17 ms·

OBS – Open Broadcaster Software

669 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

hilbert42 4y ago
On reading this story I went to the OBS/Open Broadcaster Software website and I came across OBS's privacy statement/policy and to say that I was alarmed would be a gross understatement as it seems its developers can violate a user's privacy in just about every way possible. After doing a quick scan of these posts I note that no one else has raised this matter. I've not used OBS so I'd be interested to know from users about how much 'phoning home' the software actually does in practice. Seems to me the effective extent of its privacy policy may be the limiting factor whether one would use OBS or not.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
radiojasper 4y ago
As an outdoor streamer, I love OBS! It's hosted in the cloud [0] for me, so I don't have to leave a PC running at home when I'm out streaming. I can control it through NOALBS [1], which basically means I type !start in my chat and my OBS starts streaming for me. [0] https://antiscuff.com https://antiscuff.com [1] https://github.com/715209/nginx-obs-automatic-low-bitrate-switching https://github.com/715209/nginx-obs-automatic-low-bitrate-sw... PS, I have no affiliation with either of these companies / projects - I just use their services and wanted to praise OBS.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Is this about a new release? or just a fan
oneepic 4y ago
I'm curious. What is the point of reposting this?
- taylorbuley 4y ago
  Oh, the joy of finding this software for the first time! I envy the feeling of someone seeing with fresh eyes how powerful this suite is.
- metadat 4y ago
  Agreed, I thought this was posted already within the past six months or so. Edit: Found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 "TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS" (1545 points, 521 comments, 6 months ago) p.s. thanks for the overeager downvotes, I've stopped downing any threads on HN unless they're aggressive or otherwise egregiously bad intent. Ymmv
- velcrovan 4y ago
  Maybe they finally released official builds for Apple Silicon after 2 years?
- jhugo 4y ago
  For today's lucky ten thousand. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- gwd 4y ago
  I've known of OBS for a while, but I still enjoy reading the commentary from the HN crowd; you have a chance to learn of competing (possibly better) software, interesting setups or uses you hadn't thought of, "adjacent" software or hardware that is useful in conjunction with it, or gotchas or tricks where the software is rough or tends to shine. Having "current" commentary is also useful, so having it reposted every year or two is good even for those who have read previous discussions about it.
CheeseLovers 4y ago
I'm sure most people who would benefit from this software have heard of it.
- pettycashstash2 4y ago
  I for one never heard of it and am planning on trying it out.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I found it on my own, but I had to do a bit of digging.. I wanted a way to capture my screen and didn't want to run any non-FOSS software if I could avoid it As of a few years ago, anyway, there were a LOT of half-assed apps out there to do a bad job of the same thing, and they were dominating the search results
  - Jistern 4y ago
    Try this Google search... "Most popular FOSS software for recording your screen" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=Most+popular+FOSS+software+for+recording+your+screen https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=Most+p...
- carpo 4y ago
  I can guarantee that all of those people at some point in their lives hadn't heard of it. People have to learn about it somewhere, why not here?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png
Krisjohn 4y ago
An oldie, but a goodie. I recently dusted off my install after ManyCam re-wrote the definition of "lifetime" and screwed over a bunch of its most loyal customers.
- bgro 4y ago
  Oldie? Goodie? OBS is currently the defacto standard in streaming software. There is no real alternative. Any alternative is a reskinned OBS. Streaming aside, it's a (the?) category leader in screen recording and audio manipulation.
  - eropple 4y ago
    There are plenty of real alternatives. I'm partial to vMix for live-streaming; I ran Demuxed 2020 and 2021 through my vMix deck from the comfort of my office and through 2020-21 ran about sixty high-production fighting game tournaments off of the same. I like vMix because its audio mixing is excellent and WebRTC-integrated chat comes out of the box, plus data-driven lower thirds and good remoting solutions and MIDI controls for script/function control. Other folks quite like VT-X and TriCaster setups. Or Wirecast, or XSplit (itself notably big in some circles). The only "reskinned OBS" I know of is StreamLabs OBS, which, yeah, isn't great, but there are quite a few alternatives. On the audio front, I'm not sure calling it "the category leader in audio manipulation" holds much water, given that OBS's audio facilities are notably its weakest point. (Not entirely their fault. The licensing around ASIO is weird.) Voicemeeter plus your DAW of choice come to mind. Or, for live mixing directly in your video mixer--well, vMix and NewTek both are pretty good choices there, too. This is not to take anything away from the OBS project or team; it's quite good at what it does, and if your needs are in their crosshairs or you're willing to expend as much effort as necessary to build what doesn't exist around it you can put on a great show using OBS. (And in particular I think their game-capture logic is best-of-breed; when running events I still use OBS as an ffmpeg frontend on my satellite systems because I don't have to think about game capture.) But the idea that there are no "real alternatives" isn't correct, particularly when you have more moving pieces involved and you don't want to--or, for less programmery types, aren't able to--spend your days writing duct-tape code around your video mixer.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
OBS is an awesome app. Its interface is a bit "awkward," but not too bad. It has many tools that are not available elsewhere.
- monk_e_boy 4y ago
  I came here to say the same. My son (10) uses it a lot, he's figured it all out by just trying things. The other day he had an issue with a slight echo in the audio. He mentioned it when we were out of the house. When we got home I had the idea that maybe he'd added the Audio Input Capture twice ... but I couldn't think of why that would happen. When i mentioned it to him, he'd already figured it out and solved it. He had added two audio inputs when he was trying to capture his headset mic and his desktop mic (with phone taped to it, playing music) ... I dunno what the point of this story is ... OBS has a weird interface, but it reminds me of the good old days, when you just made it work and the users just figured it out. I think the polished UI/UX we have these days makes us complacent. Afraid of poking and prodding.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    I think "polished" UX usually requires a dumbed down interface and is otherwise exceedingly difficult for necessarily complex workflows such as broadcasting. If your product isn't quite opinionated on the one right way to do things (and only a specific kind of thing) you can create a really shiny UX. If your product needs to be many things to many kinds of people, stuff ends up a bit messy but only to the detriment to extreme beginners.
    - corobo 4y ago
      The first comparison that comes into mind is old.Reddit vs new Reddit If that's what polishing is please leave OBS all smudged and gross haha
  - Jistern 4y ago
    I adamantly disagree. The problem is explained in... Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro https://bothsidesofthetable.com/design-for-the-novice-configure-for-the-pro-b259c6b4662a https://bothsidesofthetable.com/design-for-the-novice-config...
phkahler 4y ago
