dundercoder 7y ago
  I too am looking for a virtual cam. Have been for a long time.
  - rgoodwintx 7y ago
    ManyCam is an option, though I'm not really sure how reliable/performant.
    - bonestamp2 7y ago
      You can try out the free version, seems ok. I was worried about it being sketchy, but it looks like it's from a team in Canada.
      - ShamelessC 7y ago
        I'm not sure if it's true but I love the notion that Canadians are inherently better developers than the rest of the world.
        bonestamp2 7y ago
        I didn't mean to suggest they're better developers per se, but there's very little malware that comes out of Canada so with limited information about the trustworthiness of this application it might be inherently less sketchy than camera/mic capture software that comes out of some other countries. That said, they are in Quebec. :D
Derbasti 7y ago
OBS is amazing. Half our faculty just went all-out and spent thousands of dollars on some commercial screen recording software. Meanwhile I'm doing my online courses with OBS, and it works beautifully. I have multiple scenes set up in OBS that grab different parts of my screens, and I switch between them with simple key strokes, while narrating on my actions as I do them. It's a very simple, and very effective setup, and my students love it. To me, it is immensely powerful to be able to switch scenes and narrate live, instead of doing these things in post. This saves a ton of time, that I can instead spend on refining my content.
- fsagx 7y ago
  Which OS are you using?
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Not OP but I can say that on Windows it may require a lot of fiddling. Hardware drivers appear to be a big factor. Another concern is the many overlays that accompany game launchers and drivers, including: Nvidia, Steam, GOG, etc. These add latency and sometimes private notifications.
    - fsagx 7y ago
      The fiddling step was what I hoped to minimize. Did you have better luck with Linux or MacOS?
      - geerlingguy 7y ago
        Interface is similar across the platforms; I had to do a few test streams on macOS before I could find settings that didn't cause streaming hiccups or problems with other software. I also had to make sure the OBS app interface was on a monitor separate from the one I was streaming; otherwise sometimes it would have some weird stuttering issues. No matter what, you'll probably need to spend a little time tweaking things to get it all working like you want. But the 'scenes' and preferences are pretty good about letting you lock things down once you do find something you like.
ru552 7y ago
I use OBS to record live streams of conferences so I can go back and watch them later. It's pretty great.
AdrianB1 7y ago
It may be just me, but I don't find the project's main page clear and intuitive; the first screen capture looks scary and there is nothing in that page that suggests (shows) the software is easy to use. Maybe it is easy to use, it's just not showing it.
- somehnguy 7y ago
  I don't think many people would describe OBS as 'easy to use'. I think that typically comes with the territory of very powerful software like OBS though. Steep learning curve and all that.
gregfjohnson 7y ago
I've found OBS Studio to be brilliant. I needed to capture and livestream the screen of a small embedded Windows box. I purchased an HDMI-in/USB-out HD capture device. Plugged the HDMI side into the little Windows box, and the USB side into my linux box. OBS Studio recognized the new "HD Capture" virtual device, and captured the live video off the other system. I could save to a file, livestream, etc. No driver issues or problems. Just amazing.
LambdaB 7y ago
If you are looking for self-hosted desktop streaming with OBS via nginx and RTMP, you might find some insights in my recent blog post: https://bitkeks.eu/blog/2020/03/desktop-video-streaming-server-obs-studio-nginx-rtmp-hls-videojs.html https://bitkeks.eu/blog/2020/03/desktop-video-streaming-serv... The nginx module also supports DASH encoding, which can be delivered by dash.js - I have it in production, but not yet updated the article. Next I'll try setting up SRT.
- alfg 7y ago
  Also check out https://github.com/alfg/docker-nginx-rtmp https://github.com/alfg/docker-nginx-rtmp for a Docker setup with a template to output HLS.
jameshe 7y ago
I use OBS Studio with OBS-VirtualCam [0] to attend virtual lectures & hold meetings for my team. I've found it to be incredibly convenient because you can control nearly everything with scenes and the audio controls. Before meetings start, I can broadcast music and display announcements, and then without having to hit a jarring "End Screenshare" can switch to my webcam and start a meeting. Live demos and presentations are another scene with the desktop/window/browser and webcam. 100% would recommend. [0] https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam
- aarongolliver 7y ago
  how are you getting desktop audio (music or whatever) to get sent to your meetings? I didn't see how to expose the audio output from obs as a "microphone" or whatever to video conferencing software. I ended up hacking my setup together with voicemeeter but it's pretty sloppy and error prone.
  - aantix 7y ago
    Loopback? https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
    - Seirdy 7y ago
      Pipewire [0] (the successor to PulseAudio) attempts to streamline this process for Linux. I've been messing with wf-recorder [1] for my screen+audio recordings, and might try to get it to spoof a camera input so I can get any program attempting to connect to the webcam to instead turn into a screen-casting tool. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire [1]: https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
  - loa_in_ 7y ago
    JACK audio or ALSA monitor device
    - 7y ago
e8johan 7y ago
We just ran the entire foss-north conference virtually using OBS. Not a glitch during 4 days. I started documenting the setup here: https://github.com/e8johan/virtual-conf-resources https://github.com/e8johan/virtual-conf-resources .
gbea42d4 7y ago
This is a great app.
jonathankoren 7y ago
I have a topic adjacent question. If OBS is a good mixer, what’s a good open source video editor? Or can OBS do edit prerecorded files as well?
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  I use Blender's, but requires knowledge of how things work.
- mjbrusso 7y ago
  I use Kdenlive in Linux (also runs in MacOS).
mrlala 7y ago
OBS is simple enough that my 6 year old can record minecraft videos with it and work out any little quirks.
gok 7y ago
I've been using OBS to run a trivia game over YouTube. It's kind of a piece of shit. The Mac port is horrible. None of the widgets work properly, all the menu items are in the wrong place, and it supports essentially no system keyboard shortcuts. Like cmd+F doesn't do "Find…", it randomly resizes the thing you're editing. It's everything bad about Qt apps in one place. It also ships with its own 180MB copy of Chromium embedded because, you know, how could anyone write a desktop app without a copy of Chrome these days? Simple things like doing a presentation of slides are unintuitive and kludgey at best, and sometimes impossible. There are features revealed in the UI that, after digging through the forums, you'll discover are actually unimplemented. The audio mixing is very lacking; there's no easy cough button and the levels indicator doesn't work properly. So does anyone know of any alternatives?
- 3JPLW 7y ago
  I just use Quicktime. Open up a a new video recording, but don't start recording. The video recording window has an option to "float on top" — use that to put your video on your screen where you want it. Then you can either open up a new screen recording (for offline recordings) or just share your entire screen on your favorite conferencing platform. I also use desktop backgrounds smartly in conjunction with multiple spaces.
- kfarr 7y ago
  Yeah it's an amazing accomplishment from a video engineering perspective but a train wreck from a UI/UX perspective.
  - celim307 7y ago
    Sounds like most open source apps
- Proziam 7y ago
  Have you tried Streamlabs OBS?
  - Igelau 7y ago
romanovcode 7y ago
Is there anything like this that works with WinXP?
r1ch 7y ago
I'm one of the core contributors for OBS. Our website traffic has more than doubled over the last couple of weeks due to the COVID-19 situation - when we released the v25 update we accidentally killed our site due to a cache stampede after purging the CDN (oops). We're seeing all kinds of new uses, especially users who are integrating the OBS Virtualcam plugin to do presentations and other content sharing with apps that only support webcam input.
- alpb 7y ago
  Thanks for maintaining OBS! Any timelines for OBS Virtualcam to be available on macOS? It seems like several software like Snap Camera are integrating with users in this mode, OBS could be really helpful this way in webinars that don't happen over Twitch/YouTube.
  - r1ch 7y ago
    We're hoping sooner than later thanks to Tobi's bounty on this. You can follow the design spec at https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15 if you're interested.
