12 ms·

OBS Studio 27.0

439 points by TangerineDream 5y ago

kiddico 5y ago
* Added Undo/Redo [Programatic/Jim] Wooooh! That's going to turn so many instances of "Oh I've just deleted 30 minutes of filter tuning" into "whoopsy, undo" also: * "(Windows only) Added support for NVIDIA Noise Removal in the Noise Suppression filter" Nice! I wonder how that compares to the old RNNoise option...
- blindfly 5y ago
  Anyone care to speculate why this isn't available on Linux? Is it NVIDIA holding us back?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ihuman 5y ago
    It requires the NVIDIA Audio Effects SDK, which is only on Windows
- TillE 5y ago
  It was such an obvious missing feature. Though to be fair, implementing undo/redo functionality is often nontrivial. However, there's still no way to save/export scenes, aside from simply copying your entire app data directory. I just have a basic layout with few tweaks so it's not the worst thing ever, but for any streamer with a complex setup and carefully adjusted filters, moving to a new computer or whatever must be an enormous pain point.
  - deeblering4 5y ago
    Exporting and saving scenes can be done with export scene collection. It’s kind of clunky in terms of workflow but I’ve had success exporting/importing scenes across computers.
  - fordsmith 5y ago
    That is an interesting feature. I will work on that for the next version.
  - Warchamp7 5y ago
    You can export your entire scene collection to a json file and import it on another computer. If you keep all of your media and such in the same folder, then the new Missing Files dialog on startup will also auto detect every source after you point one to the new location.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  From my experience the NVIDIA filter is miles better both in detecting noise as well as suppressing just the noise but has significantly more latency and will incur a decent perf hit on the GPU (~10% FPS or so if the GPU is the bottleneck). These days if it's live is use RNNoise and if it's for a recording I use Nvidia's filter.
  - kiddico 5y ago
    Interesting. I have a PC just for streaming (I encode with CPU as well) with a[n] nvidia card, so I'm not concerned about GPU usage. I'll give it a go. Slight tangent: Is it best to say "An nvidia card" or "A nvidia card"? 'An' sounds better, but 'a' is right according to my 4th grade english lessons. I think 'an' sounds better because you're really saying "(e)nvidia". I don't know if the "an before a vowel led word" rule applies to the pronounced or the written word...
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      “A” versus “an” is all about the next syllable (and its sound), not the next letter—they’re the same word, just with context-dependent pronunciation which happens to be materialised in the spelling. My favourite way of demonstrating this practically is to observe usage of “a” versus “an” on words that have developed or lost a silent “h”. For example, in the days of long ago, “herb” had a silent “h”, so it would be spelled “an herb” as a vowel sound followed; and in American English it still is silent, and is consequently still “an herb”: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb.... But in British English, people started sounding the “h”, so that in the 1870s, “a herb” became more popular than “an herb”, and it has remained so ever since: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb... (though “an herb” is still much more common there than I’d have expected). I normally read more recent translations of the Bible, but still sometimes read the KJV aloud, so there are many cases of silent aitches that are no longer silent (a regular expression search for `\ban h` has 711 matches in the KJV, compared with only 11 in the WEBBE, which are for “honour”, “honest”, “hour” and “heir”); I decided it’s better to read “a house” rather than “an house”, given that the original spelling was only chosen because at that time they pronounced it “an ’ouse”—or at least, I think so; the ngrams there aren’t quite so conclusive, I suspect that one might have already been shifting in some parts of England, as is the case with quite a few other such words; the KJV was written in a style that was already overly formal and sometimes slightly archaic when it was new, let alone 400 years later—Tyndale’s translation from the best part of a hundred years earlier reads much more easily once you normalise spelling as was done in the KJV between 1611 and 1769. In short: you’ve got an NVIDIA card.
- fordsmith 5y ago
  Undo/redo would be me :). I put in a lot of effort and spent months working on it to get a basic workable version. I am only just a you g student, so over the last several rcs, Jim refined it and made improvements and bug fixes. I love the team and everyone involved is just a great person.
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Thank you for all your work and contributions!
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    Doing god's work
zbrozek 5y ago
OBS is such wonderful software. It's immensely powerful yet approachable and performant. I am not a streamer, but I've found it really useful as an audio/video swiss army knife. Many thanks to the team and community behind it!
- skrowl 5y ago