Does it have a freaking equalizer yet? Seriously. I don't want to research plugins or pay for one of the most fundamental signal processing blocks.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  > Does it have a freaking equalizer yet? > Seriously. I don't want to research plugins or pay for one of the most fundamental signal processing blocks. It’s amazing how often I see this “I am owed feature X” attitude… and I don’t get it. If it isn’t useful for you, then just don’t comment. OBS is a VST plugin host, so there are probably a million equalizers, but you seriously don’t want to research plugins.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> It’s amazing how often I see this “I am owed feature X” attitude… and I don’t get it. I'm not being an entitled user here. OBS has several audio blocks including noise gate and some others that I used when I casually tried it out. Those were necessary to get my crappy microphone to sounds OK. I was baffled by the lack of an EQ and it turns out the project actively does not want one. My impression is that if someone submitted a pull request with that functionality they would reject it. Perhaps I'm wrong, but if I'm right that's (IMHO) really absurd. BTW if I am wrong and they would accept it let me know, I might just take a stab at implementation.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    OBS is a VST plugin host I had no idea. The idea of something other than a DAW being a VST host seems bonkers to me, yet in the case of OBS makes perfect sense.
    - eropple 4y ago
      The catch here is that OBS doesn't support a way to bus together multiple audio sources and apply plugins to their downmix, which limits the effectiveness of being a VST plugin host. When I use OBS I find myself having to route audio (both analog and digital sources) over a virtual audio cable to another application if I want to apply nontrivial effects chains (and eating the resultant latency/fighting with audio-video sync). It's doable, but it can be intimidating if you don't know exactly what you're looking at.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
As a note, OBS is a really solid capture tool for... anything. I do a lot of old VHS conversions and found OBS is vastly superior to the in-box garbage with most capture devices.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Do tell? I need to be doing that. Have a million VHS from my parents.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    I use a roughly $6 HDMI capture dongle <- a $10 RCA to HDMI adapter <- an old VCR, and OBS is the capture software I use. Comes out pretty well, though you do basically end up watching each tape doing it.
    - cdelsolar 4y ago
      Can you tell me about this 6 dollar capture dongle? How come people pay hundreds for stuff like ElGato HD whatever to capture and stream their video games? Can a cheap dongle do this too?
      - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        Apparently I paid like $15 or something, but anyways, this is what I bought, prices have changed a bit since then, but identical devices are out there under various ASINs/labels: RCA to HDMI: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RX69KR8/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RX69KR8/ HDMI capture: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088CWQGN5/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088CWQGN5/ As far as game capture, it probably depends on a few things. Name brand definitely has significant markup, but they also include software and such as well. Note that my capture dongle here records in 1080P only, and you'll spend a lot more for 4K-capable hardware, and fancier capture devices offer HDMI pass-through so you can both capture and display on a screen, and this does not. Now, if you want to play your games in OBS at 1080p, this might work for you, I'm not sure where performance starts to degrade for a cheapy dongle like this, but I think there's probably a good reason gaming setups use a little bit higher end setups.
Night_Thastus 4y ago
It's very solid software. Extremely flexible and functional, but not too hard to pick up, and they've made it easier over the years. Free too. Can't complain about it. If I ever need high-quality recordings, I use CQP and it comes out fantastic, none of the awful compression artifacts.
reilly3000 4y ago
When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable. I was shooting video on digital 8, editing in Final Cut Pro 4 which was the new hotness, and trying but failing to use DSS on my college network. Actual streaming at scale required a massive server and a massive license from RealNetworks. If I wanted to do anything with animation, it was all $$$$$ software. This all took place in a shared lab at my college with stuff I could never afford on my own. Today, people at that age are making lucrative careers out of streaming then doing the things they love out of their bedrooms using OBS. Blender has enabled all kinds of amazing creators, from animation to video editing to 3D printing and even (basic) architecture. Kicad makes EDA! approachable. My teen son has been able to dabble in all of the above in his spare time without spending a dime. I’m in awe of the power of free software and the amazing engineering work that has enabled these projects to be good enough for real professionals to choose first. I hope we see Godot achieve world domination in gaming, GIMP in graphics, and Libra Office + Collabra in productivity. The people who have given us these tools deserve the highest accolades.
- sundvor 4y ago
  We've come an incredibly long way since Genlock on the Commodore Amiga! I use OBS Studio with my Streamdeck, a Logitech Streamcam, NVIDIA Broadcast, a condenser microphone via a Steinberg XLR audio interface along with Elgato Key lights and iHue fill lights for my working from home office Google Meets. Startup and shut downs of the entire stack including launching into Google Meets are automated with the deck (one button to macro up, one to macro down), and with proper lighting as well as NVIDIA Broadcast, the audio and video quality is just amazing. The amount of tech I'm throwing at how I connect with Meet may seem like overkill, but it really makes a lot of sense to spend some time on what's my primary interface with my colleagues and customers. If I need to quickly mute my image, a scene in OBS that shows "be right back" is an immediate Streamdeck key press away. Next to it is the audio source mute key. It's great.
  - reilly3000 4y ago
    Oh man that sounds like an awesome rig. I didn’t realize Nvidia Broadcast can reduce background noise like keystrokes until you mentioned it here. Does that really work? If so I now have a reason to buy a new GPU and finally use my cherry mx blues again.
jancsika 4y ago
So if I wanted to stream some live coding, can I do the whole thing on my XPS laptop with OBS? What's the setup look like for someone who has done this?
- broodbucket 4y ago
  Open OBS, add a window capture, maybe add your webcam in the corner, go to settings, put in your stream key for Twitch/YouTube/whatever, maybe tinker with the quality settings (bitrate/encoding/etc), click start streaming.
  - jreese 4y ago
    Even better, OBS now supports directly logging into Twitch, which then also gives you windows to set stream description and see user chat, all within OBS.
    - broodbucket 4y ago
      I don't see that in my OBS and I'm on the latest version, is it yet to make it to a tagged release or is that in one of the OBS forks like Streamlabs? EDIT: Looks like it's in the source for a long time but my distro doesn't compile OBS with the built-in browser, which I'm guessing is a requirement
      - fenrirthviti 4y ago
        Correct, our service integrations are reliant on CEF and the browser source features. Our Flatpak is an option if your distro's repo doesn't have it compiled for some reason.
- mylons 4y ago
  yes. on modern hardware, OBS is relatively lightweight until you add several video sources. for coding you should be fine if your laptop is less than 5+ years old
- djbusby 4y ago
nuclearsugar 4y ago
OBS is quite useful for recording Spout or NDI video streams. I use these two OBS plugins often - https://github.com/Off-World-Live/obs-spout2-plugin https://github.com/Off-World-Live/obs-spout2-plugin https://github.com/Palakis/obs-ndi https://github.com/Palakis/obs-ndi
- platz 4y ago
  what do you use Spout for
  - nuclearsugar 4y ago
    An interesting use-case is to inject a webcam feed into the Milkdrop engine (alpha channel included) https://vimeo.com/599028390 https://vimeo.com/599028390 Also useful for recording the visuals of a VJ performance at full resolution without needing to sacrifice a whole monitor. But typically Spout is used to share a video steam directly on the GPU between apps, such as Resolume and MadMapper.
rubychill 4y ago