    - vanous 7y ago
      It is really awesome and fast development. I am hoping it ends up cross platform (Linux) and not only OSX specific.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    Woah, I was gonna ask if anyone knew when Display Capture was gonna be possible on macOS Catalina again, but when I opened OBS now, I see that it's actually possible in version 24.0.6 that I am running. Guess I must've overlooked it until now the last few times I looked for it, lol. Anyway. Does anyone have any recommendations for settings to use in order to avoid lots of frame dropping and OBS making other applications sluggish when I try to stream to Twitch? I'm using a MacBook Air Retina 2018 model with an external monitor connected to it.
  - 7y ago
sorryitstrue 7y ago
One thing I wish you could do is have two different copies of an input - in my case, I wanted a video stream input (webcam) where I apply one set of filters to it for one scene, and a different set of filters to another scene. Seems like filters are globally applied to the instance, and you can't have two different scene elements with the same video input device.
- fenrirthviti 7y ago
  You can use groups to accomplish this currently, but it's not the most obvious thing. Just create two groups, and add the shared source to each group, then apply your filter to the group itself. Scene-specific filters and other scene-specific features is something that is on our to-do list, but very tricky at best.
megraf 7y ago
Your icon is very close to the BDSM icon! example: https://i.pinimg.com/236x/20/5e/5f/205e5fa719e6063ed5c3cfba881988bd--dom-pride-flag.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/236x/20/5e/5f/205e5fa719e6063ed5c3cfba8...
- fenrirthviti 7y ago
  It's a mitsudomoe, a common Japanese symbol. Jim picked it because he liked how it looked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoe
- Krustopolis 7y ago
  Wait, a sexual fetish has its own icon?
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    Got a flag as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM#Symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM#Symbols
jventura 7y ago
I had to move my classes online, so I've been using OBS for recording videos (mainly me talking while I go over the slides ~ 15-20 minutes). The only thing I would like to see fixed on macOS would be that my students could see the mouse pointer. Beside that, I think it works quite well.
timClicks 7y ago
I'm curious how large the development team is. There is an impressive community around OBS but seems to be many more requests for help rather than helpers.
- dodgepong 7y ago
  There's one full-time developer, about 5-10 regular free-time developers, and about 5-10 free-time support helpers.
geerlingguy 7y ago
I've been using OBS for a couple months for live streams on YouTube (see https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/ansible-101-jeff-geerling-youtube-streaming-series https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/ansible-101-jeff-geer...), and I have had rock-solid reliability, using an external mic interface, an external camera (displayed PIP), and sharing one of two displays during some instructional sessions. One thing to keep in mind, though—unless you have a dedicated video card, and it's supported by OBS (the list of supported cards on macOS is very thin), your CPU has to do all the compositing and compression, meaning you need a lot of CPU to be able to manage the streaming. On my 2016 MacBook Pro 13", it barely has the horsepower to do a stream and also run processes that I'm explaining (e.g. manage some VMs, run some database operations, etc.). I had to turn down the compression method to 'ultrafast', which is lowest quality (but still pretty good with 1080p output), and I also use SwitchResX to set my shared display at 1080p 1x resolution (instead of 4K/2x resolution).
- tessla 7y ago
  have you ever thought about getting a PC?
  - lostgame 7y ago
    If I was doing Logic Pro X tutorials, or XCode tutorials, this would be a non-option - which are the only kinds of tutorials I personally have enough knowledge and drive to create. PC is a non-option for a chunk of people in dev and media - I, for instance, do iOS dev for a living, and live by Logic Pro X for professional audio work. (I've been using Logic for about 15 years...) The amount of time it would take for me to transition, to, say Ardour - or the amount of my career that would be lost if I swapped from, say, iOS to...I'm not sure what the FOSS equivalent is...(Android doesn't count, obviously, because Google) I'd lose years and years of training, experience, and wisdom.
    - calebio 7y ago
      I think in that case you'd use a capture card on the PC and still continue to use your Mac.
strongbond 7y ago
I'd (seriously) like to see how it stacks up against Camtasia, which I've just discovered in my new job that I have no budget for.
noufalibrahim 7y ago
I don't use it for streaming but for recording screencasts and it does an excellent job there. I'm sure if I dig in a little, I'd find more features that would my videos better but even the default settings (on mac and Linux) work very well.
ktzar 7y ago
I tried this a while ago and didn't find the option, is midi supported to trigger scene changes, fadings, etc...?
xal 7y ago
I randomly learned OBS a while ago for doing some twitch streams in the evenings. I'm so glad I did. I run a 6,000 people company during the day and have OBS setup to push into Google Meet. I've done townhall with live on-screen Q/A voting, hosted podcast discussions, done PIP product reviews. I use its video record feature to react to figma prototypes and post the MP4s in the respective channel for discussion. OBS is an amazing tool and its worth learning. Even simple things like adding a compressor to an audio stream can make a huge difference to the quality. As one of our coaches recently said "Video quality is the new presence in 1:1s". On windows its reasonably easy to output OBS to a virtual camera for video conferencing software through a plugin. I've posted a bounty of $10k recently to make this a native feature and it's getting lots of traction. https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1242641154576965634 https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1242641154576965634 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15
- Osiris 7y ago
  Can you recommend any resources for learning OBS? My daughter wanted to record some videos of her playing a web-based game. I found the interface to OBS unintuitive. I managed to figure out how to capture a specific area on the desktop, but it was unexpectedly difficult to resize the output to match the input. I found some way of doing it that I can't remember. A few months later I had to do it again and that time I couldn't find the option to resize the output to match the input. I'd love to find some resources to help her learn how to setup OBS for recording or streaming.
  - julianlam 7y ago
    Instead of streaming the entire desktop (or a portion of it), you'll actually want to set up the ["Game Capture" source](https://obsproject.com/wiki/Sources-Guide#game-capture https://obsproject.com/wiki/Sources-Guide#game-capture), and configure it to automatically attach to any fullscreen application. Then add an audio stream, and you're good to go.
  - zahrc 7y ago
jononor 7y ago
Using OBS to record and stream interactive tutorials for customers, teaching machine learning for audio. Works super to use v4l2sink plugin for Linux to emulate a webcam and put it into any standard videochatting software. Thank you!
john_cogs 7y ago
Some of my teammates at GitLab are coordinating the Cloud Native Summit online event. They intend to use OBS + Zoom (and possibly Restream). If there are any resources you recommend for setting up OBS + Zoom + Restream for (mostly) Mac users, I'd love to share with the team. For context, the event will feature a mix of keynote and panel-style conversations.
poppabox 7y ago
Thank you so much for making this! Cheers to the devs.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
Even though OBS was initially aimed at streamers, it's also what I use to record all the YouTube videos I make for https://alchemist.camp https://alchemist.camp It's surprisingly flexible and there are plugins for almost everything. If you want to display keypresses, you can. If you want to add a layer and have both your video camera and screen incorporated, you can. If you want a layer to show keypresses, like I did when recording a video on VIM, you can do that, too.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  By the way, if you want to pre-record keystrokes for demos/presentations/etc and still make it look like you're live-typing, I made a thing: https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    Thanks, but I like to just type and talk as I go.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
Is this a brand new service or did they release recently because of COVID? Never heard of them before. I have been searching for open source projects to help bring my local yoga studio online for the past few weeks and this looks promising!