  Same. Not a streamer, but I use it together with https://catnip5.itch.io/mouse-highlight https://catnip5.itch.io/mouse-highlight to record demonstrations / tutorials.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    Absolutely, before this you had to use stuff like FRAPS, Camtasia, proprietary webcam software, etc. There was no all-in-one way to record any webcam/desktop. OBS does it seamlessly and across all combinations. And the staging is neat too.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Agreed. PSA: OBS can be used to create videos as well. I first used OBS to create a video presentation for school. Most of the time I was showing slides, but occasionally I would switch to a full view of myself (as required by the assignment). Or you can do the common view of big slides and a small video of the speaker in the corner.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  Yeah; I'm not a streamer either, but it took me all of an hour to go from "what's OBS?" to enabling use of my iPhone as the video camera for Zoom calls. Haven't had time yet to do anything interesting with OBS "scenes", but it looks similarly, surprisingly straightforward. A+!
  - 1_player 5y ago
    > use of my iPhone as the video camera for Zoom calls FWIW I've used iVcam until recently, and I'm now an happy user of Reincubate Camo
geerlingguy 5y ago
Excited for this release since it contains M1 Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoding support[1] — I know on my Intel Mac, OBS would massacre the CPU if I didn't have the hardware encoding enabled. On the M1 it's not quite so bad, but being able to use hardware encoding does save a lot of CPU cycles when streaming at higher bitrates! [1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/4170 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/4170
- herpderperator 5y ago
  Note that Apple Silicon (arm64) support is still in progress and all the builds released to date have been amd64 only.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Any idea when it’s coming? I know no one likes that question, but... well, I have an M1 Air, and I’d love to stream some coding sessions or tutorials. So arm64 support would be tasty. Is there some way we could help with the arm64 patching?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      My smoothbrained take is that it'll be a little bit, since optimizing it for ARM is going to take a little effort. Like GP said, it's really about the encoders slowly being updated to better support the hardware.
      - stephen_g 5y ago
        There’s still also the lack of Metal support - OBS still uses OpenGL to composite everything together, and Metal should be more highly optimised on newer macOS versions and the new chips than the long-deprecated (on Mac) OpenGL. Somebody actually did write a Metal renderer and contributed it in a pull request a few years ago. The comments were like “Oh, why did you do this? OpenGL is fine” from the lead developer. The backend just didn’t get merged (I think the developer who contributed it didn’t have great English so struggled to explain why they’d want it, and nobody who commented really seemed to know much about the Mac platform… the code looked fine though). So that renderer was never merged, and then about six months later OpenGL was deprecated on macOS. The contributed backend is probably quite out of date with changes to OBS’s APIs etc. now. It’s a shame, there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you for them doing much “optimising for ARM”.
onion2k 5y ago
Track Matte is essentially an alpha channel for stinger transitions. That should enable some really cool scene transition effects...
Buttons840 5y ago
Happy to see the Wayland support.
omegote 5y ago
I considered OBS a really nice piece of software, specially after a 10-year long track record of testing desktop capture software like Camtasia and the like. After fighting myself with ffmpeg (libav) to build a simplified desktop capture software myself, my appreciation for OBS has increased even more, because dealing with libav or anything multimedia is definitely a pita.
dzign 5y ago
Good news and bug fixes. That black screen capture on laptops was annoying.
celim307 5y ago
I remember when it was OBS vs xsplit, looks like OBS won!
- DoctorOW 5y ago
  I'm happy about that personally. OBS is an example of FOSS done really well in my opinion and I'm glad to see it winning out over potentially better funded projects.
- Warchamp7 5y ago
  We have a great relationship with the Xsplit folks and they even sponsored the project for a year when we launched our OpenCollective :)
fredleblanc 5y ago
My favorite OBS feature is that you can bring in transparent browser windows all over the place. As such, I have my work conferencing set up so my time appears in the upper-right corner. I’m on the east coast and everyone I work with is on the west coast. It’s a nice way to remind them of my current time. (It also passive aggressively animated to purple with a moon when its “after hours,” a/k/a 5pm for me.) I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events. It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS. Easily a top 5 app for me.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  I've embedded a browser window in an OBS stream on my mac, and it just about ground my computer to a halt; the CPU was pegged at 100%, and using it with Zoom basically meant not using anything else. Is it just me?
  - fredleblanc 5y ago
    I’ve got a within-the-last-18-months MacBook Pro, so yeah, your mileage may vary. A dedicated graphics card helps tremendously. I’ve got a gaming PC with a recent NVIDIA card and it does even blink at it.
  - haliskerbas 5y ago
    What was using the CPU? If it was “kernel_task” an external fan will help.
    - btgeekboy 5y ago
