17 ms·

OBS Studio 26.0

382 points by haunter 6y ago

1_player 6y ago
Just noticed that the OBS project makes about 2.5k per month on Patreon. That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch and the most of the YouTube scene uses it to record and stream their videos, and they tend to use and recommend Patreon to their own viewers. They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear.
- sarasasa28 6y ago
  If I was OBS owner I would totally charge for it, don't even quote me
  - choward 6y ago
    This is a good example of why I like open source. If someone decides to pull a move like that it can be forked and the project can live on.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      That mostly works if the owner isn't also the person doing most of the work on the project.
      - choward 6y ago
        Even then though, you can continue to keep using it as is and not have to worry about them doing some shady updates now that they sold out.
        akerl_ 6y ago
        I feel compelled to point out that selling software isn’t “selling out”.
        Shared404 6y ago
        Indeed. And there's nothing wrong with charging for FL/OSS.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        More to the point, it only works if the owner isn't the only person who is willing and able to maintain the project. Open licensing lets you maintain your own fork, but it doesn't by itself grant you the drive, general skill, and project-specific knowledge to do so.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    One of the reasons why OBS got so popular compared to Xsplit is that it is free.
    - MaysonL 6y ago
      Interesting – Xsplit is reported as a $20K sponsor on the website: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget (Scroll down to see the list of contributors.)
      - captn3m0 6y ago
        No better publicity than on your competitor’s website?
      - H4ndy 6y ago
        The OBS team has a very friendly relationship with XSplit folks, they're nice people and strive for a better product for all users.
    - dancemethis 6y ago
      Well, yes, it's Free Software, but at this quality level it is be totally fine to sell the ready-to-run binary at a cost.
- pityJuke 6y ago
  Twitch and YouTube sponsor OBS as well. The tier below them has a minimum of $50k per year, so they probably pay a lot. Check the OpenCollective as well. https://obsproject.com/contribute https://obsproject.com/contribute
  - ihuman 6y ago
    Do you mean Twitch and Facebook? I don't see YouTube on that page
- alexashka 6y ago
  I don't know - I'm really surprised that anyone is willing to do the incremental work necessary to keep projects like these going, for free. I guess there are people far better than I on this earth and that's excellent news if you ask me :)
- dewey 6y ago
  I think Patreon is just for the main guy (Jim), but the project itself is also receiving funds separately: https://opencollective.com/obsproject/contribute https://opencollective.com/obsproject/contribute
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I think you left off the bit that shows the contributors. Here's the budget and contributors: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget Another comment mentioned Facebook and Twitch contribute elsewhere. Of course, it seems very widely used, so the point that it's under funded stands.
    - MaysonL 6y ago
      According to their website[0] their current balance is $97,012.47 USD, and their annual budget is ~ $47,327.66 USD, so they're probably not too badly unerfunded. [0] https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget
      - tyingq 6y ago
        Good find! It's pretty clear that the value provided exceeds the value provided.
      - skinnymuch 6y ago
        That budget appears to mean no one is getting paid for OBS. The project is huge so likely a lot of hours are committed to it.
        kbenson 6y ago
        Or no one is getting paid full time. That might be a good thing for a project like this. A full time employee might bring with it some perverse incentives (if it reaches a state where the community isn't clamoring for a full year's worth an an engineer's time, what happens to that engineer when the work is gone, or what if they find things that aren't needed to justify more work?) If their current balance is over two years worth of their annual budget and the users are happy with the project and how its progressing, I'm happy to think they're in a good place until I hear evidence to convince me otherwise.
- jpdb 6y ago
  I interact with Jim (obs creator) pretty regularly and he definitely deserves the support. Dude is extremely talented and kind. He puts an insane amount of effort into OBS.
  - hashtagmarkup 6y ago
    It really shows. I just switched back to Windows after 10 years of macs, and OBS was a driving factor. Can't believe how powerful and easy to use it is. I ran my high school's analog TV studio 25 years ago, and we ran a live news broadcast everyday for the lunch room. Effects that took half a room of gear and thousands of watts of power are all a few clicks and sliders away.
    - codetrotter 6y ago
      > OBS was a driving factor Why? OBS runs on macOS too
      - abstrct 6y ago
        It runs horribly on macOS. Like a night and day difference. If I understand correctly the difference is primarily regarding the encoder. I also switched my streaming machine over to windows recently. Edit: ok, “horrible” is dramatic, but it was honestly shocking the first time I booted into windows and gave OBS a try there. Exact same computer that struggled with OBS in macOS produced a much better output without breaking a sweat.
        wastedhours 6y ago
        Using Boot Camp or a Hackintosh to be able to do that on the same computer? Might help to make the distinction between it overperforming via Boot Camp or underperforming on a Hackintosh.
        abstrct 6y ago
        Over-performing via Bootcamp. The machine is a fairly new Mac Mini.
- concernedctzn 6y ago
  Pretty interesting how streamlabs managed to capitalize off OBS
- taurath 6y ago
  I know of adult games making orders of magnitude more :(
- gitgud 6y ago
  > "They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear." Well it's an open-source project right? Anyone can pick up where they left off. Side note: Has an abandoned project of this size ever been forked and continued by another team?
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Gogs -> Gitea?
    - TheDong 6y ago
      Gogs was a relatively small codebase, and it had a single maintainer before, not a team.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    OpenOffice maybe.
    - geofft 6y ago