- fralewsmi 7y ago
  OBS has dominated the livestreaming working for a while now (e.g Twitch)
- blattimwind 7y ago
  This isn't a service, but good old-fashioned desktop software.
jpdb 7y ago
I have interacted with the guy that started OBS a few times because he's a member of a community I am in. He's an extremely intelligent person and definitely deserves some positive attention. If you use OBS and find value in it you should definitely consider donating, I know it goes a long way.
asutekku 7y ago
I try to love OBS but even the simplest thing (sharing a portion of your screen) requires tons of fiddling to get it work (you need to get the right area with sliders instead of just drawing it on the screen). I guess it’s once again the same old story. In theory, it is a wonderful piece of open source software, but because of the lack of competent designers in the OSS-scene, the UX is awful for casual and first-time users. For pro-users, however, it is perfect.
- fenrirthviti 7y ago
  You can hold alt+drag the red bounding box to crop easily. Screen-region select is on our to-do list, but hasn't been a high priority as it's technically already possible to get the same end result, just not as simple.
zelphirkalt 7y ago
I must say, I had a rather mixed experience with OBS. I've used it before to do some streaming too, but it definitely has some issues with instability. The example (anecdote, if you will) I remember right now: There is apparently a way to mess up your settings, so that OBS crashes. No error or anything in the UI visible. But then your config is messed up, so when you restart it, it immediately crashes again. You cannot fix it, unless you delete the settings files or reinstall the application. It should not be possible to ever reach a situation, where you can make an application crash, by only accessing the settings it provides. It should warn about invalid settings or disable settings, which cannot be used, because of settings or reset the settings to something valid or ... But in OBS it's possible to basically mess up the whole application using its own settings UI.
ko3us 7y ago
OBS is awesome and it’s helped with my company to grow. We build plugins and overlays for OBS to make it super easy for streamers to reward their audience. Shameless plug check out get.incent.com/Ingage and get free reward overlays. I think the community effort to grow OBS has been awesome.
movedx 7y ago
Love OBS. I have a Sony A6000 going into it via a Elgato HD60 S. A Rode NT-USB microphone and a green screen my brother made me (big, solid, wooden... it's awesome.) OBS has enabled me to create super high quality training videos and also provide excellent remote working video conferencing capabilities. I can basically do remote pair programming with this thing... it's amazing.
jgrauman 7y ago
I love OBS, just started using it a couple weeks ago. I am using the v4l2loopback plugin on Linux to output the video to Zoom. Is there a way for it to output the sound similarly to be used as an input in Zoom for Linux? I'm using a blackmagic decklink mini recorder as input, and Zoom won't accept it as a mic, but OBS does. I've tried a bunch of hacks with pavucontrol, but nothing will let me accept the OBS output as an input into Zoom. Does anyone have any ideas?
- jgrauman 7y ago
  Nevermind, this fixes it from elsewhere in the thread. Thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754216
sireat 7y ago
Big fan of OBS! I've been using OBS to stream to Youtube and record locally at the same time. It's been over 400 videos now ever since Google Hangouts killed Youtube integration last August. Why did Google kill integration between their properties, who knows? (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-is-killing-youtubes-hangouts-on-air-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-is-killing-yo...) With OBS streaming is dead simple just enter your Youtube API key and off you go. If you are on a laptop with integrated AND discrete video cards there can be some issues with OBS recognizing the correct GPU.
notsgnik 7y ago
Can't manage to record my desktop, only get a black screen instead. Can't manage to find a fix, even 3 years latter while not being the only one... I know it's free... Still, to me, after couple years of sponsorship it should have fixed itself... (specially with hardware as common as mine.)
- r1ch 7y ago
  This is a common problem with laptops due to the multi-GPU power saving setup most laptops have, we have a thread at https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/laptop-black-screen-when-capturing-read-here-first.5965/ https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/laptop-black-screen-whe... which explains how to fix it.
puggo 7y ago
This is old software, old news. Why is it here?
manfouchi 7y ago
This company is currently looking for members who want to sell their photography picturesMoney-mouth faceCamera with flash, would you be interested? If you’re interested send message to this email for more information: Photojobz12@gmail.com
hkiely 7y ago
How does this encode the video?
lucastech 7y ago
OBS is great! Huge thanks to everyone who's maintained it over the years. As a side note, I'm trying to figure out how to do live streaming with less intense CPU requirements. My use case is effectively trying to use a Macbook Air to stream high quality video (720p, 30fps). Is there any way I could stream the video raw and encode it on a VPS somewhere? Or is there just a very real hurdle of needing a beefy CPU for any live streaming? I've looked at WebRTC a bit, but can't seem to find much in terms of how to broadcast it in a 1 to many (like Twitch, Vimeo, etc) when using WebRTC. Mux.com at least allows you to do that if you have an RTMP source stream, but I can only find web based libraries that require Flash to stream. Is there some HTML5 camera broadcasting solution that I'm missing? Some kind of VPS software for turning WebRTC into RTMP? I'd appreciate any direction I can get on this! Thanks
- mmcclure 7y ago
  I'm actually working on a blog post on the state of streaming live from a browser! WebRTC is...a bit of a monster, especially if you want to broadcast one-to-many. I've been hacking around with using the MediaRecorder API and piping that through WebSockets to a server that publishes via RTMP. It's definitely rough, and browsers de-prioritizing requestAnimationFrame callbacks when the tab isn't in focus kills things, but it's promising. It runs shockingly well on a Glitch instance for what that's worth. You need a Mux (https://mux.com https://mux.com) stream key for the demo, but you could quickly edit it to use any RTMP URL: https://mmcc-next-streamr.glitch.me/ https://mmcc-next-streamr.glitch.me/
jscheel 7y ago
I absolutely love OBS, and use it consistently three times a week for streaming my church’s worship services. It’s an amazing tool, and I’m really thankful for it. That said, if you want to stream on macOS, be ready for some friction. I believe they are working on some issues with updating to metal, which should help quite a bit. Right now, studio mode will drop your FPS by half because OBS doesn’t disable v-sync properly, and window capture is really buggy. If you are wanting to commit to streaming, you may have better luck on a pc right now.
brobot182 7y ago
I don’t get it. OBS has been around for years, why was this link even mentioned? Why so many upvotes?
zamadatix 7y ago
Only thing I've liked more is vMix but that costs quite a bit.
voicedYoda 7y ago
No joke, i was working with colleagues just yesterday on real time closed captioning, and started googling for a few ideas for Google's cloud speech recognition API. OBS was the first few hits, so i started learning all about this amazing tool just yesterday.
pontifier 7y ago
I started using it about 2 months ago, and I've got to say it's quite amazing. It was much easier to start than I expected. Like copy and paste a code, then one button to start streaming on twitch. Creating multiple views, and adding cameras was also very easy and intuitive. It's one of the best pieces of software I've used in a long time.
JeremyNT 7y ago
OBS is amazing. I've used it to record canned demos and presentations for a year or so now, and it just works great on Linux. I even use it to record demos of a wip or partially working feature that I'm working on and attach the video to issues in our gitlab instance to request feedback from stakeholders. Its feature list is really impressive, but it's great for this kind of simple use case too. Be sure to give it a try and many thanks to the maintainers!
suyash 7y ago
Any tips on how to integrate OBS with Zoom Presentations and make use of OBS features?
Tepix 7y ago
Related: The NDI HX camera app for iOS is currently free (instead of 22€) - with the OBS NDI plugin you can use your iPhone or iPad as a low-latency webcam for OBS. https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ndi-hx-camera/id1477266080 https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ndi-hx-camera/id1477266080