      Throttling is one thing that can cause high kernel_task usage, but you can also run ‘pmset -g thermlog’ to verify whether it’s actually due to throttling/cooling issues.
      - 5y ago
crescentfresh 5y ago
> This fixes the black screen issues on laptops in particular My youngest wanted to learn how to use OBS so he can begin making videos of his gaming. I tasked him with figuring out everything, from how to download it (I closely monitored this part), install it, and use it. He watched tutorials. He got so far but got discouraged when he ran into the above issue and started the whole process over again because he thought he must have messed up. We eventually figured out the workaround but so happy to see they've fixed it!
- laumars 5y ago
  What is the black screen issue?
  - cbhl 5y ago
    The mechanism of action I've seen is that sometimes OBS will start on, say, internal graphics, and you'll need to force it to run on your discrete graphics card in order to get it to screen capture your video game. This affects computers that have both integrated and discrete graphics (say, to save power on a laptop).
- ddtaylor 5y ago
  This is a big deal for me. I really like to use OBS to capture things when I want to show someone how something is working. Until now using OBS has essentially meant disabling my iGPU which, for me, kills battery life and isn't worth the sacrifice. I have been using Windows Gaming (press Win+G) to capture videos and then manually cropping and re-compressing them using KDEnlive.
pkiv 5y ago
If you use OBS, I would love show you our product https://www.stream.club https://www.stream.club. We're bringing OBS into the browser, making it really easy to create live video content. Our customers find that they can get setup in Stream Club much faster than they can with OBS, and they don't need a powerful computer to do it. Happy to answer any questions!
- phone8675309 5y ago
  Question: Why would I waste more than 10 seconds on your website if I can't create an account and try it instantly?
  - pkiv 5y ago
    Great question! We like to onboard each livestreamer personally to understand their livestreaming workflow and goals. Completely understand the disdain for our ambiguous website, and would be happy to send a beta invite directly to your email if you (or anyone else on here) is willing to give it a shot!
- redfern314 5y ago
  This looks like a slightly inferior version of https://streamyard.com/ https://streamyard.com/ (in particular, fewer participants at each price level) - do you have any value propositions above what they offer?
  - pkiv 5y ago
    Streamyard is a great company so I'll take slightly inferior as a major compliment! We're actually have all the features of their Professional plan ($50/month) at half the cost. The on-screen participants per live stream is something we've capped at six for usability reasons (livestreams just don't look good with 10 faces on a stream).
    - redfern314 5y ago
      My particular use case depends on more than 6 participants, which is why I asked - but I think it may not be a common one. Thanks for explaining! Hope you're able to get it into public beta soon. edit: I also realized that "slightly inferior" was denigrating, which wasn't really how I intended it, even if you took it as a compliment. Sorry about that.
mdoms 5y ago
I used to use OBS to capture game clips, but it recently started capturing at shitty 5fps framerates and tanking my in-game FPS. I tried a ton of things to fix it but eventually gave up. Based on this changelist it doesn't look like the problem is solved. Oh well.
- sosborn 5y ago
  Have you filed a detailed bug report?
alpb 5y ago
Having upgraded OBS before on macOS, I backed it up first, then installed the new version. As somewhat expected to me, the new version is not launching. I had to launch it from CLI to see and see there is an error: error: os_dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib->libpython3.9.dylib): dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib, 257): image not found It also changes something in the stored state on disk so that next time you try to launch an older version, it cannot launch either. So the issue damages the previous versions somehow as well. Similar errors have happened to me in the past. If you are doing important streaming stuff, do not upgrade OBS as long as it continues to work. Especially if you are on a tight deadline or have a scheduled upcoming stream.
- photojosh 5y ago
  Pretty sure (can't check rn) Big Sur only bundles Python 3.8 (and earlier OSes may be even older Python versions). Installing 3.9 from python.org might fix this. I can't see which other version they would build against but not include in the install.
  - alpb 5y ago
    Python 3.9 is already installed and linked via Homebrew. I already have an issue open about this in the repo.
- jes 5y ago
  Maybe check with otool on macOS and check to see where it is looking for the .dylib it can’t find. You can also update the executable with otool to use a different path to the dylib, if need be.
luisrudge 5y ago
Obs is amazing. I’m using it to record my screen for YouTube videos. I have one unrelated issue, though. My screen recording feels super washed out. The colors are awful. This happens with obs and other screen recorders as well (even quick time), but OBS it’s a bit worse. I have no idea how to fix it, so I just compensate in post, but it feels unnatural.
- cbhl 5y ago
  Double check your color space in settings. For a screen recording you want 4:4:4 (look for "rgb" or something); often video cameras are 4:2:2 or 4:2:0.