I remember having a subscription to xfire back in 2012, apparently the same year that OBS 1.0 was released. Having such a high quality piece of open source software as the defacto standard for video recording/streaming is quite nice alongside Audacity for audio recording.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  XFire, now that's a throwback...
LanceH 4y ago
For those who haven't tried it, you can mount the output of OBS as a camera, which can be used as input for something like Zoom. So you can add graphics, multiple angles, switch between different views, etc...
- joshstrange 4y ago
  You can also overlay your iPhone/iPad screen on your camera feed. I literally set this up just yesterday after being frustrated with trying to hold up my iPhone to show something in a zoom. I know Zoom offers a way to share your iPhone screen (like a screenshare) but it can be flakey (the airplay version is more flakey) and sometimes I don't want to throw the whole meeting into chaos by starting a screenshare. Now I can just fire up OBS, switch my camera in Zoom to the OBS virtual webcam (which shows my main webcam), then toggle on my iPhone source and drag it anywhere I want in the frame.
- platz 4y ago
  unfortunately it does add a bit of lag which I find makes the technique somewhat untenable.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    Not sure why this is being downvoted. I have a colleague who uses an OBS virtual webcam setup like this, and it's really disconcerting having a conversation with them, compared to others who don't use it, because of the additional lag. Their setup may have some specific problem though.
    - Rantenki 4y ago
      That's a configuration problem, and not hard to correct. Tell him to go into the audio settings, then "advanced audio settings", and add the "sync offset" in milliseconds required to bring the audio and video into sync. Also, it's likely that his camera is mostly at fault; OBS with my Logitech camera doesn't have any significant lag. OBS itself has very little lag.
fredsmith219 4y ago
I have Google Fi as my phone service, so I can make and receive calls from my PC. I use OBS to record my important calls with big companies. I always smirk when I hear "this call may be recorded". You bet your ass it's being recorded. The recordings have saved me money and aggravation more than once.
- jhugo 4y ago
  Depending on where you live, this can backfire on you if you don't inform the other party that you're recording them. (IIRC, in some locations, "at least one" party needs to know the call is being recorded — so since you know, it's fine. In others, all parties need to be informed.)
  - bjt 4y ago
    Yes. https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations/ https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...
- Pakdef 4y ago
  Ocenaudio can probably also do that
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  Gotta check recording laws, of course! But I’ve done the same. I recorded a transaction between me and another person using OBS. OBS made it easy to add in the discord chat overlayed with our zoom call. It recorded everything to disk in one file, audio video and the chat overlay. All in real time. OBS is just an amazing product.
  - gwd 4y ago
    > Gotta check recording laws, of course! There's a weekly online meeting for work that I record, and the first thing on every recording is me saying, "Right, so I've started recording." Probably overkill, but it takes almost no effort, and prevents just about any possible misunderstandings. The only thing that's a bit of a pain is that the meeting app (understandably) doesn't reflect my own sound back to me; so I have to send the mic separately to OBS and to the meeting app, so that both the recording and the live meeting can hear my voice. That in turn means I have to mute in two places separately if I want neither one to (for instance) hear my crying toddler come into the room. That's not OBS's fault, and could probably be solved with yet another layer of software... but probably not worth it to me to set up at this point in time.
platz 4y ago
I'm not a streamer, but I find OBS is great for other uses. The main things I use OBS for is: - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time. - routing master windows audio through a compressor/limiter when listening to videos or streams that have poor leveling (though you need to install a virtual audio output in windows to do this - I found something called CABLE that works. Then windows outputs to CABLE, OBS reads CABLE into desktop audio source, and then you monitor that on you speakers/headphones, so you can now add audio filters to desktop audio source.) - adjusting gamma/contrast/brightness of webcams (but not during face to face video calls; OBS does introduce lag which limits the usefullness of this)
- usrn 4y ago
  > - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time. FFMPEG alone (well, with the pulseaudio loopback) can do this. It can also stream to stuff like twitch with no extra software. OBS is great but I feel like it's overkill for a lot of what people do.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    FFMPEG also requires a command line which makes it completely unusable for nearly everyone.
  - ehsankia 4y ago
    Good luck figure out the command to compose even a simple scene with a webcam on top of a desktop feed, let alone switching inputs or mixing audio. All of which are very basic thing you'd want to do when creating a screen recording. Meanwhile it's 4-5 clicks in OBS.
  - raptorfactor 4y ago
    Imo it's the opposite. Learning to use FFMPEG feels like overkill when OBS makes simple tasks simple.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    Low latency hardware encoding and muxing with ffmpeg can be rather tricky depending on your setup. OBS works out of the box on every platform. If you’ve never measured end-to-end latency, your viewers are missing out.
deleted 4y ago
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na85 4y ago
OBS is great. I make WWII combat flight simulator videos for youtube using OBS to record gameplay and do some light editing with Da Vinci Resolve to show teachable moments.
IncRnd 4y ago
OBS is in my workflow similar to many other people here. Video Camera -> OBS -> Internet -> nginx server -> HLS -> stream to browsers.
- rjuyal 4y ago
  HLS?
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    By HLS I mean streaming to browsers. HLS is HTTP Live Streaming.
godelmachine 4y ago
Have been using OBS for over a year coz Grabilla is not supported on my new company laptop. A huge learning curve is needed to understand OBS. For ex - I have still not been able to figure out how to record audio using AirPods Pro Secondly, whenever I connect an external monitor to my primary laptop, the audio is not recorded. Some challenges I face while using OBS. Many a times it's really frustrating
- rg111 4y ago
  > A huge learning curve is needed to understand OBS. A big no. You can start streaming or recording with OBS within twenty minutes of installing it. I did. Never used it before. I wanted a simple coding set-up where the whole screen is the main source and my webcam feed is in the corner as a box. > Secondly, whenever I connect an external monitor to my primary laptop, the audio is not recorded. Doesn't happen with me. Try restarting with the monitor added. I use a condenser microphone, a Wacom graphics tablet (kudos to them for first class Linuc support), a webcam, an external monitor, and so on. If you want to start streaming or recording within thirty mimutes of installing a SW, use OBS.
  - godelmachine 4y ago
    I connect to the same external monitor everyday in my office and both are restarted daily - my primary laptop as well as the secondary monitor. Never has the audio been captured in this setup.
    - rg111 4y ago
      Can you capture audio otherwise? I mean, without OBS?
      - godelmachine 4y ago
        Yes, all the time.
        4y ago
Hard_Space 4y ago
Timely - I discovered OBS only last week, and am consistently amazed by it. Only thing missing is the ability to draw crop areas prior to a screengrab/video.
- AB1908 4y ago
  I feel like I've seen this. Can you check stuff like capture settings?
- corobo 4y ago
  I'm not certain what you're needing but if you want to make changes to a scene before making it live you can enable studio mode, this gives you a preview of the new scene before you actually switch to it If it's literally just cropping you're after hold alt while resizing the element
NiekvdMaas 4y ago