1518 points by open-source-ux 7y ago

OBS is commonly used for video game streaming, but it's a great tool for any scenario where you need to take live audio and video from different sources and display them at the same time or transition between them. I've been using it to make a corny music interview show with my local musician friends during the coronavirus shelter in place. Whereas a lot of my fellow musicians are streaming from their phone, I'm able to connect a mixer to my computer and stream the show with really good audio quality.

ehsankia 7y ago
The B in OBS hints at streaming, but it's also fantastic for purely recording. It's honestly surprising how lacking that space was before OBS. I remember using FRAPS/Taksi a bit, and stuff like Camtasia, but there were all pretty awful to be honesty and definitely not free or open source.
- xmprt 7y ago
  It feels like OBS has been here forever but I remember the days when I had to use Camtasia. The software was actually surprisingly good and easy to use but for the amount you were paying, it wasn't worth it, not to mention the proprietary recording format wasn't doing it much good.
- icelancer 7y ago
  Agreed. I used it just this week to record my screen (have used it in the past for streaming) and was blown away at not only how easy it was to use, but how small the files were and how well it integrated the encoders my system supported.
- fuball63 7y ago
  I really like using the recording feature to do sound checks. We go through all of our checks, then I watch the video locally in VLC. That way I'm certain when it goes live it'll sound the way it's supposed to.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    I wish more people would do this. Or maybe OBS should have some (opt-out) warnings for when your audio is either unbalanced, too low or too loud. I seen way too videos or streams with bad audio levels.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

yesimahuman 7y ago

OBS is really great, but beware the latest version has some serious crash issues on Catalina. Seems related to password managers and HTML forms with password inputs. Had my stream crash over and over until I stopped using my browser during the session.

r1ch 7y ago
This is triggered by secure input causing issues with the hotkey code. We're aware of the issue and should have a hotfix out soon.

simonmales 7y ago

We use it to stream product demo's to Workplace (Facebook product). Works great!

archon 7y ago

I started using OBS when our church moved our services to live streaming due to the pandemic. Our mostly non-technical volunteer media team has had zero issues using it to stream to Facebook or a self-hosted Restreamer instance. Easy to use, straightforward interface. I'm sure we'll keep using it for streaming even after the pandemic is over.

bigtex 7y ago
What kind of camera are you using?
chirau 7y ago
What's your setup if you don't mind me asking?
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  I know I've been getting a number of questions around livestreaming for churches lately (since I used to do that a lot more in the past), and I've been gathering my thoughts in a blog post here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-livestream-masses-or-other-liturgies-on-youtube https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-livestream-masses... It depends mainly on the budget, but with Easter coming up (probably _the_ major day in many (if not most) Christian churches), it seems many groups are scrambling to find a way to get a decent quality stream set up in time. Many groups on the lower end of the budget scale are using an iPhone on a tripod (but the audio is terrible). Medium range you have one or two cameras plugged into a laptop with OBS, and you can get audio from the church's sound system. High end many places already have PTZ camera systems installed, and they just need someone to control the video system during the event.
MontagFTB 7y ago
A blog post about your setup would be invaluable for small churches with a skeleton/volunteer AV crew. Would you be willing?
JshWright 7y ago
Yep, same here. Went from zero to a fairly professional streaming experience in a few hours. I had a couple Logitech C920 webcams, and a Presonus Audiobox lying around. Combined with an older iMac, I was able to set up a pretty "fire and forget" rig.

dfee 7y ago

There’s one feature of OBS that’s missing for me, and that’s recording sources to separate files. I believe this is called “multicording”, and it something I’ve only found in paid software, like screen flow. Here is the multi year discussion in the OBS forums: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-separate-video-files.61173/ https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-se...

chirau 7y ago
What's the use case?
- dfee 7y ago
  Exporting to something like iMovie to manage chroma keys (video alpha channels), or manage the two videos separately: zooming in, highlighting in the background recording, effects for the foreground recording etc.
- foxyv 7y ago
  For editing together screen/face/camera streams later probably.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zbobet2012 7y ago
If you are using any of the many hardware-accelerated encoders available on desktop today the CPU is not at all limiting. Quicksync can run 9 HD h264 encodes, NVENC can run 4 to 17 depending on the card, etc. Most OBS users don't configure software encode because of the resource issues.
- eropple 7y ago
  This is very true, but it's worth noting that NVENC requires a Quadro card for more than one or two streams (depending on the model).

jcelerier 7y ago

OBS is a very nice example of developping & distributing a Qt app to Mac / Windows / Linux with rad performance.

AbuAssar 7y ago
Telegram is the best Qt cross-platform app i used
- mappu 7y ago
  Although Telegram is QML, not Widgets - I think they should be compared as different categories.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    Nope, Telegram is widgets (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/search?q=qwidget&unscoped_q=qwidget https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/search?q=qwidget...)

binarymax 7y ago

Just started using it last week, and we'll be using it for our first virtual meetup next Thursday! It's a great project, but the area that would make it absolutely amazing would be a better layout UX. It requires lots of clicking around to get things lined up and sized properly. Some UX practices from existing layout systems like inkscape would go a long way.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Just found this a few days ago for doing a screen recording. Works really well but the UI could maybe use a little cleanup to make it easier to use.

kawfey 7y ago
As a seasoned user, I love the UI. But also I'm a seasoned user. It is a highly complicated software, but it's extremely flexible and surprisingly reliable for all things streaming and screen recording. A dead-simple mode might suffice but if you do anything with streaming or recording it's worth it to learn the deeper idiosyncrasies of OBS.

gw 7y ago

Did anyone report that bizarre OBS bug that Jon Blow ran into while streaming a week ago? It was pretty entertaining... https://www.twitch.tv/videos/575151695?t=00h00m25s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/575151695?t=00h00m25s

ialexpw 7y ago
I experienced a similar thing while testing it. Had it on another monitor with an app in full screen and it just locked onto a single frame.
TehCorwiz 7y ago
It looks like whenever the scene, source, and audio panels on the bottom of the window are on screen but in the background the frame times become choppy.
deathanatos 7y ago
I wish they would have explored what some of the commenters noted: does it happen when you position OBS such that it has to recursively capture itself? (The feed contains a picture of the feed which contains a picture of the feed which …) It seemed like some positions, it would handle 2-4 recursions okay, but the positions where it had to do infinite recursions were the ones that the frame-rate plummeted.
- dodgepong 7y ago
  Recursion would have nothing to do with it. Recursive capture does not add any load, it just looks weird.
ckdarby 7y ago
Wish Jon didn't bash so much and contributed to the project instead :(

thomascgalvin 7y ago

I use OBS to record training videos for our engineers. I used QuickTime for a while, but jumped ship when QuickTime crashed and ate an hour-long session, with no recoverable backup.

acidburnNSA 7y ago

Love it. I've been using it on Linux with v4l2loopback to get it into things like Skype, zoom, jitsi, and teams. Really slick. For quarantine levity, this combined with live audio effects possible with JACK rack like voice changers and echos is hilarious. Maybe today's a good day to try that out on the engineering managers meeting.