ww520 5y ago
OBS is great, with lots of useful feature. One setup to combine multiple computers into one video stream I don't see often is to run OBS virtual camera on each computer to capture the local screen, and then feeds the OBS virtual cam videos over NDI to other computers. One of the computers running OBS acts as the combiner to take in all the remote video sources and combine them into the final output video.
- zwarag 5y ago
  It sounds awesome but also kinda hard on the network. How much bandwidth do you need to make that work?
  - sas41 5y ago
    I will keep it short, say you have 4 perspectives, each with the same setup in 1080p60 @ 2500Kbps, combining in to a 4K video at the ingest server. Now, your ingest server needs to map each perspective on to a 4K canvas and upload that stream somewhere, let's assume a 5 Mbit 2160p60 stream this is what you get: Clients 2.5 x 4 = 10 Mbps upload. IServer 10 Mbps download. IServer 5 Mbps upload. EDIT: Twitch caps @ 6 Mbps for streaming so it doesn't matter if 5 Mbps is enough or not, 6 is max for Twitch.
pkilgore 5y ago
This is one of my favorite pieces of free software I've ever used. Amazingly powerful and it's cross platform! I use it to record all sorts of videos, and only very occasionally stream. Congrats to their team + contributors, and thank you if you're lurking.
iainctduncan 5y ago
OBS is the cat's pajamas for making zoom presentations reliable, and for making any kind of tutorial/demo video. I really like the fact that whatever layout/system you cook up "just works" for both. Love it to bits!
JohnTHaller 5y ago
You can also grab it in PortableApps.com Format to use without a local install: https://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/obs-studio-portable https://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/obs-studio-portabl...
antman 5y ago
OBS is great! Microsoft Teams broke virtual cam support a couple of months back on windoss. Has anyone found a workaround to maybe fake OBS virtual cam as a physical one? I would be grateful!
- myguysi 5y ago
  For windows: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ The CEO of Shopify put up a bounty last year to support similar functionality on macOS, I’m not sure if it was ever completed. EDIT: looks like OBS officially supports it for Mac and Linux since 26.1 - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0
  - antman 5y ago
    Yes that is what I am saying, teams broke virtual cams unfortunately
- bbvnvlt 5y ago
  Do you mean the problem with the image from your OBS virtual camera turning green and glitchy? You seem to be able to fix this (in some cases) by using 1920x1080 at 30fps. See https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets-distorted-and-turns-greenish.135098/post-525968 https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets...
kumarvvr 5y ago
OBS and VLC have made everyones lives better. And they have been doing it for a long time now. There should be a global fund, funded by tax payers, globally managed, like the UN, that helps developers who develop software that is used in every nook and corner of earth. A strong incentive like that, and we could see a revolution in open source software.
- rainonmoon 5y ago
  Some of the companies/people I know are quite happy sending portions of their revenue to e.g. Blender for its use in their commercial pipeline. As a hobbyist I do the same (not a portion of revenue, but I chuck a monthly coffee towards whatever I'm learning, at least.) That global fund? It's not the UN, it's HN. That strong incentive? It's the feeling that moved your comment. We can send that money to developers right now. Hopefully a lot of us already are. tl;dr: buy WinRAR.
MR4D 5y ago
Why is OBS so slow on Mac? Is there a hardware issue here, or is it a software issue with OBS? It’s fantastic, but the speed difference on Windows is so much better.
- myself248 5y ago
  My experience is that there are all sorts of accelerations and things that may or may not enable themselves, and no way to know these even exist without trawling through a bunch of forum threads. An "OBS performance audit/optimizer" would be an interesting add-on. Because, yeah, it can sometimes bring an otherwise-fast machine to its knees, seemingly inexplicably.
nonbirithm 5y ago
Seeing as OBS is now ubiquitous for livestreaming, I have to wonder if there's one or more software companies out there who see all that usage as lost revenue from a proprietary solution and are kicking themselves over it. I almost can't believe how good OBS is for being open source.
- roboyoshi 5y ago
  I think streamlabs [0] is that "proprietary" solution making money with an even more user friendly UX and useful extensions. [0] https://streamlabs.com/ https://streamlabs.com/
  - dodgepong 5y ago
    Streamlabs is a fork of OBS, and as such, is also open source: http://github.com/stream-labs http://github.com/stream-labs
- reassembled 5y ago
  Wirecast has been around since the mid-2000s and has a very similar feature set to OBS. It is lacking in some areas and ahead of the curve in others (Wirecast has GPU-accelerated scene preview thumbnails instead of OBS’ flat text list). VMix is another successful proprietary desktop streaming software. You could also probably add the OG, TriCaster, to the same list as it solves many of the same problems (video switching on commodity PC hardware, real-time layering/compositing, desktop capture, etc) but is married to NewTek’s hardware.