      I thought LibreOffice has (approximately) continuity of maintainership with the OOo team, which itself had continuity of maintainership with the StarOffice team. Apache OpenOffice is moribund and has never really regained active development, despite being the official successor according to Oracle corporate.
- edoceo 6y ago
  I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. Just got 26 installed on my Gentoo box, seamless upgrade. I've only been a user for a short, short time but it's amazing.
  - RobotCaleb 6y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't understand how to parse your first sentence
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Excuse me, I speak Jive. I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. = I am about to increase that amount by $100 per month.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        Surely, it's a rare occurrence to hear that reference from Airplane!.
        bjornstar 6y ago
        Don't call me Shirley
        MR4D 6y ago
        Roger, Rodger.
      - xen2xen1 6y ago
        Excellent Airplane reference.
    - lwhsiao 6y ago
      He's saying he is about to up (or increase) that by $100/mo.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- InitEnabler 6y ago
  I think I remember two big streamers Destiny and HasanPiker donated a combined 4k or 5k to the project last year on stream. Really wish streamers would know that these are open source projects where their only source of income is from donations.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  > That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch Do they? I heard XSplit was used by bigger streamers?
sitzkrieg 6y ago
virtual camera will be fun to abuse
- mikece 6y ago
  I wonder if it can take one person's video feed from MS Teams and use that as an input... which is the background subbed in via green-screen. And then re-injected into an MS Teams call via virtual camera.
- anonymfus 6y ago
  The plugin with similar functionality called OBS Virtual Camera is quite old, I use it since end of March for Zoom improv and I noticed that many other improvisers do too.
2bitencryption 6y ago
An amazing piece of open-source software. My colleagues keep spawning Teams meetings just to record their screens; meanwhile, I can open OBS, add a screen recording element, resize it however I like, set the bitrate, encoding type, resolution, scaling, and record beautiful 60fps demos. And that's literally the simplest scenario. The amount of stuff you can do with video compositing in this tool is insane.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  And it has been capable of doing this for several years. People just didn't know about it. It's truly a nice piece of software!
Swizec 6y ago
All I want is for NVENC to work on MacOS. If I’m reading this correctly, we remain shit out if luck. My laptop comes with a beefy GPU (top line 16” mbp) and OBS can’t use any of it. Even the on-board Intel GPU is wonky
- minimaxir 6y ago
  NVENC only works on recent NVidia GPUs (it's in the hardware itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC ), and there haven't been any recent NVidia GPUs that are (officially) supported by macOS. You can technically use the Mac GPU by selecting a Video Toolbox encoder, but quality varies. FWIW, I can steam 1080p60 without too much CPU overhead (~20%) on my iMac 2020 using libx264.
  - patmorgan23 6y ago
    Well 'recent' is since 2012, which I suspect the vast majority of Nvidia gpus out there are newer than that.
  - lathiat 6y ago
    Right and the 16" MacBook Pro has an AMD Radeon Pro GPU. So NVENC is not going to work. AMD has an equivalent "Video Coding Engine" (VCE) which is supported through "Video Toolbox" (an apple API) as mentioned by another commentor although there is some talk of the quality not being as high no idea how relevant that is the current AMD cards in the MacBook Pro 16".
    - Aerroon 6y ago
      Quality not being as high mostly means that you have to bump up the bitrate. For local recording it'll produce larger files and for streaming it'll require a better connection (if the streaming site allows higher bitrate). That still makes it very much usable though.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  I wonder if that would require Nvidia webdrivers to be un-discontinued?
anonymousab 6y ago
OBS is such a great tool. It does its job in a clear and specific manner, and exposes as many levers as you need in the controls. The plugin system seems a bit unrefined though, I think it could be a major win if it was somewhat more accessible. Platform-specific stuff kinda sucks but it's the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, at some point they seemed to have removed support for the AMD encoder used with my old GPU, so I can't enjoy the recent software updates until I update my hardware.
- H4ndy 6y ago
  Some kind of plugin manager/installer is certainly something that will get added to OBS, probably sooner than later. The AMD AMF encoder is still preset in OBS, it just requires somewhat recent GPU drivers to work (19.7.1 minimum, 19.9.2 or newer recommended)
unnouinceput 6y ago
I don't get it. Why in newer versions of OBS Game Capture is not working for some games, while older version of OBS works without a problem. Same system, same game, OBS version 0.659 (that I have it for like ~2 years) captures games and newer OBS versions all fail. For this purpose I have to keep around this old version while for all other stuff I have the latest and greatest. Is it some DRM problem? Because otherwise I can't explain it.
- r1ch 6y ago
  OBS 0.659 is "Classic" OBS which has been discontinued for years. If you're having issues capturing games with OBS Studio, stop by our forums or Discord with a log and we may be able to help. If the game uses any kind of anti-cheat engine, it's possible the developer only whitelisted older capture DLLs but this is rare.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    There is no log. OBS "captures" but the image is black while the game sound is there. One common attribute I found for all these games are that they are "true full screen". One example is "Tomb Raider", the series reboot from 2013. OBS 0.659 has no problem capturing my gameplay, while newer versions gives, like I said, black screen on recording. Quick question if you indulge me: Why was classic discontinued?
    - fenrirthviti 6y ago
      OBS Studio is a full rewrite of OBS, and the old version was renamed to Classic to avoid confusion. It's been deprecated for many years now, and is no longer maintained. There is no real reason to use it anymore. If I had to guess the issue here, you're on a laptop with two GPUs and OBS Studio is running on a different GPU than OBS Classic is, which is why you're running in to issues. We'd need a log file to know for sure, but it's likely a simple fix (which you can stop by our Discord or forums with and we can take a closer look, feel free to ping me @fenrir in either location). If you'd rather do your own testing, here's a starting point for my guess as to the issue: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Laptop-GPU-Selection-Windows-10 https://obsproject.com/wiki/Laptop-GPU-Selection-Windows-10