Self-promo: In case anyone is interested in controlling OBS remotely, you can use OBS-web: https://github.com/Niek/obs-web https://github.com/Niek/obs-web It's not a full reimplementation of the UI, but offers the most often used controls so you can manage a livestream from e.g. a tablet or phone.
synu 4y ago
I recently started a company focused on providing a cloud backend for OBS - all the collaboration bits (script writing, storyboarding), reviews, and publishing/distribution. All the workflows you do outside of OBS itself, basically, and integrated with OBS through a plugin. We also sponsor OBS with a $10k/mo donation. If this is a problem you’re having I’d love to talk about it, or even if you just want to share your experience of what works well for you. My email is in my profile.
rg111 4y ago
I have a beefy laptop GPU, but cannot utilize it with NVIDIA Broadcast because I use Linux! ;( I hope someday soon I can use it in Linux. In Windows it is very easy to use the output of NVIDIA Broadcast as a scene in OBS.
unlog 4y ago
I do not understand the five-second minimum delay I got..... nginx and obs paired at a 1s key frame interval still gives a five-second delay on football matches, which is very annoying because you heard your neighbors before actually watching the footage, and no, this is not solved by any streaming service.
- keerthiko 4y ago
  There is a stream delay setting in OBS — check your settings on the source setup running OBS. 5 seconds sounds like the default, you could potentially set it to 0. This is in place to a) head off any network dropped frames and allow OBS to backfill the stream buffer. At 0 seconds you may see slightly more quality drop from 1080p to 480p if your stream source upload bandwidth is unreliable than if you left this at 5+ seconds. b) for game streamers of competitive multiplayer video games, to protect them from "stream cheating" where an opponent recognizes their in-game ID and then looks at their stream to get additional information in the middle of a match (eg: looking at their hand in poker). With many games a 5 second delay nullifies this issue, and many streamers set it to more like 30-45 seconds depending on the game they play.
- nodja 4y ago
  I've tried to deal with this many years back, I think the latency is inherent in the protocols, there's layers like 2/3 layers of buffers that by the time the frame reaches the client several seconds have already passed. When I was researching this back then, there was only one protocol in OBS that was fast enough, but it was proprietary. It was called FTL and was what Mixer used (twitch competitor, now dead). Mixer was so fast that I could move my mouse from the stream window, latency was probably very similar to cloud gaming services today. Not sure what you're trying to attempt, but if you want low latency webrtc will probably be the best performing because it's p2p, however there's no official support for it in OBS and client support is weird, you might have to cook up some webrtc webpage just for it, but if you want sub 100ms latency it's the way to go. The alternative that OBS supports is SRT, but I have never used it, the arch wiki claims it has ~1s delay. Maybe the 1to1 version lowers it and it seems simple enough if you can use ffplay/vlc where you're watching. SRT Project Page: https://github.com/Haivision/srt https://github.com/Haivision/srt Live Server Implementation: https://github.com/Edward-Wu/srt-live-server https://github.com/Edward-Wu/srt-live-server 1to1 Client Implementation: https://github.com/Haivision/srt/blob/master/apps/srt-live-transmit.cpp https://github.com/Haivision/srt/blob/master/apps/srt-live-t...
Schinken_ 4y ago
OBS is an amazing piece of software. I remember when I first dabbled in livestreaming and everything was either pricey or broken. I am currently using OBS solely as a method to grab screens/windows and use a custom plugin to stream that to multiple WebRTC users to create something like a low latency game streaming for friends. OBS saves me a ton of time since I don't have to implement X11 / Wayland / Mac / Windows DXGI screen capture methods as well as a way to composite several of those into a nice picture. The development discord is hit or miss though but with a bit of luck and digging (and thanks to other plugins) one can piece together how to write a plugin.
amai 4y ago
Sorry to spoil the party, but my experience with OBS for creating a webinar video was not good. OBS is powerful, but it lacks decent defaults. Creating a simple overlay of my webcam in circular form over the presentation was not possible. But even a rectangular side-by-side of my webcam next to the presentation didn't look good ( the position was always wrong by a few pixels) because you have to position everything manually. It would be very nice if one could position things by selecting say top left corner, center, bottom right corner and also simply select shapes for the video view. For doing webinars I'm now using the functionality built into Apple Keynote, which is great and simple to use: https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/add-live-video-tan6a7b90433/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/add-live-video-tan6a... Also - in opposition to OBS - Keynote will not use 100% of my CPU to render the live presentation.
- Daunk 4y ago
  You can absolutely have your webcam take a circular form. Just apply a mask to your webcam as a filter and use any image you want to make it take that shape.
  - amai 4y ago
    But you have to first create a such a mask with some image software: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Filters-Guide#image-maskblend https://obsproject.com/wiki/Filters-Guide#image-maskblend This costs a lot of time and generates questions, for example what resolution should my mask image be? OBS doesn't offer even the simplest default shapes like a circle. This is annoying and makes OBS not suited for beginners and simple tasks.
    - corobo 4y ago
      Does it really? I mean you can download one that someone else has already made or you could whip one up in 20 seconds in whatever design app you use - draw a black circle on a white background and you're done. Add some feathering to the circle if you want to get fancy. Not to assume you know how to use masks of course, but this information is readily available when googling something like "webcam circle obs" Resolution wise I just match the input rather than think about it. If my webcam is 1080p, so is my mask. I would like if you could natively round elements for sure, dunno when I'd use personally it but it could be useful. There are plugins to do this for you out there too but learning masks and other filters is a super useful skill if you're getting into video Additionally regarding positioning of things from the top level comment I'm pretty sure there's a positioning menu when you right click that lets you chuck things to the top/bottom/right/left etc
NonNefarious 4y ago
What about it?
wdb 4y ago
Is this similar to Streamyard that I keep hearing YTers talk about?
- corobo 4y ago
  Similar in that it does the same end result (at a glance at streamyard), except that's a service and OBS is installed software
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
I'm still looking for a backend/headless tool that works like OBS that can run on servers.
29athrowaway 4y ago
You can disable the preview once you've set up your scene and make it a bit faster.
jjice 4y ago
I remember using a host of god awful screen capture software as a kid. All of it was poor quality, except for a few that cost more money than 11 year old me could afford (Fraps was ~$40, Camtasia was ~$200 if I recall). Then OBS stepped in and changed the game. Not only is it open source and free, but it's debatably the best out there. Super easy to start with, and there's enough of a community that you can figure out the advanced stuff as an amateur like myself.
swyx 4y ago
heard a great interview of the creator of OBS recently https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/obs-with-jim-bailey/id1607792894?i=1000550017010 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/obs-with-jim-bailey/id... surprisingly its not that old!
mrkramer 4y ago
It's crazy that such a powerful software is free of charge and open source. Imagine how much money they could've made if it was closed source and licensed. Millions or maybe billions. I always had a wet dream about making a big SaaS company e.g. Adobe or Oracle so I'm always amazed that people put so much effort into FOSS.
nunez 4y ago
OBS is a blessing; hard to believe that it's still free. You can get a lot of mileage with it.