* Added Undo/Redo [Programatic/Jim] Wooooh! That's going to turn so many instances of "Oh I've just deleted 30 minutes of filter tuning" into "whoopsy, undo" also: * "(Windows only) Added support for NVIDIA Noise Removal in the Noise Suppression filter" Nice! I wonder how that compares to the old RNNoise option...

blindfly 5y ago
Anyone care to speculate why this isn't available on Linux? Is it NVIDIA holding us back?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ihuman 5y ago
  It requires the NVIDIA Audio Effects SDK, which is only on Windows
TillE 5y ago
It was such an obvious missing feature. Though to be fair, implementing undo/redo functionality is often nontrivial. However, there's still no way to save/export scenes, aside from simply copying your entire app data directory. I just have a basic layout with few tweaks so it's not the worst thing ever, but for any streamer with a complex setup and carefully adjusted filters, moving to a new computer or whatever must be an enormous pain point.
- deeblering4 5y ago
  Exporting and saving scenes can be done with export scene collection. It’s kind of clunky in terms of workflow but I’ve had success exporting/importing scenes across computers.
- fordsmith 5y ago
  That is an interesting feature. I will work on that for the next version.
- Warchamp7 5y ago
  You can export your entire scene collection to a json file and import it on another computer. If you keep all of your media and such in the same folder, then the new Missing Files dialog on startup will also auto detect every source after you point one to the new location.
zamadatix 5y ago
From my experience the NVIDIA filter is miles better both in detecting noise as well as suppressing just the noise but has significantly more latency and will incur a decent perf hit on the GPU (~10% FPS or so if the GPU is the bottleneck). These days if it's live is use RNNoise and if it's for a recording I use Nvidia's filter.
- kiddico 5y ago
  Interesting. I have a PC just for streaming (I encode with CPU as well) with a[n] nvidia card, so I'm not concerned about GPU usage. I'll give it a go. Slight tangent: Is it best to say "An nvidia card" or "A nvidia card"? 'An' sounds better, but 'a' is right according to my 4th grade english lessons. I think 'an' sounds better because you're really saying "(e)nvidia". I don't know if the "an before a vowel led word" rule applies to the pronounced or the written word...
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    “A” versus “an” is all about the next syllable (and its sound), not the next letter—they’re the same word, just with context-dependent pronunciation which happens to be materialised in the spelling. My favourite way of demonstrating this practically is to observe usage of “a” versus “an” on words that have developed or lost a silent “h”. For example, in the days of long ago, “herb” had a silent “h”, so it would be spelled “an herb” as a vowel sound followed; and in American English it still is silent, and is consequently still “an herb”: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb.... But in British English, people started sounding the “h”, so that in the 1870s, “a herb” became more popular than “an herb”, and it has remained so ever since: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb... (though “an herb” is still much more common there than I’d have expected). I normally read more recent translations of the Bible, but still sometimes read the KJV aloud, so there are many cases of silent aitches that are no longer silent (a regular expression search for `\ban h` has 711 matches in the KJV, compared with only 11 in the WEBBE, which are for “honour”, “honest”, “hour” and “heir”); I decided it’s better to read “a house” rather than “an house”, given that the original spelling was only chosen because at that time they pronounced it “an ’ouse”—or at least, I think so; the ngrams there aren’t quite so conclusive, I suspect that one might have already been shifting in some parts of England, as is the case with quite a few other such words; the KJV was written in a style that was already overly formal and sometimes slightly archaic when it was new, let alone 400 years later—Tyndale’s translation from the best part of a hundred years earlier reads much more easily once you normalise spelling as was done in the KJV between 1611 and 1769. In short: you’ve got an NVIDIA card.
fordsmith 5y ago
Undo/redo would be me :). I put in a lot of effort and spent months working on it to get a basic workable version. I am only just a you g student, so over the last several rcs, Jim refined it and made improvements and bug fixes. I love the team and everyone involved is just a great person.
- sbarre 5y ago
  Thank you for all your work and contributions!
- hanniabu 5y ago
  Doing god's work

zbrozek 5y ago

OBS is such wonderful software. It's immensely powerful yet approachable and performant. I am not a streamer, but I've found it really useful as an audio/video swiss army knife. Many thanks to the team and community behind it!