guerrilla 6y ago
> The VLC source’s playlist property can now be reordered by dragging and dropping items within it [cg2121] Finally. With big lists, this was one of the most painful and tedius things to do on a computer. Too bad it still can't reset its stream to YouTube on its own after the overzealous AI disconnects you for nothing.
phkahler 6y ago
Still want 2 things for OBS: 1) built in Equalizer 2) wayland support - this is dependent on other projects too, I use Gnome which doesnt allow screen capture yet.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  While OBS doesn't have a built in equalizer you can use plugins quite successfully. Reaper's plugins [0] work seamlessly with OBS. [0] https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/ https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
- Jnr 6y ago
  There is a way to capture Wayland https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 I'm hoping this eventually gets merged in. This would not only allow capturing Wayland, but also capturing games without affecting the performance too much (similarly to Shadowplay on Windows).
  - fenrirthviti 6y ago
    We'd like to merge it as well, but it's still very much a work in progress, and there's some major hurdles with both Wayland itself and Qt that need to be addressed first.
jjcm 6y ago
I'll be very interested to see what happens to OBS now that Nvidia is directly competing with them with Nvidia Broadcast: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-broadcast-app/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-broadcast-a... While it's community supported (though only at 2.5k/mo) I highly suspect that NB is going to outperform OBS in the coming years, just given the market Nvidia is trying to capture. Most youtubers / streamers don't need the full configuration capabilities of OBS, but rather just want something that works out of the box with the basic nice to haves (overlays, noise cancellation, basic text compositing / donation integrations).
- gruez 6y ago
  Isn't nvidia broadcast just some tools that plug into your existing streaming software? >NVIDIA Broadcast is a universal plugin that works with most popular live streaming, voice chat and video conferencing apps. It’s supported on any NVIDIA GeForce RTX, TITAN RTX or Quadro RTX GPU, using their dedicated Tensor Core AI processors to help the app’s AI networks run in real-time, right alongside your games.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Can't you describe any software as 'just some tools'? If the tools do what you want and achieve the same things as OBS then isn't that what you want?
  - jjcm 6y ago
    It's a bit of both. It can configure itself to be a virtual camera (similar to OBS), which could then be consumed by OBS. It also has built in features for directly streaming to twitch/youtube/etc and skipping OBS entirely. Likely an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy on their part.
    - Warchamp7 6y ago
      > It also has built in features for directly streaming to twitch/youtube/etc and skipping OBS entirely. This is not true lol
filmgirlcw 6y ago
This is one of the few projects I support on Patreon and Jim is fantastic. The amount of work that goes into this software is really incredible.
worldmerge 6y ago
If you haven't just used OBS you definitely should check it out. It's an incredible piece of software. I can screen cap multiple browsers and get a webcam feed and be at ~4% CPU usage. To put that in perspective I just made an app with OpenFrameworks (C++) that just gets my camera and it uses ~6% of my CPU. OBS is amazing.
- deathtrader666 6y ago
  As a counter anecdote - my 2015 MacBook Pro stutters within 30-40 seconds of OBS streaming a 1080p feed to YouTube. Is there anything to tweak? Or is my machine too old?
  - bsder 6y ago
    Sorry, you probably need a "real" video card for video encode. I really tried to make OBS work at 1080p on my 2015 MacBook Pro, but just about anything (even a simple flip the webcam output) causes my fan to spin to maximum and eventually the video lags behind. The best thing I could do was get something like the Avaya HC020 Webcam. It does a lot of things like zoom, flip, color balance, etc. all in the camera so you're processing as little as possible. At that point, I think I got 720p reliable, but not 1080p. However, my fan was still going full blast. Eventually, I just gave up and built a Windows 10 desktop machine solely for video. It works great and I don't have a jet engine powering up next to my face when I do video.
  - worldmerge 6y ago
    Not sure, you may want to drop to 720p and maybe lower your bitrate. For my latest project I was using a Macbook pro 2015 to test it, running my app and streaming at the same time fine. I was running Windows 10 though on the mac. If you're running Mac OS try using a utility like SMC Fan Control to set the fan RPM high. Mac OS by default wants to be as silent as possible which could be leading to some performance issues. I'm very new to streaming so take what I say with a grain of salt.
    - imtringued 6y ago
dang 6y ago
If curious see also a big thread from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748247
non-entity 6y ago
Jxovkjqjfh
corytheboyd 6y ago
Love me some OBS, I use it for piano practice with my tutor. Simultaneous video feeds (face, hands) and window capture of VMPK mirroring the MIDI out of my digital piano piped into a virtual camera, then VBcable pipes the OBS monitor audio to an input source. Put those two together as the audio and recording devices in zoom and were off! If there is interest I’d love to write more about it and share, let me know!
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  One day they will figure out how to implement undo without impacting performance too much :p
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Could you ask someone to make a video of you while you are using this setup? Like a friend/family member in your room holding a phone? I would like to show an older piano teacher this setup.
- lozf 6y ago
  > If there is interest I’d love to write more about it and share, let me know! Please do, that sounds awesome! I'd love to read more - but also seconding the request for a short video overview.
dmerrick 6y ago