preek 7y ago
That sounds like a great setup. I use OBS for recording and PulseEffects for some features like a noise gate. However, the latter doesn’t work well for me. Do you have some docs you could share on the setup you describe above, please? In any case, thanks for sharing your setup so far!
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  I have a video about the JACK Rack setup at least from a while back but haven't written anything about the OBS/v4l2loopback stuff. It's probably a good time to write something like that up, eh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igca1qT8Sjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igca1qT8Sjs

lvh 7y ago

If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland, and screencasts on that have long since been a complete pain in the neck with per-compositor "solutions" that mostly don't work quite right. Fortunately someone who works on Gnome wrote the obs-xdg-portal plugin that should fix this, at least for Gnome and hopefully soon for wlroots and KDE once they fully support the underlying portal API. Until then, the easiest way to get screencasting working is just to run in X11. (Ask me about ffmpeg raw GPU buffer capture one day; running a bunch of codec code as root is always exciting.) OBS Plugin: https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal/ https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal/ For GTK: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk For KDE: https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde For wlr: https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

cycloptic 7y ago
Those will cover the capture plugins, but OBS still needs XWayland to run due to a dependency on GLX for rendering. For those interested, there is an open PR here to add native EGL/Wayland support: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484 For wlroots compositors there is also the wlrobs plugin, which can be used if you don't need pipewire: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
- Jnr 7y ago
  There is an even cooler pull request that adds zero-copy screen capture. https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 I think this is a better way to go to get the same performance and low latency gaming capture as on Windows with gaming GPUs. The guy who made that PR frequently streams coding sessions on Youtube. I think he made it because he wanted a better way to stream some cool live opengl coding sessions. And even though that code isn't production ready, he has used it for some time now and it seems to work great. If there is some company that slightly cares about Linux desktop and gaming on Linux, I would suggest helping with that pull request and getting it merged. (Anyone from Steam, AMD or Nvidia here?)

darzu 7y ago

My team loves OBS! We’ve been using it to live stream “learn to code” sessions for kids 4-5x daily after the world went into lockdown. Shameless self plug: https://makecode.com/online-learning https://makecode.com/online-learning

technofiend 7y ago

I've been using it to create videos of an infrastructure provisioning product. One of the most useful things so far is being able to record a process that may take 15 minutes to fail but only has an error for a few seconds before clearing the screen, rebooting, hanging, etc. Much easier to rewind and grab the failure from a stream than to hang poised over a keyboard waiting to bang print screen at the precise moment needed.

LegitShady 7y ago
...shouldnt you just log errors as you go and check the log?
- technofiend 7y ago
  Absolutely. However this isn't my code and it can fail in strange ways with an ephemeral error message. If I can't change the code, this is my workaround.
- carapace 7y ago
  If you think about it, that's exactly what they're doing. ;-)
blattimwind 7y ago
Sounds like a perfect fit for OBS Replay Buffer.

SN76477 7y ago

Used it with windows for years. I use it to record my screen for training my outsourcers. Works great and is simple.

turdnagel 7y ago

Love OBS. Does anyone know if there is a way to use the hardware encoder with a Radeon GPU on Mac?

zo1 7y ago

If anyone is wondering how they can use this with something like zoom, I found this really handy blog post about it: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebcamVideoCallsToTheNextLevelWithOBSNDIToolsAndElgatoStreamDeck.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...

bnycum 7y ago

If you are looking for a more robust solution Streamlabs OBS[1] is more popular in the livestreaming community, it's OBS on steroids. It is also open source, and just released a beta on Mac like this week. [1]: https://streamlabs.com/ https://streamlabs.com/

songshuu 7y ago
Oh snap, it's out of Beta!? Downloaded!
ShamelessC 7y ago
Is this a fork of OBS or another project. If it's a fork, why not work on the OBS project to implement these enhancements there? Is there backlash to that sort of thing from the OBS maintainers?
- ihuman 7y ago
  I think one of the reasons why is because Streamlabs sells premium add-ons https://streamlabs.com/goprime https://streamlabs.com/goprime
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    That aside, I think it specializes OBS in a way that is too specific for OBS, which tries to be more generic. I think they both have their place, but personally I use OBS for recording videos and SLOBS adds no value for me.
    - joking 7y ago
      I didn't know about slobs, but the idea of a "theme store" maybe would be something worth to explore on obs, It actually could be a revenue stream, just like wordpress, where the core is open source but you have several theme stores.
- timdorr 7y ago
  It's a frontend for OBS. This is the Electron app: https://github.com/stream-labs/streamlabs-obs/ https://github.com/stream-labs/streamlabs-obs/ This is the wrapper library for Node: https://github.com/stream-labs/obs-studio-node https://github.com/stream-labs/obs-studio-node

xwowsersx 7y ago

Is there some news with OBS or just sharing this wonderful piece of software?

bonestamp2 7y ago

Is there anyway I can make it pretend to be a webcam so I can use the output as a "camera" source for skype, teams, etc?

dashesyan 7y ago
Yes there’s OBS Virtual Camera and there’s NDI tools See the setup section here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebcamVideoCallsToTheNextLevelWithOBSNDIToolsAndElgatoStreamDeck.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...
- jsilence 7y ago
  Zoom on Windows 10 does not seem to recognize the obs-cam virtual camera. Unfortunately. If anyone has a solution for this, I'd love to get a hint.
  - r1ch 7y ago
    Their latest Windows version has some weird DLL blacklist which blocks the ffmpeg DLLs used by the virtual camera. I made an inert version of the DLL[1] but this will break screen sharing due to a set of digital signature checks Zoom does before screen sharing. https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1243734261628383232 https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1243734261628383232
  - sorryitstrue 7y ago
    didnt work for me either, I had to use NDI tools
  - bentcorner 7y ago
    You need to downgrade Zoom to 4.6.7: https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam/issues/78 https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam/issues/78
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  Thank you! It looks like virtual camera only works on Windows for those who are interested.

jimhefferon 7y ago

College professor here. This software has been a big help in the current situation. Applause for the developers! (Anyone know how to fix that it changes red to blue and blue to red, when grabbing Firefox? I'm using Ubuntu MATE, Bionic Beaver.)

superhuzza 7y ago
Give this a shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnLtc63XJQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnLtc63XJQ&feature=youtu.be
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  Well, I'll be damned. Thanks.

adamfeldman 7y ago

I've been trying to find a way to easily use my green screen outside Zoom. Have been tinkering with OBS: https://www.rightpoint.com/thought/2017/12/19/improving-your-video-meetings-on-skype-with-green-screens https://www.rightpoint.com/thought/2017/12/19/improving-your..., https://streamshark.io/blog/chroma-key-software-live-streaming https://streamshark.io/blog/chroma-key-software-live-streami... I'm looking for an actively-developed macOS virtual webcam tool, as CamTwist's website is showing a PHP error, and their Mac software doesn't seem to be notarized: http://camtwiststudio.com http://camtwiststudio.com.

dundercoder 7y ago
I too am looking for a virtual cam. Have been for a long time.
- rgoodwintx 7y ago
  ManyCam is an option, though I'm not really sure how reliable/performant.
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    You can try out the free version, seems ok. I was worried about it being sketchy, but it looks like it's from a team in Canada.
    - ShamelessC 7y ago
      I'm not sure if it's true but I love the notion that Canadians are inherently better developers than the rest of the world.
      - bonestamp2 7y ago
        I didn't mean to suggest they're better developers per se, but there's very little malware that comes out of Canada so with limited information about the trustworthiness of this application it might be inherently less sketchy than camera/mic capture software that comes out of some other countries. That said, they are in Quebec. :D