669 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

On reading this story I went to the OBS/Open Broadcaster Software website and I came across OBS's privacy statement/policy and to say that I was alarmed would be a gross understatement as it seems its developers can violate a user's privacy in just about every way possible. After doing a quick scan of these posts I note that no one else has raised this matter. I've not used OBS so I'd be interested to know from users about how much 'phoning home' the software actually does in practice. Seems to me the effective extent of its privacy policy may be the limiting factor whether one would use OBS or not.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

radiojasper 4y ago

As an outdoor streamer, I love OBS! It's hosted in the cloud [0] for me, so I don't have to leave a PC running at home when I'm out streaming. I can control it through NOALBS [1], which basically means I type !start in my chat and my OBS starts streaming for me. [0] https://antiscuff.com https://antiscuff.com [1] https://github.com/715209/nginx-obs-automatic-low-bitrate-switching https://github.com/715209/nginx-obs-automatic-low-bitrate-sw... PS, I have no affiliation with either of these companies / projects - I just use their services and wanted to praise OBS.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Is this about a new release? or just a fan

oneepic 4y ago

I'm curious. What is the point of reposting this?

taylorbuley 4y ago
Oh, the joy of finding this software for the first time! I envy the feeling of someone seeing with fresh eyes how powerful this suite is.
metadat 4y ago
Agreed, I thought this was posted already within the past six months or so. Edit: Found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 "TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS" (1545 points, 521 comments, 6 months ago) p.s. thanks for the overeager downvotes, I've stopped downing any threads on HN unless they're aggressive or otherwise egregiously bad intent. Ymmv
velcrovan 4y ago
Maybe they finally released official builds for Apple Silicon after 2 years?
jhugo 4y ago
For today's lucky ten thousand. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
gwd 4y ago
I've known of OBS for a while, but I still enjoy reading the commentary from the HN crowd; you have a chance to learn of competing (possibly better) software, interesting setups or uses you hadn't thought of, "adjacent" software or hardware that is useful in conjunction with it, or gotchas or tricks where the software is rough or tends to shine. Having "current" commentary is also useful, so having it reposted every year or two is good even for those who have read previous discussions about it.

CheeseLovers 4y ago

I'm sure most people who would benefit from this software have heard of it.

pettycashstash2 4y ago
I for one never heard of it and am planning on trying it out.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
I found it on my own, but I had to do a bit of digging.. I wanted a way to capture my screen and didn't want to run any non-FOSS software if I could avoid it As of a few years ago, anyway, there were a LOT of half-assed apps out there to do a bad job of the same thing, and they were dominating the search results
- Jistern 4y ago
  Try this Google search... "Most popular FOSS software for recording your screen" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=Most+popular+FOSS+software+for+recording+your+screen https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=Most+p...
carpo 4y ago
I can guarantee that all of those people at some point in their lives hadn't heard of it. People have to learn about it somewhere, why not here?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png

Krisjohn 4y ago

An oldie, but a goodie. I recently dusted off my install after ManyCam re-wrote the definition of "lifetime" and screwed over a bunch of its most loyal customers.

bgro 4y ago
Oldie? Goodie? OBS is currently the defacto standard in streaming software. There is no real alternative. Any alternative is a reskinned OBS. Streaming aside, it's a (the?) category leader in screen recording and audio manipulation.
- eropple 4y ago
  There are plenty of real alternatives. I'm partial to vMix for live-streaming; I ran Demuxed 2020 and 2021 through my vMix deck from the comfort of my office and through 2020-21 ran about sixty high-production fighting game tournaments off of the same. I like vMix because its audio mixing is excellent and WebRTC-integrated chat comes out of the box, plus data-driven lower thirds and good remoting solutions and MIDI controls for script/function control. Other folks quite like VT-X and TriCaster setups. Or Wirecast, or XSplit (itself notably big in some circles). The only "reskinned OBS" I know of is StreamLabs OBS, which, yeah, isn't great, but there are quite a few alternatives. On the audio front, I'm not sure calling it "the category leader in audio manipulation" holds much water, given that OBS's audio facilities are notably its weakest point. (Not entirely their fault. The licensing around ASIO is weird.) Voicemeeter plus your DAW of choice come to mind. Or, for live mixing directly in your video mixer--well, vMix and NewTek both are pretty good choices there, too. This is not to take anything away from the OBS project or team; it's quite good at what it does, and if your needs are in their crosshairs or you're willing to expend as much effort as necessary to build what doesn't exist around it you can put on a great show using OBS. (And in particular I think their game-capture logic is best-of-breed; when running events I still use OBS as an ffmpeg frontend on my satellite systems because I don't have to think about game capture.) But the idea that there are no "real alternatives" isn't correct, particularly when you have more moving pieces involved and you don't want to--or, for less programmery types, aren't able to--spend your days writing duct-tape code around your video mixer.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

OBS is an awesome app. Its interface is a bit "awkward," but not too bad. It has many tools that are not available elsewhere.

monk_e_boy 4y ago
I came here to say the same. My son (10) uses it a lot, he's figured it all out by just trying things. The other day he had an issue with a slight echo in the audio. He mentioned it when we were out of the house. When we got home I had the idea that maybe he'd added the Audio Input Capture twice ... but I couldn't think of why that would happen. When i mentioned it to him, he'd already figured it out and solved it. He had added two audio inputs when he was trying to capture his headset mic and his desktop mic (with phone taped to it, playing music) ... I dunno what the point of this story is ... OBS has a weird interface, but it reminds me of the good old days, when you just made it work and the users just figured it out. I think the polished UI/UX we have these days makes us complacent. Afraid of poking and prodding.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I think "polished" UX usually requires a dumbed down interface and is otherwise exceedingly difficult for necessarily complex workflows such as broadcasting. If your product isn't quite opinionated on the one right way to do things (and only a specific kind of thing) you can create a really shiny UX. If your product needs to be many things to many kinds of people, stuff ends up a bit messy but only to the detriment to extreme beginners.
  - corobo 4y ago
    The first comparison that comes into mind is old.Reddit vs new Reddit If that's what polishing is please leave OBS all smudged and gross haha
- Jistern 4y ago
  I adamantly disagree. The problem is explained in... Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro https://bothsidesofthetable.com/design-for-the-novice-configure-for-the-pro-b259c6b4662a https://bothsidesofthetable.com/design-for-the-novice-config...

phkahler 4y ago

Does it have a freaking equalizer yet? Seriously. I don't want to research plugins or pay for one of the most fundamental signal processing blocks.