Does anyone have suggestions for running OBS in the cloud? I have a project that is designed to run 24/7 and it would be really nice if I could use a cloud server instead of a computer on my home network. I have it all set up... OBS in Docker with k8s templates. Just need to find an affordable online option.
- numlock86 6y ago
  Depending on what you stream or trying to achieve, just get a Windows/Linux VPS and set up everything via RDP/VNC like you would on your own box. That's what I did for a "twitch plays" channel that was up for about a year.
- H4ndy 6y ago
  While OBS will run virtualized, you will get a massive performance hit if no GPU is available and everything is done in software rendering. And GPU-enabled cloud servers are quite expensive.
  - dmerrick 6y ago
    This has indeed been my experience. It seems to be one of those uncommon situations where a physical server is more desirable than a cloud server.
Jnr 6y ago
I particularly enjoy that they added Mozilla's RNNoise library for AI noise suppression. It is not as good as Nvidia's RTX Voice but it does the job. This is very helpful to get some noisy microphones to behave nicely.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  Or buy a $5 headset from your local gas station, so the microphone is close to the mouth and doesn't pick up the speaker...
  - Jnr 6y ago
    That is not always preferable, especially in front of an audience. We have some cheap lavalier mic and with this noise suppression it sounds great. The problem was not with picking up the speaker, it was with the noise of the microphone.
xvilka 6y ago
The biggest problem - it doesn't work[1][2] with Wayland. So, for example, with Fedora 32 default installation it is impossible to make it record either whole screen or just a selected window. [1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471 [2] https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/14 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/14
- dannyobrien 6y ago
  I've used https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs without a problem, but it's true that it doesn't work out of the box.
NamTaf 6y ago
I have used obs.ninja [1] to pipe phone camera feeds as video inputs to OBS. I then use the virtual cam plugin to make that my webcam feed. This works great, but what I'd also love to do is take the audio from the phone mic as a browser input and use it as a virtual microphone. I've only been successful by using a VBCable pipe and setting the monitoring device, but what that ends up doing is also playing all of the sound OBS is capturing from my phone into my headphones too, so I get my own voice. If I mute OBS, the monitoring doesn't work, and so I get no audio. If I capture the audio completely outside OBS with another mic, everything's out-of-sync and I don't have portable audio. This is so close to a seamless way to turn any phone into a portable webcam with mic, but I haven't figured out that last little piece of the puzzle. However, I wanted to 1) shout out OBS for being such an incredible piece of software, and 2) shout out obs.ninja for what it does. Seriously impressive. [1]: https://obs.ninja/ https://obs.ninja/
- breather 6y ago
  I was once where you are now. This completes the puzzle: https://github.com/toadjaune/pulseaudio-config https://github.com/toadjaune/pulseaudio-config Thank me later ;)
  - NamTaf 6y ago
    No, I think I shall thank you right now if it's all the same to you! I'm trying to do this on a Windows box so PA doesn't specifically work, but after a cursory glance over this page I think I can take this concept and work out how to map it to a Windows implementation with a bit of fiddling.
    - ikiris 6y ago
      virtual audio jack
- thesandlord 6y ago
  Have you tried DroidCam? https://www.dev47apps.com/ https://www.dev47apps.com/ Maps your phone to a virtual webcam, works over WiFi or USB
mattanimation 6y ago
nice, they added RNNoise
temptemptemp111 6y ago
No mentions of "live stream" in the comments or document? Strange... Other platforms need live streaming, user/admin accounts, and "super chats"!
jedimastert 6y ago
I play piano and sing. When I wanted to start streaming, I went from opening OBS for the first time to having a livestream to youtube, complete with audio from my interface synced to my webcam, in about 5 minutes. Just and incredible piece of software. I'm gonna drop a few bucks Everytime I stream now. Also, shout out to obs.ninja, which let me cast my chromebook to the stream for my little jazz theory lecture/ramblings. Also also, shameless self-promotion time: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4fu3juqIttf7z_UbRRaILsAKn-oL-r7U https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4fu3juqIttf7z_UbRRaI...
NiekvdMaas 6y ago
OBS is an amazing piece of software. When the Streamlabs OBS fork came out, many people switched - but the original OBS keeps improving. If you're looking to control OBS through a web interface (e.g. to switch scenes from a phone/tablet), see my project https://github.com/Niek/obs-web https://github.com/Niek/obs-web
- numlock86 6y ago
  I've tried SLOBS many times. Like every now and then, months apart. Actually, just this weekend again. Usually only takes me about an hour to go back to OBS ... I am not even entirely sure why I keep looking into it. Probably subconsciously I am looking for something that justifies electron and the horrible UI.
saos 6y ago
Finally!
AI_WAIFU 6y ago
OBS is great, very intuitive to use and really lowers the barrier to entry for streaming.
brendt_gd 6y ago
Still no support for my audio interface over USB… You can add it, but no signal comes true. I know about virtual audio routing, but I'm so sad this bug hasn't been fixed after years…
- H4ndy 6y ago
  Your device must support one of the common audio protocols to work in OBS (for Windows WASAPI for example). There's also an ASIO plugin available. OBS will probably not add any specific code to support non-conforming device(s) without an external maintainer willing to keep the needed code updated over the years.
wiradikusuma 6y ago
> Windows: Added Virtual Camera There's already a plugin for that and I've been using it for a while. I use it to combine my webcam with my desktop so that I can watch YouTube together with my family while still looking at each other's face.
jjice 6y ago
8 years ago when I was a kid and I tried to record Minecraft videos, the options for screen capture where awful. The best option at the time seemed to be Fraps. I don't remember when OBS began to take off in the community, but I couldn't be happier. It's an incredible piece of software that is so powerful and very user friendly. Quality is killer too.
osmyn 6y ago
Here's a neat use of OBS by Scott Hanselman for PowerPoint presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciNcxi2bPwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciNcxi2bPwM