Derbasti 7y ago

OBS is amazing. Half our faculty just went all-out and spent thousands of dollars on some commercial screen recording software. Meanwhile I'm doing my online courses with OBS, and it works beautifully. I have multiple scenes set up in OBS that grab different parts of my screens, and I switch between them with simple key strokes, while narrating on my actions as I do them. It's a very simple, and very effective setup, and my students love it. To me, it is immensely powerful to be able to switch scenes and narrate live, instead of doing these things in post. This saves a ton of time, that I can instead spend on refining my content.

fsagx 7y ago
Which OS are you using?
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Not OP but I can say that on Windows it may require a lot of fiddling. Hardware drivers appear to be a big factor. Another concern is the many overlays that accompany game launchers and drivers, including: Nvidia, Steam, GOG, etc. These add latency and sometimes private notifications.
  - fsagx 7y ago
    The fiddling step was what I hoped to minimize. Did you have better luck with Linux or MacOS?
    - geerlingguy 7y ago
      Interface is similar across the platforms; I had to do a few test streams on macOS before I could find settings that didn't cause streaming hiccups or problems with other software. I also had to make sure the OBS app interface was on a monitor separate from the one I was streaming; otherwise sometimes it would have some weird stuttering issues. No matter what, you'll probably need to spend a little time tweaking things to get it all working like you want. But the 'scenes' and preferences are pretty good about letting you lock things down once you do find something you like.

ru552 7y ago

I use OBS to record live streams of conferences so I can go back and watch them later. It's pretty great.

AdrianB1 7y ago

It may be just me, but I don't find the project's main page clear and intuitive; the first screen capture looks scary and there is nothing in that page that suggests (shows) the software is easy to use. Maybe it is easy to use, it's just not showing it.

somehnguy 7y ago
I don't think many people would describe OBS as 'easy to use'. I think that typically comes with the territory of very powerful software like OBS though. Steep learning curve and all that.

gregfjohnson 7y ago

I've found OBS Studio to be brilliant. I needed to capture and livestream the screen of a small embedded Windows box. I purchased an HDMI-in/USB-out HD capture device. Plugged the HDMI side into the little Windows box, and the USB side into my linux box. OBS Studio recognized the new "HD Capture" virtual device, and captured the live video off the other system. I could save to a file, livestream, etc. No driver issues or problems. Just amazing.

LambdaB 7y ago

If you are looking for self-hosted desktop streaming with OBS via nginx and RTMP, you might find some insights in my recent blog post: https://bitkeks.eu/blog/2020/03/desktop-video-streaming-server-obs-studio-nginx-rtmp-hls-videojs.html https://bitkeks.eu/blog/2020/03/desktop-video-streaming-serv... The nginx module also supports DASH encoding, which can be delivered by dash.js - I have it in production, but not yet updated the article. Next I'll try setting up SRT.

alfg 7y ago
Also check out https://github.com/alfg/docker-nginx-rtmp https://github.com/alfg/docker-nginx-rtmp for a Docker setup with a template to output HLS.

jameshe 7y ago

I use OBS Studio with OBS-VirtualCam [0] to attend virtual lectures & hold meetings for my team. I've found it to be incredibly convenient because you can control nearly everything with scenes and the audio controls. Before meetings start, I can broadcast music and display announcements, and then without having to hit a jarring "End Screenshare" can switch to my webcam and start a meeting. Live demos and presentations are another scene with the desktop/window/browser and webcam. 100% would recommend. [0] https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam

aarongolliver 7y ago
how are you getting desktop audio (music or whatever) to get sent to your meetings? I didn't see how to expose the audio output from obs as a "microphone" or whatever to video conferencing software. I ended up hacking my setup together with voicemeeter but it's pretty sloppy and error prone.
- aantix 7y ago
  Loopback? https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
  - Seirdy 7y ago
    Pipewire [0] (the successor to PulseAudio) attempts to streamline this process for Linux. I've been messing with wf-recorder [1] for my screen+audio recordings, and might try to get it to spoof a camera input so I can get any program attempting to connect to the webcam to instead turn into a screen-casting tool. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire [1]: https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
- loa_in_ 7y ago
  JACK audio or ALSA monitor device
  - 7y ago

e8johan 7y ago

We just ran the entire foss-north conference virtually using OBS. Not a glitch during 4 days. I started documenting the setup here: https://github.com/e8johan/virtual-conf-resources https://github.com/e8johan/virtual-conf-resources .

gbea42d4 7y ago

This is a great app.

jonathankoren 7y ago

I have a topic adjacent question. If OBS is a good mixer, what’s a good open source video editor? Or can OBS do edit prerecorded files as well?

jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
I use Blender's, but requires knowledge of how things work.
mjbrusso 7y ago
I use Kdenlive in Linux (also runs in MacOS).

mrlala 7y ago

OBS is simple enough that my 6 year old can record minecraft videos with it and work out any little quirks.

gok 7y ago

I've been using OBS to run a trivia game over YouTube. It's kind of a piece of shit. The Mac port is horrible. None of the widgets work properly, all the menu items are in the wrong place, and it supports essentially no system keyboard shortcuts. Like cmd+F doesn't do "Find…", it randomly resizes the thing you're editing. It's everything bad about Qt apps in one place. It also ships with its own 180MB copy of Chromium embedded because, you know, how could anyone write a desktop app without a copy of Chrome these days? Simple things like doing a presentation of slides are unintuitive and kludgey at best, and sometimes impossible. There are features revealed in the UI that, after digging through the forums, you'll discover are actually unimplemented. The audio mixing is very lacking; there's no easy cough button and the levels indicator doesn't work properly. So does anyone know of any alternatives?

3JPLW 7y ago
I just use Quicktime. Open up a a new video recording, but don't start recording. The video recording window has an option to "float on top" — use that to put your video on your screen where you want it. Then you can either open up a new screen recording (for offline recordings) or just share your entire screen on your favorite conferencing platform. I also use desktop backgrounds smartly in conjunction with multiple spaces.
kfarr 7y ago
Yeah it's an amazing accomplishment from a video engineering perspective but a train wreck from a UI/UX perspective.
- celim307 7y ago
  Sounds like most open source apps
Proziam 7y ago
Have you tried Streamlabs OBS?
- Igelau 7y ago

romanovcode 7y ago

Is there anything like this that works with WinXP?

r1ch 7y ago

I'm one of the core contributors for OBS. Our website traffic has more than doubled over the last couple of weeks due to the COVID-19 situation - when we released the v25 update we accidentally killed our site due to a cache stampede after purging the CDN (oops). We're seeing all kinds of new uses, especially users who are integrating the OBS Virtualcam plugin to do presentations and other content sharing with apps that only support webcam input.