skrowl 5y ago
Same. Not a streamer, but I use it together with https://catnip5.itch.io/mouse-highlight https://catnip5.itch.io/mouse-highlight to record demonstrations / tutorials.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Absolutely, before this you had to use stuff like FRAPS, Camtasia, proprietary webcam software, etc. There was no all-in-one way to record any webcam/desktop. OBS does it seamlessly and across all combinations. And the staging is neat too.
Buttons840 5y ago
Agreed. PSA: OBS can be used to create videos as well. I first used OBS to create a video presentation for school. Most of the time I was showing slides, but occasionally I would switch to a full view of myself (as required by the assignment). Or you can do the common view of big slides and a small video of the speaker in the corner.
chrisweekly 5y ago
Yeah; I'm not a streamer either, but it took me all of an hour to go from "what's OBS?" to enabling use of my iPhone as the video camera for Zoom calls. Haven't had time yet to do anything interesting with OBS "scenes", but it looks similarly, surprisingly straightforward. A+!
- 1_player 5y ago
  > use of my iPhone as the video camera for Zoom calls FWIW I've used iVcam until recently, and I'm now an happy user of Reincubate Camo

geerlingguy 5y ago

Excited for this release since it contains M1 Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoding support[1] — I know on my Intel Mac, OBS would massacre the CPU if I didn't have the hardware encoding enabled. On the M1 it's not quite so bad, but being able to use hardware encoding does save a lot of CPU cycles when streaming at higher bitrates! [1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/4170 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/4170

herpderperator 5y ago
Note that Apple Silicon (arm64) support is still in progress and all the builds released to date have been amd64 only.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Any idea when it’s coming? I know no one likes that question, but... well, I have an M1 Air, and I’d love to stream some coding sessions or tutorials. So arm64 support would be tasty. Is there some way we could help with the arm64 patching?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    My smoothbrained take is that it'll be a little bit, since optimizing it for ARM is going to take a little effort. Like GP said, it's really about the encoders slowly being updated to better support the hardware.
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      There’s still also the lack of Metal support - OBS still uses OpenGL to composite everything together, and Metal should be more highly optimised on newer macOS versions and the new chips than the long-deprecated (on Mac) OpenGL. Somebody actually did write a Metal renderer and contributed it in a pull request a few years ago. The comments were like “Oh, why did you do this? OpenGL is fine” from the lead developer. The backend just didn’t get merged (I think the developer who contributed it didn’t have great English so struggled to explain why they’d want it, and nobody who commented really seemed to know much about the Mac platform… the code looked fine though). So that renderer was never merged, and then about six months later OpenGL was deprecated on macOS. The contributed backend is probably quite out of date with changes to OBS’s APIs etc. now. It’s a shame, there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you for them doing much “optimising for ARM”.

onion2k 5y ago

Track Matte is essentially an alpha channel for stinger transitions. That should enable some really cool scene transition effects...

Buttons840 5y ago

Happy to see the Wayland support.

omegote 5y ago

I considered OBS a really nice piece of software, specially after a 10-year long track record of testing desktop capture software like Camtasia and the like. After fighting myself with ffmpeg (libav) to build a simplified desktop capture software myself, my appreciation for OBS has increased even more, because dealing with libav or anything multimedia is definitely a pita.

dzign 5y ago

Good news and bug fixes. That black screen capture on laptops was annoying.

celim307 5y ago

I remember when it was OBS vs xsplit, looks like OBS won!

DoctorOW 5y ago
I'm happy about that personally. OBS is an example of FOSS done really well in my opinion and I'm glad to see it winning out over potentially better funded projects.
Warchamp7 5y ago
We have a great relationship with the Xsplit folks and they even sponsored the project for a year when we launched our OpenCollective :)

fredleblanc 5y ago

My favorite OBS feature is that you can bring in transparent browser windows all over the place. As such, I have my work conferencing set up so my time appears in the upper-right corner. I’m on the east coast and everyone I work with is on the west coast. It’s a nice way to remind them of my current time. (It also passive aggressively animated to purple with a moon when its “after hours,” a/k/a 5pm for me.) I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events. It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS. Easily a top 5 app for me.

pavel_lishin 5y ago
I've embedded a browser window in an OBS stream on my mac, and it just about ground my computer to a halt; the CPU was pegged at 100%, and using it with Zoom basically meant not using anything else. Is it just me?
- fredleblanc 5y ago
  I’ve got a within-the-last-18-months MacBook Pro, so yeah, your mileage may vary. A dedicated graphics card helps tremendously. I’ve got a gaming PC with a recent NVIDIA card and it does even blink at it.
- haliskerbas 5y ago
  What was using the CPU? If it was “kernel_task” an external fan will help.
  - btgeekboy 5y ago
    Throttling is one thing that can cause high kernel_task usage, but you can also run ‘pmset -g thermlog’ to verify whether it’s actually due to throttling/cooling issues.
    - 5y ago

crescentfresh 5y ago

> This fixes the black screen issues on laptops in particular My youngest wanted to learn how to use OBS so he can begin making videos of his gaming. I tasked him with figuring out everything, from how to download it (I closely monitored this part), install it, and use it. He watched tutorials. He got so far but got discouraged when he ran into the above issue and started the whole process over again because he thought he must have messed up. We eventually figured out the workaround but so happy to see they've fixed it!