382 points by haunter 6y ago

Just noticed that the OBS project makes about 2.5k per month on Patreon. That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch and the most of the YouTube scene uses it to record and stream their videos, and they tend to use and recommend Patreon to their own viewers. They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear.

sarasasa28 6y ago
If I was OBS owner I would totally charge for it, don't even quote me
- choward 6y ago
  This is a good example of why I like open source. If someone decides to pull a move like that it can be forked and the project can live on.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That mostly works if the owner isn't also the person doing most of the work on the project.
    - choward 6y ago
      Even then though, you can continue to keep using it as is and not have to worry about them doing some shady updates now that they sold out.
      - akerl_ 6y ago
        I feel compelled to point out that selling software isn’t “selling out”.
        Shared404 6y ago
        Indeed. And there's nothing wrong with charging for FL/OSS.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      More to the point, it only works if the owner isn't the only person who is willing and able to maintain the project. Open licensing lets you maintain your own fork, but it doesn't by itself grant you the drive, general skill, and project-specific knowledge to do so.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  One of the reasons why OBS got so popular compared to Xsplit is that it is free.
  - MaysonL 6y ago
    Interesting – Xsplit is reported as a $20K sponsor on the website: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget (Scroll down to see the list of contributors.)
    - captn3m0 6y ago
      No better publicity than on your competitor’s website?
    - H4ndy 6y ago
      The OBS team has a very friendly relationship with XSplit folks, they're nice people and strive for a better product for all users.
  - dancemethis 6y ago
    Well, yes, it's Free Software, but at this quality level it is be totally fine to sell the ready-to-run binary at a cost.
pityJuke 6y ago
Twitch and YouTube sponsor OBS as well. The tier below them has a minimum of $50k per year, so they probably pay a lot. Check the OpenCollective as well. https://obsproject.com/contribute https://obsproject.com/contribute
- ihuman 6y ago
  Do you mean Twitch and Facebook? I don't see YouTube on that page
alexashka 6y ago
I don't know - I'm really surprised that anyone is willing to do the incremental work necessary to keep projects like these going, for free. I guess there are people far better than I on this earth and that's excellent news if you ask me :)
dewey 6y ago
I think Patreon is just for the main guy (Jim), but the project itself is also receiving funds separately: https://opencollective.com/obsproject/contribute https://opencollective.com/obsproject/contribute
- tyingq 6y ago
  I think you left off the bit that shows the contributors. Here's the budget and contributors: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget Another comment mentioned Facebook and Twitch contribute elsewhere. Of course, it seems very widely used, so the point that it's under funded stands.
  - MaysonL 6y ago
    According to their website[0] their current balance is $97,012.47 USD, and their annual budget is ~ $47,327.66 USD, so they're probably not too badly unerfunded. [0] https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Good find! It's pretty clear that the value provided exceeds the value provided.
    - skinnymuch 6y ago
      That budget appears to mean no one is getting paid for OBS. The project is huge so likely a lot of hours are committed to it.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        Or no one is getting paid full time. That might be a good thing for a project like this. A full time employee might bring with it some perverse incentives (if it reaches a state where the community isn't clamoring for a full year's worth an an engineer's time, what happens to that engineer when the work is gone, or what if they find things that aren't needed to justify more work?) If their current balance is over two years worth of their annual budget and the users are happy with the project and how its progressing, I'm happy to think they're in a good place until I hear evidence to convince me otherwise.
jpdb 6y ago
I interact with Jim (obs creator) pretty regularly and he definitely deserves the support. Dude is extremely talented and kind. He puts an insane amount of effort into OBS.
- hashtagmarkup 6y ago
  It really shows. I just switched back to Windows after 10 years of macs, and OBS was a driving factor. Can't believe how powerful and easy to use it is. I ran my high school's analog TV studio 25 years ago, and we ran a live news broadcast everyday for the lunch room. Effects that took half a room of gear and thousands of watts of power are all a few clicks and sliders away.
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    > OBS was a driving factor Why? OBS runs on macOS too
    - abstrct 6y ago
      It runs horribly on macOS. Like a night and day difference. If I understand correctly the difference is primarily regarding the encoder. I also switched my streaming machine over to windows recently. Edit: ok, “horrible” is dramatic, but it was honestly shocking the first time I booted into windows and gave OBS a try there. Exact same computer that struggled with OBS in macOS produced a much better output without breaking a sweat.
      - wastedhours 6y ago
        Using Boot Camp or a Hackintosh to be able to do that on the same computer? Might help to make the distinction between it overperforming via Boot Camp or underperforming on a Hackintosh.
        abstrct 6y ago
        Over-performing via Bootcamp. The machine is a fairly new Mac Mini.
concernedctzn 6y ago
Pretty interesting how streamlabs managed to capitalize off OBS
taurath 6y ago
I know of adult games making orders of magnitude more :(
gitgud 6y ago
> "They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear." Well it's an open-source project right? Anyone can pick up where they left off. Side note: Has an abandoned project of this size ever been forked and continued by another team?
- closeparen 6y ago
  Gogs -> Gitea?
  - TheDong 6y ago
    Gogs was a relatively small codebase, and it had a single maintainer before, not a team.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  OpenOffice maybe.
  - geofft 6y ago
    I thought LibreOffice has (approximately) continuity of maintainership with the OOo team, which itself had continuity of maintainership with the StarOffice team. Apache OpenOffice is moribund and has never really regained active development, despite being the official successor according to Oracle corporate.
edoceo 6y ago
I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. Just got 26 installed on my Gentoo box, seamless upgrade. I've only been a user for a short, short time but it's amazing.
- RobotCaleb 6y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't understand how to parse your first sentence
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Excuse me, I speak Jive. I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. = I am about to increase that amount by $100 per month.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Surely, it's a rare occurrence to hear that reference from Airplane!.
      - bjornstar 6y ago
        Don't call me Shirley
        MR4D 6y ago
        Roger, Rodger.
    - xen2xen1 6y ago
      Excellent Airplane reference.
  - lwhsiao 6y ago
    He's saying he is about to up (or increase) that by $100/mo.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
InitEnabler 6y ago
I think I remember two big streamers Destiny and HasanPiker donated a combined 4k or 5k to the project last year on stream. Really wish streamers would know that these are open source projects where their only source of income is from donations.
Semaphor 6y ago
> That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch Do they? I heard XSplit was used by bigger streamers?