alpb 7y ago
Thanks for maintaining OBS! Any timelines for OBS Virtualcam to be available on macOS? It seems like several software like Snap Camera are integrating with users in this mode, OBS could be really helpful this way in webinars that don't happen over Twitch/YouTube.
- r1ch 7y ago
  We're hoping sooner than later thanks to Tobi's bounty on this. You can follow the design spec at https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15 if you're interested.
  - vanous 7y ago
    It is really awesome and fast development. I am hoping it ends up cross platform (Linux) and not only OSX specific.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  Woah, I was gonna ask if anyone knew when Display Capture was gonna be possible on macOS Catalina again, but when I opened OBS now, I see that it's actually possible in version 24.0.6 that I am running. Guess I must've overlooked it until now the last few times I looked for it, lol. Anyway. Does anyone have any recommendations for settings to use in order to avoid lots of frame dropping and OBS making other applications sluggish when I try to stream to Twitch? I'm using a MacBook Air Retina 2018 model with an external monitor connected to it.
- 7y ago

sorryitstrue 7y ago

One thing I wish you could do is have two different copies of an input - in my case, I wanted a video stream input (webcam) where I apply one set of filters to it for one scene, and a different set of filters to another scene. Seems like filters are globally applied to the instance, and you can't have two different scene elements with the same video input device.

fenrirthviti 7y ago
You can use groups to accomplish this currently, but it's not the most obvious thing. Just create two groups, and add the shared source to each group, then apply your filter to the group itself. Scene-specific filters and other scene-specific features is something that is on our to-do list, but very tricky at best.

megraf 7y ago

Your icon is very close to the BDSM icon! example: https://i.pinimg.com/236x/20/5e/5f/205e5fa719e6063ed5c3cfba881988bd--dom-pride-flag.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/236x/20/5e/5f/205e5fa719e6063ed5c3cfba8...

fenrirthviti 7y ago
It's a mitsudomoe, a common Japanese symbol. Jim picked it because he liked how it looked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoe
Krustopolis 7y ago
Wait, a sexual fetish has its own icon?
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Got a flag as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM#Symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM#Symbols

jventura 7y ago

I had to move my classes online, so I've been using OBS for recording videos (mainly me talking while I go over the slides ~ 15-20 minutes). The only thing I would like to see fixed on macOS would be that my students could see the mouse pointer. Beside that, I think it works quite well.

timClicks 7y ago

I'm curious how large the development team is. There is an impressive community around OBS but seems to be many more requests for help rather than helpers.

dodgepong 7y ago
There's one full-time developer, about 5-10 regular free-time developers, and about 5-10 free-time support helpers.

geerlingguy 7y ago

I've been using OBS for a couple months for live streams on YouTube (see https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/ansible-101-jeff-geerling-youtube-streaming-series https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/ansible-101-jeff-geer...), and I have had rock-solid reliability, using an external mic interface, an external camera (displayed PIP), and sharing one of two displays during some instructional sessions. One thing to keep in mind, though—unless you have a dedicated video card, and it's supported by OBS (the list of supported cards on macOS is very thin), your CPU has to do all the compositing and compression, meaning you need a lot of CPU to be able to manage the streaming. On my 2016 MacBook Pro 13", it barely has the horsepower to do a stream and also run processes that I'm explaining (e.g. manage some VMs, run some database operations, etc.). I had to turn down the compression method to 'ultrafast', which is lowest quality (but still pretty good with 1080p output), and I also use SwitchResX to set my shared display at 1080p 1x resolution (instead of 4K/2x resolution).

tessla 7y ago
have you ever thought about getting a PC?
- lostgame 7y ago
  If I was doing Logic Pro X tutorials, or XCode tutorials, this would be a non-option - which are the only kinds of tutorials I personally have enough knowledge and drive to create. PC is a non-option for a chunk of people in dev and media - I, for instance, do iOS dev for a living, and live by Logic Pro X for professional audio work. (I've been using Logic for about 15 years...) The amount of time it would take for me to transition, to, say Ardour - or the amount of my career that would be lost if I swapped from, say, iOS to...I'm not sure what the FOSS equivalent is...(Android doesn't count, obviously, because Google) I'd lose years and years of training, experience, and wisdom.
  - calebio 7y ago
    I think in that case you'd use a capture card on the PC and still continue to use your Mac.

strongbond 7y ago

I'd (seriously) like to see how it stacks up against Camtasia, which I've just discovered in my new job that I have no budget for.

noufalibrahim 7y ago

I don't use it for streaming but for recording screencasts and it does an excellent job there. I'm sure if I dig in a little, I'd find more features that would my videos better but even the default settings (on mac and Linux) work very well.

ktzar 7y ago

I tried this a while ago and didn't find the option, is midi supported to trigger scene changes, fadings, etc...?

xal 7y ago

I randomly learned OBS a while ago for doing some twitch streams in the evenings. I'm so glad I did. I run a 6,000 people company during the day and have OBS setup to push into Google Meet. I've done townhall with live on-screen Q/A voting, hosted podcast discussions, done PIP product reviews. I use its video record feature to react to figma prototypes and post the MP4s in the respective channel for discussion. OBS is an amazing tool and its worth learning. Even simple things like adding a compressor to an audio stream can make a huge difference to the quality. As one of our coaches recently said "Video quality is the new presence in 1:1s". On windows its reasonably easy to output OBS to a virtual camera for video conferencing software through a plugin. I've posted a bounty of $10k recently to make this a native feature and it's getting lots of traction. https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1242641154576965634 https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1242641154576965634 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15

Osiris 7y ago
Can you recommend any resources for learning OBS? My daughter wanted to record some videos of her playing a web-based game. I found the interface to OBS unintuitive. I managed to figure out how to capture a specific area on the desktop, but it was unexpectedly difficult to resize the output to match the input. I found some way of doing it that I can't remember. A few months later I had to do it again and that time I couldn't find the option to resize the output to match the input. I'd love to find some resources to help her learn how to setup OBS for recording or streaming.
- julianlam 7y ago
  Instead of streaming the entire desktop (or a portion of it), you'll actually want to set up the ["Game Capture" source](https://obsproject.com/wiki/Sources-Guide#game-capture https://obsproject.com/wiki/Sources-Guide#game-capture), and configure it to automatically attach to any fullscreen application. Then add an audio stream, and you're good to go.
- zahrc 7y ago

jononor 7y ago

Using OBS to record and stream interactive tutorials for customers, teaching machine learning for audio. Works super to use v4l2sink plugin for Linux to emulate a webcam and put it into any standard videochatting software. Thank you!

john_cogs 7y ago

Some of my teammates at GitLab are coordinating the Cloud Native Summit online event. They intend to use OBS + Zoom (and possibly Restream). If there are any resources you recommend for setting up OBS + Zoom + Restream for (mostly) Mac users, I'd love to share with the team. For context, the event will feature a mix of keynote and panel-style conversations.

poppabox 7y ago

Thank you so much for making this! Cheers to the devs.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

Even though OBS was initially aimed at streamers, it's also what I use to record all the YouTube videos I make for https://alchemist.camp https://alchemist.camp It's surprisingly flexible and there are plugins for almost everything. If you want to display keypresses, you can. If you want to add a layer and have both your video camera and screen incorporated, you can. If you want a layer to show keypresses, like I did when recording a video on VIM, you can do that, too.