naikrovek 4y ago
> Does it have a freaking equalizer yet? > Seriously. I don't want to research plugins or pay for one of the most fundamental signal processing blocks. It’s amazing how often I see this “I am owed feature X” attitude… and I don’t get it. If it isn’t useful for you, then just don’t comment. OBS is a VST plugin host, so there are probably a million equalizers, but you seriously don’t want to research plugins.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> It’s amazing how often I see this “I am owed feature X” attitude… and I don’t get it. I'm not being an entitled user here. OBS has several audio blocks including noise gate and some others that I used when I casually tried it out. Those were necessary to get my crappy microphone to sounds OK. I was baffled by the lack of an EQ and it turns out the project actively does not want one. My impression is that if someone submitted a pull request with that functionality they would reject it. Perhaps I'm wrong, but if I'm right that's (IMHO) really absurd. BTW if I am wrong and they would accept it let me know, I might just take a stab at implementation.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  OBS is a VST plugin host I had no idea. The idea of something other than a DAW being a VST host seems bonkers to me, yet in the case of OBS makes perfect sense.
  - eropple 4y ago
    The catch here is that OBS doesn't support a way to bus together multiple audio sources and apply plugins to their downmix, which limits the effectiveness of being a VST plugin host. When I use OBS I find myself having to route audio (both analog and digital sources) over a virtual audio cable to another application if I want to apply nontrivial effects chains (and eating the resultant latency/fighting with audio-video sync). It's doable, but it can be intimidating if you don't know exactly what you're looking at.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

As a note, OBS is a really solid capture tool for... anything. I do a lot of old VHS conversions and found OBS is vastly superior to the in-box garbage with most capture devices.

xen2xen1 4y ago
Do tell? I need to be doing that. Have a million VHS from my parents.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  I use a roughly $6 HDMI capture dongle <- a $10 RCA to HDMI adapter <- an old VCR, and OBS is the capture software I use. Comes out pretty well, though you do basically end up watching each tape doing it.
  - cdelsolar 4y ago
    Can you tell me about this 6 dollar capture dongle? How come people pay hundreds for stuff like ElGato HD whatever to capture and stream their video games? Can a cheap dongle do this too?
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      Apparently I paid like $15 or something, but anyways, this is what I bought, prices have changed a bit since then, but identical devices are out there under various ASINs/labels: RCA to HDMI: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RX69KR8/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RX69KR8/ HDMI capture: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088CWQGN5/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088CWQGN5/ As far as game capture, it probably depends on a few things. Name brand definitely has significant markup, but they also include software and such as well. Note that my capture dongle here records in 1080P only, and you'll spend a lot more for 4K-capable hardware, and fancier capture devices offer HDMI pass-through so you can both capture and display on a screen, and this does not. Now, if you want to play your games in OBS at 1080p, this might work for you, I'm not sure where performance starts to degrade for a cheapy dongle like this, but I think there's probably a good reason gaming setups use a little bit higher end setups.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

It's very solid software. Extremely flexible and functional, but not too hard to pick up, and they've made it easier over the years. Free too. Can't complain about it. If I ever need high-quality recordings, I use CQP and it comes out fantastic, none of the awful compression artifacts.

reilly3000 4y ago

When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable. I was shooting video on digital 8, editing in Final Cut Pro 4 which was the new hotness, and trying but failing to use DSS on my college network. Actual streaming at scale required a massive server and a massive license from RealNetworks. If I wanted to do anything with animation, it was all $$$$$ software. This all took place in a shared lab at my college with stuff I could never afford on my own. Today, people at that age are making lucrative careers out of streaming then doing the things they love out of their bedrooms using OBS. Blender has enabled all kinds of amazing creators, from animation to video editing to 3D printing and even (basic) architecture. Kicad makes EDA! approachable. My teen son has been able to dabble in all of the above in his spare time without spending a dime. I’m in awe of the power of free software and the amazing engineering work that has enabled these projects to be good enough for real professionals to choose first. I hope we see Godot achieve world domination in gaming, GIMP in graphics, and Libra Office + Collabra in productivity. The people who have given us these tools deserve the highest accolades.

sundvor 4y ago
We've come an incredibly long way since Genlock on the Commodore Amiga! I use OBS Studio with my Streamdeck, a Logitech Streamcam, NVIDIA Broadcast, a condenser microphone via a Steinberg XLR audio interface along with Elgato Key lights and iHue fill lights for my working from home office Google Meets. Startup and shut downs of the entire stack including launching into Google Meets are automated with the deck (one button to macro up, one to macro down), and with proper lighting as well as NVIDIA Broadcast, the audio and video quality is just amazing. The amount of tech I'm throwing at how I connect with Meet may seem like overkill, but it really makes a lot of sense to spend some time on what's my primary interface with my colleagues and customers. If I need to quickly mute my image, a scene in OBS that shows "be right back" is an immediate Streamdeck key press away. Next to it is the audio source mute key. It's great.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  Oh man that sounds like an awesome rig. I didn’t realize Nvidia Broadcast can reduce background noise like keystrokes until you mentioned it here. Does that really work? If so I now have a reason to buy a new GPU and finally use my cherry mx blues again.

jancsika 4y ago

So if I wanted to stream some live coding, can I do the whole thing on my XPS laptop with OBS? What's the setup look like for someone who has done this?

broodbucket 4y ago
Open OBS, add a window capture, maybe add your webcam in the corner, go to settings, put in your stream key for Twitch/YouTube/whatever, maybe tinker with the quality settings (bitrate/encoding/etc), click start streaming.
- jreese 4y ago
  Even better, OBS now supports directly logging into Twitch, which then also gives you windows to set stream description and see user chat, all within OBS.
  - broodbucket 4y ago
    I don't see that in my OBS and I'm on the latest version, is it yet to make it to a tagged release or is that in one of the OBS forks like Streamlabs? EDIT: Looks like it's in the source for a long time but my distro doesn't compile OBS with the built-in browser, which I'm guessing is a requirement
    - fenrirthviti 4y ago
      Correct, our service integrations are reliant on CEF and the browser source features. Our Flatpak is an option if your distro's repo doesn't have it compiled for some reason.
mylons 4y ago
yes. on modern hardware, OBS is relatively lightweight until you add several video sources. for coding you should be fine if your laptop is less than 5+ years old
djbusby 4y ago

nuclearsugar 4y ago

OBS is quite useful for recording Spout or NDI video streams. I use these two OBS plugins often - https://github.com/Off-World-Live/obs-spout2-plugin https://github.com/Off-World-Live/obs-spout2-plugin https://github.com/Palakis/obs-ndi https://github.com/Palakis/obs-ndi

platz 4y ago
what do you use Spout for
- nuclearsugar 4y ago
  An interesting use-case is to inject a webcam feed into the Milkdrop engine (alpha channel included) https://vimeo.com/599028390 https://vimeo.com/599028390 Also useful for recording the visuals of a VJ performance at full resolution without needing to sacrifice a whole monitor. But typically Spout is used to share a video steam directly on the GPU between apps, such as Resolume and MadMapper.

rubychill 4y ago

I remember having a subscription to xfire back in 2012, apparently the same year that OBS 1.0 was released. Having such a high quality piece of open source software as the defacto standard for video recording/streaming is quite nice alongside Audacity for audio recording.

ehsankia 4y ago
XFire, now that's a throwback...