sitzkrieg 6y ago

virtual camera will be fun to abuse

mikece 6y ago
I wonder if it can take one person's video feed from MS Teams and use that as an input... which is the background subbed in via green-screen. And then re-injected into an MS Teams call via virtual camera.
anonymfus 6y ago
The plugin with similar functionality called OBS Virtual Camera is quite old, I use it since end of March for Zoom improv and I noticed that many other improvisers do too.

2bitencryption 6y ago

An amazing piece of open-source software. My colleagues keep spawning Teams meetings just to record their screens; meanwhile, I can open OBS, add a screen recording element, resize it however I like, set the bitrate, encoding type, resolution, scaling, and record beautiful 60fps demos. And that's literally the simplest scenario. The amount of stuff you can do with video compositing in this tool is insane.

Aerroon 6y ago
And it has been capable of doing this for several years. People just didn't know about it. It's truly a nice piece of software!

Swizec 6y ago

All I want is for NVENC to work on MacOS. If I’m reading this correctly, we remain shit out if luck. My laptop comes with a beefy GPU (top line 16” mbp) and OBS can’t use any of it. Even the on-board Intel GPU is wonky

minimaxir 6y ago
NVENC only works on recent NVidia GPUs (it's in the hardware itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC ), and there haven't been any recent NVidia GPUs that are (officially) supported by macOS. You can technically use the Mac GPU by selecting a Video Toolbox encoder, but quality varies. FWIW, I can steam 1080p60 without too much CPU overhead (~20%) on my iMac 2020 using libx264.
- patmorgan23 6y ago
  Well 'recent' is since 2012, which I suspect the vast majority of Nvidia gpus out there are newer than that.
- lathiat 6y ago
  Right and the 16" MacBook Pro has an AMD Radeon Pro GPU. So NVENC is not going to work. AMD has an equivalent "Video Coding Engine" (VCE) which is supported through "Video Toolbox" (an apple API) as mentioned by another commentor although there is some talk of the quality not being as high no idea how relevant that is the current AMD cards in the MacBook Pro 16".
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    Quality not being as high mostly means that you have to bump up the bitrate. For local recording it'll produce larger files and for streaming it'll require a better connection (if the streaming site allows higher bitrate). That still makes it very much usable though.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
I wonder if that would require Nvidia webdrivers to be un-discontinued?

anonymousab 6y ago

OBS is such a great tool. It does its job in a clear and specific manner, and exposes as many levers as you need in the controls. The plugin system seems a bit unrefined though, I think it could be a major win if it was somewhat more accessible. Platform-specific stuff kinda sucks but it's the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, at some point they seemed to have removed support for the AMD encoder used with my old GPU, so I can't enjoy the recent software updates until I update my hardware.

H4ndy 6y ago
Some kind of plugin manager/installer is certainly something that will get added to OBS, probably sooner than later. The AMD AMF encoder is still preset in OBS, it just requires somewhat recent GPU drivers to work (19.7.1 minimum, 19.9.2 or newer recommended)

unnouinceput 6y ago

I don't get it. Why in newer versions of OBS Game Capture is not working for some games, while older version of OBS works without a problem. Same system, same game, OBS version 0.659 (that I have it for like ~2 years) captures games and newer OBS versions all fail. For this purpose I have to keep around this old version while for all other stuff I have the latest and greatest. Is it some DRM problem? Because otherwise I can't explain it.

r1ch 6y ago
OBS 0.659 is "Classic" OBS which has been discontinued for years. If you're having issues capturing games with OBS Studio, stop by our forums or Discord with a log and we may be able to help. If the game uses any kind of anti-cheat engine, it's possible the developer only whitelisted older capture DLLs but this is rare.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  There is no log. OBS "captures" but the image is black while the game sound is there. One common attribute I found for all these games are that they are "true full screen". One example is "Tomb Raider", the series reboot from 2013. OBS 0.659 has no problem capturing my gameplay, while newer versions gives, like I said, black screen on recording. Quick question if you indulge me: Why was classic discontinued?
  - fenrirthviti 6y ago
    OBS Studio is a full rewrite of OBS, and the old version was renamed to Classic to avoid confusion. It's been deprecated for many years now, and is no longer maintained. There is no real reason to use it anymore. If I had to guess the issue here, you're on a laptop with two GPUs and OBS Studio is running on a different GPU than OBS Classic is, which is why you're running in to issues. We'd need a log file to know for sure, but it's likely a simple fix (which you can stop by our Discord or forums with and we can take a closer look, feel free to ping me @fenrir in either location). If you'd rather do your own testing, here's a starting point for my guess as to the issue: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Laptop-GPU-Selection-Windows-10 https://obsproject.com/wiki/Laptop-GPU-Selection-Windows-10

guerrilla 6y ago

> The VLC source’s playlist property can now be reordered by dragging and dropping items within it [cg2121] Finally. With big lists, this was one of the most painful and tedius things to do on a computer. Too bad it still can't reset its stream to YouTube on its own after the overzealous AI disconnects you for nothing.

phkahler 6y ago

Still want 2 things for OBS: 1) built in Equalizer 2) wayland support - this is dependent on other projects too, I use Gnome which doesnt allow screen capture yet.