laumars 5y ago
What is the black screen issue?
- cbhl 5y ago
  The mechanism of action I've seen is that sometimes OBS will start on, say, internal graphics, and you'll need to force it to run on your discrete graphics card in order to get it to screen capture your video game. This affects computers that have both integrated and discrete graphics (say, to save power on a laptop).
ddtaylor 5y ago
This is a big deal for me. I really like to use OBS to capture things when I want to show someone how something is working. Until now using OBS has essentially meant disabling my iGPU which, for me, kills battery life and isn't worth the sacrifice. I have been using Windows Gaming (press Win+G) to capture videos and then manually cropping and re-compressing them using KDEnlive.

pkiv 5y ago

If you use OBS, I would love show you our product https://www.stream.club https://www.stream.club. We're bringing OBS into the browser, making it really easy to create live video content. Our customers find that they can get setup in Stream Club much faster than they can with OBS, and they don't need a powerful computer to do it. Happy to answer any questions!

phone8675309 5y ago
Question: Why would I waste more than 10 seconds on your website if I can't create an account and try it instantly?
- pkiv 5y ago
  Great question! We like to onboard each livestreamer personally to understand their livestreaming workflow and goals. Completely understand the disdain for our ambiguous website, and would be happy to send a beta invite directly to your email if you (or anyone else on here) is willing to give it a shot!
redfern314 5y ago
This looks like a slightly inferior version of https://streamyard.com/ https://streamyard.com/ (in particular, fewer participants at each price level) - do you have any value propositions above what they offer?
- pkiv 5y ago
  Streamyard is a great company so I'll take slightly inferior as a major compliment! We're actually have all the features of their Professional plan ($50/month) at half the cost. The on-screen participants per live stream is something we've capped at six for usability reasons (livestreams just don't look good with 10 faces on a stream).
  - redfern314 5y ago
    My particular use case depends on more than 6 participants, which is why I asked - but I think it may not be a common one. Thanks for explaining! Hope you're able to get it into public beta soon. edit: I also realized that "slightly inferior" was denigrating, which wasn't really how I intended it, even if you took it as a compliment. Sorry about that.

mdoms 5y ago

I used to use OBS to capture game clips, but it recently started capturing at shitty 5fps framerates and tanking my in-game FPS. I tried a ton of things to fix it but eventually gave up. Based on this changelist it doesn't look like the problem is solved. Oh well.

sosborn 5y ago
Have you filed a detailed bug report?

alpb 5y ago

Having upgraded OBS before on macOS, I backed it up first, then installed the new version. As somewhat expected to me, the new version is not launching. I had to launch it from CLI to see and see there is an error: error: os_dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib->libpython3.9.dylib): dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib, 257): image not found It also changes something in the stored state on disk so that next time you try to launch an older version, it cannot launch either. So the issue damages the previous versions somehow as well. Similar errors have happened to me in the past. If you are doing important streaming stuff, do not upgrade OBS as long as it continues to work. Especially if you are on a tight deadline or have a scheduled upcoming stream.

photojosh 5y ago
Pretty sure (can't check rn) Big Sur only bundles Python 3.8 (and earlier OSes may be even older Python versions). Installing 3.9 from python.org might fix this. I can't see which other version they would build against but not include in the install.
- alpb 5y ago
  Python 3.9 is already installed and linked via Homebrew. I already have an issue open about this in the repo.
jes 5y ago
Maybe check with otool on macOS and check to see where it is looking for the .dylib it can’t find. You can also update the executable with otool to use a different path to the dylib, if need be.

luisrudge 5y ago

Obs is amazing. I’m using it to record my screen for YouTube videos. I have one unrelated issue, though. My screen recording feels super washed out. The colors are awful. This happens with obs and other screen recorders as well (even quick time), but OBS it’s a bit worse. I have no idea how to fix it, so I just compensate in post, but it feels unnatural.

cbhl 5y ago
Double check your color space in settings. For a screen recording you want 4:4:4 (look for "rgb" or something); often video cameras are 4:2:2 or 4:2:0.