LanceH 4y ago

For those who haven't tried it, you can mount the output of OBS as a camera, which can be used as input for something like Zoom. So you can add graphics, multiple angles, switch between different views, etc...

joshstrange 4y ago
You can also overlay your iPhone/iPad screen on your camera feed. I literally set this up just yesterday after being frustrated with trying to hold up my iPhone to show something in a zoom. I know Zoom offers a way to share your iPhone screen (like a screenshare) but it can be flakey (the airplay version is more flakey) and sometimes I don't want to throw the whole meeting into chaos by starting a screenshare. Now I can just fire up OBS, switch my camera in Zoom to the OBS virtual webcam (which shows my main webcam), then toggle on my iPhone source and drag it anywhere I want in the frame.
platz 4y ago
unfortunately it does add a bit of lag which I find makes the technique somewhat untenable.
- jhugo 4y ago
  Not sure why this is being downvoted. I have a colleague who uses an OBS virtual webcam setup like this, and it's really disconcerting having a conversation with them, compared to others who don't use it, because of the additional lag. Their setup may have some specific problem though.
  - Rantenki 4y ago
    That's a configuration problem, and not hard to correct. Tell him to go into the audio settings, then "advanced audio settings", and add the "sync offset" in milliseconds required to bring the audio and video into sync. Also, it's likely that his camera is mostly at fault; OBS with my Logitech camera doesn't have any significant lag. OBS itself has very little lag.

fredsmith219 4y ago

I have Google Fi as my phone service, so I can make and receive calls from my PC. I use OBS to record my important calls with big companies. I always smirk when I hear "this call may be recorded". You bet your ass it's being recorded. The recordings have saved me money and aggravation more than once.

jhugo 4y ago
Depending on where you live, this can backfire on you if you don't inform the other party that you're recording them. (IIRC, in some locations, "at least one" party needs to know the call is being recorded — so since you know, it's fine. In others, all parties need to be informed.)
- bjt 4y ago
  Yes. https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations/ https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...
Pakdef 4y ago
Ocenaudio can probably also do that
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
Gotta check recording laws, of course! But I’ve done the same. I recorded a transaction between me and another person using OBS. OBS made it easy to add in the discord chat overlayed with our zoom call. It recorded everything to disk in one file, audio video and the chat overlay. All in real time. OBS is just an amazing product.
- gwd 4y ago
  > Gotta check recording laws, of course! There's a weekly online meeting for work that I record, and the first thing on every recording is me saying, "Right, so I've started recording." Probably overkill, but it takes almost no effort, and prevents just about any possible misunderstandings. The only thing that's a bit of a pain is that the meeting app (understandably) doesn't reflect my own sound back to me; so I have to send the mic separately to OBS and to the meeting app, so that both the recording and the live meeting can hear my voice. That in turn means I have to mute in two places separately if I want neither one to (for instance) hear my crying toddler come into the room. That's not OBS's fault, and could probably be solved with yet another layer of software... but probably not worth it to me to set up at this point in time.

platz 4y ago

I'm not a streamer, but I find OBS is great for other uses. The main things I use OBS for is: - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time. - routing master windows audio through a compressor/limiter when listening to videos or streams that have poor leveling (though you need to install a virtual audio output in windows to do this - I found something called CABLE that works. Then windows outputs to CABLE, OBS reads CABLE into desktop audio source, and then you monitor that on you speakers/headphones, so you can now add audio filters to desktop audio source.) - adjusting gamma/contrast/brightness of webcams (but not during face to face video calls; OBS does introduce lag which limits the usefullness of this)

usrn 4y ago
> - Recording screen or window, while recording desktop audio and mic at the same time. FFMPEG alone (well, with the pulseaudio loopback) can do this. It can also stream to stuff like twitch with no extra software. OBS is great but I feel like it's overkill for a lot of what people do.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  FFMPEG also requires a command line which makes it completely unusable for nearly everyone.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  Good luck figure out the command to compose even a simple scene with a webcam on top of a desktop feed, let alone switching inputs or mixing audio. All of which are very basic thing you'd want to do when creating a screen recording. Meanwhile it's 4-5 clicks in OBS.
- raptorfactor 4y ago
  Imo it's the opposite. Learning to use FFMPEG feels like overkill when OBS makes simple tasks simple.
- NavinF 4y ago
  Low latency hardware encoding and muxing with ffmpeg can be rather tricky depending on your setup. OBS works out of the box on every platform. If you’ve never measured end-to-end latency, your viewers are missing out.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

na85 4y ago

OBS is great. I make WWII combat flight simulator videos for youtube using OBS to record gameplay and do some light editing with Da Vinci Resolve to show teachable moments.

IncRnd 4y ago

OBS is in my workflow similar to many other people here. Video Camera -> OBS -> Internet -> nginx server -> HLS -> stream to browsers.

rjuyal 4y ago
HLS?
- IncRnd 4y ago
  By HLS I mean streaming to browsers. HLS is HTTP Live Streaming.

godelmachine 4y ago

Have been using OBS for over a year coz Grabilla is not supported on my new company laptop. A huge learning curve is needed to understand OBS. For ex - I have still not been able to figure out how to record audio using AirPods Pro Secondly, whenever I connect an external monitor to my primary laptop, the audio is not recorded. Some challenges I face while using OBS. Many a times it's really frustrating

rg111 4y ago
> A huge learning curve is needed to understand OBS. A big no. You can start streaming or recording with OBS within twenty minutes of installing it. I did. Never used it before. I wanted a simple coding set-up where the whole screen is the main source and my webcam feed is in the corner as a box. > Secondly, whenever I connect an external monitor to my primary laptop, the audio is not recorded. Doesn't happen with me. Try restarting with the monitor added. I use a condenser microphone, a Wacom graphics tablet (kudos to them for first class Linuc support), a webcam, an external monitor, and so on. If you want to start streaming or recording within thirty mimutes of installing a SW, use OBS.
- godelmachine 4y ago
  I connect to the same external monitor everyday in my office and both are restarted daily - my primary laptop as well as the secondary monitor. Never has the audio been captured in this setup.
  - rg111 4y ago
    Can you capture audio otherwise? I mean, without OBS?
    - godelmachine 4y ago
      Yes, all the time.
      - 4y ago

Hard_Space 4y ago

Timely - I discovered OBS only last week, and am consistently amazed by it. Only thing missing is the ability to draw crop areas prior to a screengrab/video.