Aerroon 6y ago
While OBS doesn't have a built in equalizer you can use plugins quite successfully. Reaper's plugins [0] work seamlessly with OBS. [0] https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/ https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
Jnr 6y ago
There is a way to capture Wayland https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758 I'm hoping this eventually gets merged in. This would not only allow capturing Wayland, but also capturing games without affecting the performance too much (similarly to Shadowplay on Windows).
- fenrirthviti 6y ago
  We'd like to merge it as well, but it's still very much a work in progress, and there's some major hurdles with both Wayland itself and Qt that need to be addressed first.

jjcm 6y ago

I'll be very interested to see what happens to OBS now that Nvidia is directly competing with them with Nvidia Broadcast: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-broadcast-app/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-broadcast-a... While it's community supported (though only at 2.5k/mo) I highly suspect that NB is going to outperform OBS in the coming years, just given the market Nvidia is trying to capture. Most youtubers / streamers don't need the full configuration capabilities of OBS, but rather just want something that works out of the box with the basic nice to haves (overlays, noise cancellation, basic text compositing / donation integrations).

gruez 6y ago
Isn't nvidia broadcast just some tools that plug into your existing streaming software? >NVIDIA Broadcast is a universal plugin that works with most popular live streaming, voice chat and video conferencing apps. It’s supported on any NVIDIA GeForce RTX, TITAN RTX or Quadro RTX GPU, using their dedicated Tensor Core AI processors to help the app’s AI networks run in real-time, right alongside your games.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Can't you describe any software as 'just some tools'? If the tools do what you want and achieve the same things as OBS then isn't that what you want?
- jjcm 6y ago
  It's a bit of both. It can configure itself to be a virtual camera (similar to OBS), which could then be consumed by OBS. It also has built in features for directly streaming to twitch/youtube/etc and skipping OBS entirely. Likely an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy on their part.
  - Warchamp7 6y ago
    > It also has built in features for directly streaming to twitch/youtube/etc and skipping OBS entirely. This is not true lol

filmgirlcw 6y ago

This is one of the few projects I support on Patreon and Jim is fantastic. The amount of work that goes into this software is really incredible.

worldmerge 6y ago

If you haven't just used OBS you definitely should check it out. It's an incredible piece of software. I can screen cap multiple browsers and get a webcam feed and be at ~4% CPU usage. To put that in perspective I just made an app with OpenFrameworks (C++) that just gets my camera and it uses ~6% of my CPU. OBS is amazing.

deathtrader666 6y ago
As a counter anecdote - my 2015 MacBook Pro stutters within 30-40 seconds of OBS streaming a 1080p feed to YouTube. Is there anything to tweak? Or is my machine too old?
- bsder 6y ago
  Sorry, you probably need a "real" video card for video encode. I really tried to make OBS work at 1080p on my 2015 MacBook Pro, but just about anything (even a simple flip the webcam output) causes my fan to spin to maximum and eventually the video lags behind. The best thing I could do was get something like the Avaya HC020 Webcam. It does a lot of things like zoom, flip, color balance, etc. all in the camera so you're processing as little as possible. At that point, I think I got 720p reliable, but not 1080p. However, my fan was still going full blast. Eventually, I just gave up and built a Windows 10 desktop machine solely for video. It works great and I don't have a jet engine powering up next to my face when I do video.
- worldmerge 6y ago
  Not sure, you may want to drop to 720p and maybe lower your bitrate. For my latest project I was using a Macbook pro 2015 to test it, running my app and streaming at the same time fine. I was running Windows 10 though on the mac. If you're running Mac OS try using a utility like SMC Fan Control to set the fan RPM high. Mac OS by default wants to be as silent as possible which could be leading to some performance issues. I'm very new to streaming so take what I say with a grain of salt.
  - imtringued 6y ago

dang 6y ago

If curious see also a big thread from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748247

non-entity 6y ago

Jxovkjqjfh

corytheboyd 6y ago

Love me some OBS, I use it for piano practice with my tutor. Simultaneous video feeds (face, hands) and window capture of VMPK mirroring the MIDI out of my digital piano piped into a virtual camera, then VBcable pipes the OBS monitor audio to an input source. Put those two together as the audio and recording devices in zoom and were off! If there is interest I’d love to write more about it and share, let me know!

corytheboyd 6y ago
One day they will figure out how to implement undo without impacting performance too much :p
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Could you ask someone to make a video of you while you are using this setup? Like a friend/family member in your room holding a phone? I would like to show an older piano teacher this setup.
lozf 6y ago
> If there is interest I’d love to write more about it and share, let me know! Please do, that sounds awesome! I'd love to read more - but also seconding the request for a short video overview.

dmerrick 6y ago

Does anyone have suggestions for running OBS in the cloud? I have a project that is designed to run 24/7 and it would be really nice if I could use a cloud server instead of a computer on my home network. I have it all set up... OBS in Docker with k8s templates. Just need to find an affordable online option.

numlock86 6y ago
Depending on what you stream or trying to achieve, just get a Windows/Linux VPS and set up everything via RDP/VNC like you would on your own box. That's what I did for a "twitch plays" channel that was up for about a year.
H4ndy 6y ago
While OBS will run virtualized, you will get a massive performance hit if no GPU is available and everything is done in software rendering. And GPU-enabled cloud servers are quite expensive.
- dmerrick 6y ago
  This has indeed been my experience. It seems to be one of those uncommon situations where a physical server is more desirable than a cloud server.