ww520 5y ago

OBS is great, with lots of useful feature. One setup to combine multiple computers into one video stream I don't see often is to run OBS virtual camera on each computer to capture the local screen, and then feeds the OBS virtual cam videos over NDI to other computers. One of the computers running OBS acts as the combiner to take in all the remote video sources and combine them into the final output video.

zwarag 5y ago
It sounds awesome but also kinda hard on the network. How much bandwidth do you need to make that work?
- sas41 5y ago
  I will keep it short, say you have 4 perspectives, each with the same setup in 1080p60 @ 2500Kbps, combining in to a 4K video at the ingest server. Now, your ingest server needs to map each perspective on to a 4K canvas and upload that stream somewhere, let's assume a 5 Mbit 2160p60 stream this is what you get: Clients 2.5 x 4 = 10 Mbps upload. IServer 10 Mbps download. IServer 5 Mbps upload. EDIT: Twitch caps @ 6 Mbps for streaming so it doesn't matter if 5 Mbps is enough or not, 6 is max for Twitch.

pkilgore 5y ago

This is one of my favorite pieces of free software I've ever used. Amazingly powerful and it's cross platform! I use it to record all sorts of videos, and only very occasionally stream. Congrats to their team + contributors, and thank you if you're lurking.

iainctduncan 5y ago

OBS is the cat's pajamas for making zoom presentations reliable, and for making any kind of tutorial/demo video. I really like the fact that whatever layout/system you cook up "just works" for both. Love it to bits!

JohnTHaller 5y ago

You can also grab it in PortableApps.com Format to use without a local install: https://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/obs-studio-portable https://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/obs-studio-portabl...

antman 5y ago

OBS is great! Microsoft Teams broke virtual cam support a couple of months back on windoss. Has anyone found a workaround to maybe fake OBS virtual cam as a physical one? I would be grateful!

myguysi 5y ago
For windows: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ The CEO of Shopify put up a bounty last year to support similar functionality on macOS, I’m not sure if it was ever completed. EDIT: looks like OBS officially supports it for Mac and Linux since 26.1 - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0
- antman 5y ago
  Yes that is what I am saying, teams broke virtual cams unfortunately
bbvnvlt 5y ago
Do you mean the problem with the image from your OBS virtual camera turning green and glitchy? You seem to be able to fix this (in some cases) by using 1920x1080 at 30fps. See https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets-distorted-and-turns-greenish.135098/post-525968 https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets...

kumarvvr 5y ago

OBS and VLC have made everyones lives better. And they have been doing it for a long time now. There should be a global fund, funded by tax payers, globally managed, like the UN, that helps developers who develop software that is used in every nook and corner of earth. A strong incentive like that, and we could see a revolution in open source software.

rainonmoon 5y ago
Some of the companies/people I know are quite happy sending portions of their revenue to e.g. Blender for its use in their commercial pipeline. As a hobbyist I do the same (not a portion of revenue, but I chuck a monthly coffee towards whatever I'm learning, at least.) That global fund? It's not the UN, it's HN. That strong incentive? It's the feeling that moved your comment. We can send that money to developers right now. Hopefully a lot of us already are. tl;dr: buy WinRAR.

MR4D 5y ago

Why is OBS so slow on Mac? Is there a hardware issue here, or is it a software issue with OBS? It’s fantastic, but the speed difference on Windows is so much better.

myself248 5y ago
My experience is that there are all sorts of accelerations and things that may or may not enable themselves, and no way to know these even exist without trawling through a bunch of forum threads. An "OBS performance audit/optimizer" would be an interesting add-on. Because, yeah, it can sometimes bring an otherwise-fast machine to its knees, seemingly inexplicably.

nonbirithm 5y ago

Seeing as OBS is now ubiquitous for livestreaming, I have to wonder if there's one or more software companies out there who see all that usage as lost revenue from a proprietary solution and are kicking themselves over it. I almost can't believe how good OBS is for being open source.

roboyoshi 5y ago
I think streamlabs [0] is that "proprietary" solution making money with an even more user friendly UX and useful extensions. [0] https://streamlabs.com/ https://streamlabs.com/
- dodgepong 5y ago
  Streamlabs is a fork of OBS, and as such, is also open source: http://github.com/stream-labs http://github.com/stream-labs
reassembled 5y ago
Wirecast has been around since the mid-2000s and has a very similar feature set to OBS. It is lacking in some areas and ahead of the curve in others (Wirecast has GPU-accelerated scene preview thumbnails instead of OBS’ flat text list). VMix is another successful proprietary desktop streaming software. You could also probably add the OG, TriCaster, to the same list as it solves many of the same problems (video switching on commodity PC hardware, real-time layering/compositing, desktop capture, etc) but is married to NewTek’s hardware.