AB1908 4y ago
I feel like I've seen this. Can you check stuff like capture settings?
corobo 4y ago
I'm not certain what you're needing but if you want to make changes to a scene before making it live you can enable studio mode, this gives you a preview of the new scene before you actually switch to it If it's literally just cropping you're after hold alt while resizing the element

NiekvdMaas 4y ago

Self-promo: In case anyone is interested in controlling OBS remotely, you can use OBS-web: https://github.com/Niek/obs-web https://github.com/Niek/obs-web It's not a full reimplementation of the UI, but offers the most often used controls so you can manage a livestream from e.g. a tablet or phone.

synu 4y ago

I recently started a company focused on providing a cloud backend for OBS - all the collaboration bits (script writing, storyboarding), reviews, and publishing/distribution. All the workflows you do outside of OBS itself, basically, and integrated with OBS through a plugin. We also sponsor OBS with a $10k/mo donation. If this is a problem you’re having I’d love to talk about it, or even if you just want to share your experience of what works well for you. My email is in my profile.

rg111 4y ago

I have a beefy laptop GPU, but cannot utilize it with NVIDIA Broadcast because I use Linux! ;( I hope someday soon I can use it in Linux. In Windows it is very easy to use the output of NVIDIA Broadcast as a scene in OBS.

unlog 4y ago

I do not understand the five-second minimum delay I got..... nginx and obs paired at a 1s key frame interval still gives a five-second delay on football matches, which is very annoying because you heard your neighbors before actually watching the footage, and no, this is not solved by any streaming service.

keerthiko 4y ago
There is a stream delay setting in OBS — check your settings on the source setup running OBS. 5 seconds sounds like the default, you could potentially set it to 0. This is in place to a) head off any network dropped frames and allow OBS to backfill the stream buffer. At 0 seconds you may see slightly more quality drop from 1080p to 480p if your stream source upload bandwidth is unreliable than if you left this at 5+ seconds. b) for game streamers of competitive multiplayer video games, to protect them from "stream cheating" where an opponent recognizes their in-game ID and then looks at their stream to get additional information in the middle of a match (eg: looking at their hand in poker). With many games a 5 second delay nullifies this issue, and many streamers set it to more like 30-45 seconds depending on the game they play.
nodja 4y ago
I've tried to deal with this many years back, I think the latency is inherent in the protocols, there's layers like 2/3 layers of buffers that by the time the frame reaches the client several seconds have already passed. When I was researching this back then, there was only one protocol in OBS that was fast enough, but it was proprietary. It was called FTL and was what Mixer used (twitch competitor, now dead). Mixer was so fast that I could move my mouse from the stream window, latency was probably very similar to cloud gaming services today. Not sure what you're trying to attempt, but if you want low latency webrtc will probably be the best performing because it's p2p, however there's no official support for it in OBS and client support is weird, you might have to cook up some webrtc webpage just for it, but if you want sub 100ms latency it's the way to go. The alternative that OBS supports is SRT, but I have never used it, the arch wiki claims it has ~1s delay. Maybe the 1to1 version lowers it and it seems simple enough if you can use ffplay/vlc where you're watching. SRT Project Page: https://github.com/Haivision/srt https://github.com/Haivision/srt Live Server Implementation: https://github.com/Edward-Wu/srt-live-server https://github.com/Edward-Wu/srt-live-server 1to1 Client Implementation: https://github.com/Haivision/srt/blob/master/apps/srt-live-transmit.cpp https://github.com/Haivision/srt/blob/master/apps/srt-live-t...

Schinken_ 4y ago

OBS is an amazing piece of software. I remember when I first dabbled in livestreaming and everything was either pricey or broken. I am currently using OBS solely as a method to grab screens/windows and use a custom plugin to stream that to multiple WebRTC users to create something like a low latency game streaming for friends. OBS saves me a ton of time since I don't have to implement X11 / Wayland / Mac / Windows DXGI screen capture methods as well as a way to composite several of those into a nice picture. The development discord is hit or miss though but with a bit of luck and digging (and thanks to other plugins) one can piece together how to write a plugin.

amai 4y ago

Sorry to spoil the party, but my experience with OBS for creating a webinar video was not good. OBS is powerful, but it lacks decent defaults. Creating a simple overlay of my webcam in circular form over the presentation was not possible. But even a rectangular side-by-side of my webcam next to the presentation didn't look good ( the position was always wrong by a few pixels) because you have to position everything manually. It would be very nice if one could position things by selecting say top left corner, center, bottom right corner and also simply select shapes for the video view. For doing webinars I'm now using the functionality built into Apple Keynote, which is great and simple to use: https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/add-live-video-tan6a7b90433/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/add-live-video-tan6a... Also - in opposition to OBS - Keynote will not use 100% of my CPU to render the live presentation.

Daunk 4y ago
You can absolutely have your webcam take a circular form. Just apply a mask to your webcam as a filter and use any image you want to make it take that shape.
- amai 4y ago
  But you have to first create a such a mask with some image software: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Filters-Guide#image-maskblend https://obsproject.com/wiki/Filters-Guide#image-maskblend This costs a lot of time and generates questions, for example what resolution should my mask image be? OBS doesn't offer even the simplest default shapes like a circle. This is annoying and makes OBS not suited for beginners and simple tasks.
  - corobo 4y ago
    Does it really? I mean you can download one that someone else has already made or you could whip one up in 20 seconds in whatever design app you use - draw a black circle on a white background and you're done. Add some feathering to the circle if you want to get fancy. Not to assume you know how to use masks of course, but this information is readily available when googling something like "webcam circle obs" Resolution wise I just match the input rather than think about it. If my webcam is 1080p, so is my mask. I would like if you could natively round elements for sure, dunno when I'd use personally it but it could be useful. There are plugins to do this for you out there too but learning masks and other filters is a super useful skill if you're getting into video Additionally regarding positioning of things from the top level comment I'm pretty sure there's a positioning menu when you right click that lets you chuck things to the top/bottom/right/left etc

NonNefarious 4y ago

What about it?

wdb 4y ago

Is this similar to Streamyard that I keep hearing YTers talk about?

corobo 4y ago
Similar in that it does the same end result (at a glance at streamyard), except that's a service and OBS is installed software

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

I'm still looking for a backend/headless tool that works like OBS that can run on servers.

29athrowaway 4y ago

You can disable the preview once you've set up your scene and make it a bit faster.

jjice 4y ago

I remember using a host of god awful screen capture software as a kid. All of it was poor quality, except for a few that cost more money than 11 year old me could afford (Fraps was ~$40, Camtasia was ~$200 if I recall). Then OBS stepped in and changed the game. Not only is it open source and free, but it's debatably the best out there. Super easy to start with, and there's enough of a community that you can figure out the advanced stuff as an amateur like myself.

swyx 4y ago

heard a great interview of the creator of OBS recently https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/obs-with-jim-bailey/id1607792894?i=1000550017010 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/obs-with-jim-bailey/id... surprisingly its not that old!

mrkramer 4y ago

It's crazy that such a powerful software is free of charge and open source. Imagine how much money they could've made if it was closed source and licensed. Millions or maybe billions. I always had a wet dream about making a big SaaS company e.g. Adobe or Oracle so I'm always amazed that people put so much effort into FOSS.

nunez 4y ago

OBS is a blessing; hard to believe that it's still free. You can get a lot of mileage with it.