Jnr 6y ago

I particularly enjoy that they added Mozilla's RNNoise library for AI noise suppression. It is not as good as Nvidia's RTX Voice but it does the job. This is very helpful to get some noisy microphones to behave nicely.

murgindrag 6y ago
Or buy a $5 headset from your local gas station, so the microphone is close to the mouth and doesn't pick up the speaker...
- Jnr 6y ago
  That is not always preferable, especially in front of an audience. We have some cheap lavalier mic and with this noise suppression it sounds great. The problem was not with picking up the speaker, it was with the noise of the microphone.

xvilka 6y ago

The biggest problem - it doesn't work[1][2] with Wayland. So, for example, with Fedora 32 default installation it is impossible to make it record either whole screen or just a selected window. [1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471 [2] https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/14 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/14

dannyobrien 6y ago
I've used https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs without a problem, but it's true that it doesn't work out of the box.

NamTaf 6y ago

I have used obs.ninja [1] to pipe phone camera feeds as video inputs to OBS. I then use the virtual cam plugin to make that my webcam feed. This works great, but what I'd also love to do is take the audio from the phone mic as a browser input and use it as a virtual microphone. I've only been successful by using a VBCable pipe and setting the monitoring device, but what that ends up doing is also playing all of the sound OBS is capturing from my phone into my headphones too, so I get my own voice. If I mute OBS, the monitoring doesn't work, and so I get no audio. If I capture the audio completely outside OBS with another mic, everything's out-of-sync and I don't have portable audio. This is so close to a seamless way to turn any phone into a portable webcam with mic, but I haven't figured out that last little piece of the puzzle. However, I wanted to 1) shout out OBS for being such an incredible piece of software, and 2) shout out obs.ninja for what it does. Seriously impressive. [1]: https://obs.ninja/ https://obs.ninja/

breather 6y ago
I was once where you are now. This completes the puzzle: https://github.com/toadjaune/pulseaudio-config https://github.com/toadjaune/pulseaudio-config Thank me later ;)
- NamTaf 6y ago
  No, I think I shall thank you right now if it's all the same to you! I'm trying to do this on a Windows box so PA doesn't specifically work, but after a cursory glance over this page I think I can take this concept and work out how to map it to a Windows implementation with a bit of fiddling.
  - ikiris 6y ago
    virtual audio jack
thesandlord 6y ago
Have you tried DroidCam? https://www.dev47apps.com/ https://www.dev47apps.com/ Maps your phone to a virtual webcam, works over WiFi or USB

mattanimation 6y ago

nice, they added RNNoise

temptemptemp111 6y ago

No mentions of "live stream" in the comments or document? Strange... Other platforms need live streaming, user/admin accounts, and "super chats"!

jedimastert 6y ago

I play piano and sing. When I wanted to start streaming, I went from opening OBS for the first time to having a livestream to youtube, complete with audio from my interface synced to my webcam, in about 5 minutes. Just and incredible piece of software. I'm gonna drop a few bucks Everytime I stream now. Also, shout out to obs.ninja, which let me cast my chromebook to the stream for my little jazz theory lecture/ramblings. Also also, shameless self-promotion time: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4fu3juqIttf7z_UbRRaILsAKn-oL-r7U https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4fu3juqIttf7z_UbRRaI...

NiekvdMaas 6y ago

OBS is an amazing piece of software. When the Streamlabs OBS fork came out, many people switched - but the original OBS keeps improving. If you're looking to control OBS through a web interface (e.g. to switch scenes from a phone/tablet), see my project https://github.com/Niek/obs-web https://github.com/Niek/obs-web

numlock86 6y ago
I've tried SLOBS many times. Like every now and then, months apart. Actually, just this weekend again. Usually only takes me about an hour to go back to OBS ... I am not even entirely sure why I keep looking into it. Probably subconsciously I am looking for something that justifies electron and the horrible UI.

saos 6y ago

Finally!

AI_WAIFU 6y ago

OBS is great, very intuitive to use and really lowers the barrier to entry for streaming.

brendt_gd 6y ago

Still no support for my audio interface over USB… You can add it, but no signal comes true. I know about virtual audio routing, but I'm so sad this bug hasn't been fixed after years…

H4ndy 6y ago
Your device must support one of the common audio protocols to work in OBS (for Windows WASAPI for example). There's also an ASIO plugin available. OBS will probably not add any specific code to support non-conforming device(s) without an external maintainer willing to keep the needed code updated over the years.

wiradikusuma 6y ago

> Windows: Added Virtual Camera There's already a plugin for that and I've been using it for a while. I use it to combine my webcam with my desktop so that I can watch YouTube together with my family while still looking at each other's face.

jjice 6y ago

8 years ago when I was a kid and I tried to record Minecraft videos, the options for screen capture where awful. The best option at the time seemed to be Fraps. I don't remember when OBS began to take off in the community, but I couldn't be happier. It's an incredible piece of software that is so powerful and very user friendly. Quality is killer too.

osmyn 6y ago

Here's a neat use of OBS by Scott Hanselman for PowerPoint presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciNcxi2bPwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciNcxi2bPwM