StavrosK 7y ago
By the way, if you want to pre-record keystrokes for demos/presentations/etc and still make it look like you're live-typing, I made a thing: https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Thanks, but I like to just type and talk as I go.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

Is this a brand new service or did they release recently because of COVID? Never heard of them before. I have been searching for open source projects to help bring my local yoga studio online for the past few weeks and this looks promising!

fralewsmi 7y ago
OBS has dominated the livestreaming working for a while now (e.g Twitch)
blattimwind 7y ago
This isn't a service, but good old-fashioned desktop software.

jpdb 7y ago

I have interacted with the guy that started OBS a few times because he's a member of a community I am in. He's an extremely intelligent person and definitely deserves some positive attention. If you use OBS and find value in it you should definitely consider donating, I know it goes a long way.

asutekku 7y ago

I try to love OBS but even the simplest thing (sharing a portion of your screen) requires tons of fiddling to get it work (you need to get the right area with sliders instead of just drawing it on the screen). I guess it’s once again the same old story. In theory, it is a wonderful piece of open source software, but because of the lack of competent designers in the OSS-scene, the UX is awful for casual and first-time users. For pro-users, however, it is perfect.

fenrirthviti 7y ago
You can hold alt+drag the red bounding box to crop easily. Screen-region select is on our to-do list, but hasn't been a high priority as it's technically already possible to get the same end result, just not as simple.

zelphirkalt 7y ago

I must say, I had a rather mixed experience with OBS. I've used it before to do some streaming too, but it definitely has some issues with instability. The example (anecdote, if you will) I remember right now: There is apparently a way to mess up your settings, so that OBS crashes. No error or anything in the UI visible. But then your config is messed up, so when you restart it, it immediately crashes again. You cannot fix it, unless you delete the settings files or reinstall the application. It should not be possible to ever reach a situation, where you can make an application crash, by only accessing the settings it provides. It should warn about invalid settings or disable settings, which cannot be used, because of settings or reset the settings to something valid or ... But in OBS it's possible to basically mess up the whole application using its own settings UI.

ko3us 7y ago

OBS is awesome and it’s helped with my company to grow. We build plugins and overlays for OBS to make it super easy for streamers to reward their audience. Shameless plug check out get.incent.com/Ingage and get free reward overlays. I think the community effort to grow OBS has been awesome.

movedx 7y ago

Love OBS. I have a Sony A6000 going into it via a Elgato HD60 S. A Rode NT-USB microphone and a green screen my brother made me (big, solid, wooden... it's awesome.) OBS has enabled me to create super high quality training videos and also provide excellent remote working video conferencing capabilities. I can basically do remote pair programming with this thing... it's amazing.

jgrauman 7y ago

I love OBS, just started using it a couple weeks ago. I am using the v4l2loopback plugin on Linux to output the video to Zoom. Is there a way for it to output the sound similarly to be used as an input in Zoom for Linux? I'm using a blackmagic decklink mini recorder as input, and Zoom won't accept it as a mic, but OBS does. I've tried a bunch of hacks with pavucontrol, but nothing will let me accept the OBS output as an input into Zoom. Does anyone have any ideas?

jgrauman 7y ago
Nevermind, this fixes it from elsewhere in the thread. Thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754216

sireat 7y ago

Big fan of OBS! I've been using OBS to stream to Youtube and record locally at the same time. It's been over 400 videos now ever since Google Hangouts killed Youtube integration last August. Why did Google kill integration between their properties, who knows? (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-is-killing-youtubes-hangouts-on-air-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-is-killing-yo...) With OBS streaming is dead simple just enter your Youtube API key and off you go. If you are on a laptop with integrated AND discrete video cards there can be some issues with OBS recognizing the correct GPU.

notsgnik 7y ago

Can't manage to record my desktop, only get a black screen instead. Can't manage to find a fix, even 3 years latter while not being the only one... I know it's free... Still, to me, after couple years of sponsorship it should have fixed itself... (specially with hardware as common as mine.)

r1ch 7y ago
This is a common problem with laptops due to the multi-GPU power saving setup most laptops have, we have a thread at https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/laptop-black-screen-when-capturing-read-here-first.5965/ https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/laptop-black-screen-whe... which explains how to fix it.

puggo 7y ago

This is old software, old news. Why is it here?

manfouchi 7y ago

This company is currently looking for members who want to sell their photography picturesMoney-mouth faceCamera with flash, would you be interested? If you’re interested send message to this email for more information: Photojobz12@gmail.com

hkiely 7y ago

How does this encode the video?

lucastech 7y ago

OBS is great! Huge thanks to everyone who's maintained it over the years. As a side note, I'm trying to figure out how to do live streaming with less intense CPU requirements. My use case is effectively trying to use a Macbook Air to stream high quality video (720p, 30fps). Is there any way I could stream the video raw and encode it on a VPS somewhere? Or is there just a very real hurdle of needing a beefy CPU for any live streaming? I've looked at WebRTC a bit, but can't seem to find much in terms of how to broadcast it in a 1 to many (like Twitch, Vimeo, etc) when using WebRTC. Mux.com at least allows you to do that if you have an RTMP source stream, but I can only find web based libraries that require Flash to stream. Is there some HTML5 camera broadcasting solution that I'm missing? Some kind of VPS software for turning WebRTC into RTMP? I'd appreciate any direction I can get on this! Thanks

mmcclure 7y ago
I'm actually working on a blog post on the state of streaming live from a browser! WebRTC is...a bit of a monster, especially if you want to broadcast one-to-many. I've been hacking around with using the MediaRecorder API and piping that through WebSockets to a server that publishes via RTMP. It's definitely rough, and browsers de-prioritizing requestAnimationFrame callbacks when the tab isn't in focus kills things, but it's promising. It runs shockingly well on a Glitch instance for what that's worth. You need a Mux (https://mux.com https://mux.com) stream key for the demo, but you could quickly edit it to use any RTMP URL: https://mmcc-next-streamr.glitch.me/ https://mmcc-next-streamr.glitch.me/

jscheel 7y ago

I absolutely love OBS, and use it consistently three times a week for streaming my church’s worship services. It’s an amazing tool, and I’m really thankful for it. That said, if you want to stream on macOS, be ready for some friction. I believe they are working on some issues with updating to metal, which should help quite a bit. Right now, studio mode will drop your FPS by half because OBS doesn’t disable v-sync properly, and window capture is really buggy. If you are wanting to commit to streaming, you may have better luck on a pc right now.

brobot182 7y ago

I don’t get it. OBS has been around for years, why was this link even mentioned? Why so many upvotes?

zamadatix 7y ago

Only thing I've liked more is vMix but that costs quite a bit.

voicedYoda 7y ago

No joke, i was working with colleagues just yesterday on real time closed captioning, and started googling for a few ideas for Google's cloud speech recognition API. OBS was the first few hits, so i started learning all about this amazing tool just yesterday.

pontifier 7y ago

I started using it about 2 months ago, and I've got to say it's quite amazing. It was much easier to start than I expected. Like copy and paste a code, then one button to start streaming on twitch. Creating multiple views, and adding cameras was also very easy and intuitive. It's one of the best pieces of software I've used in a long time.

JeremyNT 7y ago

OBS is amazing. I've used it to record canned demos and presentations for a year or so now, and it just works great on Linux. I even use it to record demos of a wip or partially working feature that I'm working on and attach the video to issues in our gitlab instance to request feedback from stakeholders. Its feature list is really impressive, but it's great for this kind of simple use case too. Be sure to give it a try and many thanks to the maintainers!

suyash 7y ago

Any tips on how to integrate OBS with Zoom Presentations and make use of OBS features?

Tepix 7y ago

Related: The NDI HX camera app for iOS is currently free (instead of 22€) - with the OBS NDI plugin you can use your iPhone or iPad as a low-latency webcam for OBS. https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ndi-hx-camera/id1477266080 https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ndi-hx-camera/id1477266080