
Show HN: OBS-web – Control OBS from the browser - NiekvdMaas
https://github.com/Niek/obs-web
======
mikece
How is OBS doing in terms of donors/engineers? I suspect the number of people
discovering and using OBS went up exponentially in the past few months... I'm
sure I'm not the only one who went from never having worked with live video
before to running live-streaming for work/church/family meetings/etc and OBS
has been a vital part in that.

I've certainly told many people about OBS and will continue to spread the word
but short of donating I'm not sure how else I can help out (and I'm short on
cash thanks to the lockdown).

~~~
dodgepong
To be frank, it could definitely use help in terms of both engineers and
donors. OBS's userbase has grown from roughly 500k daily users at the
beginning of March 2020 to more than 1.4 million today (on Windows -- I don't
have numbers for Mac or Linux). The project only has one full-time developer,
and he's frequently stretched pretty thin between developing major features,
reviewing pull requests, reviewing RFCs, and having calls with industry
members. Unfortunately the nature of such a complex project (both in terms of
functionality and technology) is that it's hard to find people qualified to
work on it who aren't already dedicated to some other project. More community
contribution from skilled engineers would absolutely be welcome. For example:
[https://github.com/obsproject/obs-
browser/issues/219](https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/issues/219) and
[https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink/issues/56](https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink/issues/56)

And on the subject of donors, it's tough to be able to appropriately
compensate contributors without some amount of stability of income. OBS
accepts donations primarily though Open Collective
([https://opencollective.com/obsproject](https://opencollective.com/obsproject)),
and while there's a good amount in the bank, it's not being replaced as
quickly as the project might need in order to properly fund developers at the
level it needs to in the long term. A broader donor base would certainly help
bring the stability needed to support that sort of effort.

And you make an excellent point with the lockdown. Now's an awkward time to
want to raise funds for the project with so many people struggling
financially. In fact, it's probably reasonable to say that OBS's usage has
increased so much specifically due to the fact that it doesn't require anyone
to pay for it, so it's less likely that the people who use it are able to help
fund it.

I will say that there are efforts underway to hopefully address some of the
systemic shortcomings that the OBS team has in terms of funding and
development bandwidth, but things still move slowly when built on the back of
a largely-volunteer workforce.

~~~
karmelapple
Thank you for posting this! I used OBS a little before the lockdown, and have
used it a couple times during, but I hadn’t seen any reference to an open
collective when I used the software.

Is there anything really obvious in the GUI that I missed? A small reminder,
even after using it a few times, might help unobservant folks who want to
support free software, like myself.

~~~
dodgepong
There's a small link in the About dialog. It could absolutely be promoted
more, though.

------
MR4D
This is kinda neat...

You run OBS in your computer, displaying video from several phones you are
using as NDI video devices, and control all of that on an iPad (or something
else) running a web browser.

Thinking thru this, you can run your whole home studio setup while sitting at
a desk looking like an anchor/host with minimal fuss.

Honestly, I think this will help people up their game on small budget
productions.

I love OBS. Waiting for it to work with Zoom again though (not their fault -
that’s a Zoom thing).

~~~
soylentcola
Does it not work with Zoom on a particular platform? At least as of last
Friday I used it as my virtual cam for a weekly Zoom meetup (mainly just to
add some basic color correction/cropping to my webcam feed). Didn't notice
anything not working, but I only used it on Win10 and didn't do anything
fancy.

~~~
mikece
There is a feature of OBS called OBS-VirtalCam that presents your "program
output" as a webcam on your system which you could select as your webcam input
on Zoom... or Skype or Teams or anything else.

[https://davidwalsh.name/obs-webcam](https://davidwalsh.name/obs-webcam)

~~~
soylentcola
That's what I use for mine. I even messed around with using Snap's PC
application to generate a virtual green screen, then using Snap's virtual cam
as the input into OBS. Then in OBS I do any cropping and color correction
before adding a chromakey for backgrounds and overlays and sending the OBS
virtual cam to WebEx, etc.

Way more elaborate than just buying a green sheet but I didn't have to go
anywhere or buy anything ;)

------
ricklamers
This is awesome! And so incredibly timely for me personally as I was just
about to set up a live streaming set-up tomorrow for a theater in the
Netherlands that requires an operator to switch scenes.

~~~
NiekvdMaas
That's great! Let me know if it works well for you and/or if you have any
suggestions (I'm Dutch myself).

~~~
ricklamers
Will do! I'll use GitHub issues if I run into anything. Fantastisch project ;
)!

------
dotXYZ
This is smart. It's like having Elgato's Stream Deck in the browser. Well
done!

------
zemnmez
I don’t see any authentication on this? can’t any website just make requests
to my obs via localhost if i install this?

~~~
p4bl0
This is also the first thought I had. I checked, the obs-websocket plugin
allows to set a password:

> It is highly recommended to protect obs-websocket with a password against
> unauthorized control. To do this, open the "Websocket server settings"
> dialog under OBS' "Tools" menu. In the settings dialogs, you can enable or
> disable authentication and set a password for it.

(from [https://github.com/Palakis/obs-
websocket](https://github.com/Palakis/obs-websocket)).

------
simlevesque
my last job built this plus much more... almost fully controllable OBS with
scripting in the browser with webrtc. we were deploying GPU instancs in the
cloud and starting headless OBS with a vnc server also available in the
browser so you could edit anything that's not in the web interface.

sadly all closed source.

~~~
Dangeranger
Is is possible that you could author a high level design document of the
process you followed?

This kind of control could be really useful for streamers and instructors who
have production assistants in other physical locations.

~~~
simlevesque
No I sadly can't really talk about the process much more than this or name the
company. We used AWS Elemental and/or Fastly (I left before they choosed).
Wowza is great too but there is a big learning curve.

I left before the ground testing so all I have is theoretical. We had a second
websocket to control our own system over the product where you could make
rooms kinda like Zoom with live editing.

------
DevX101
What are the options for publishing a live stream from the browser with no
desktop app? I'm not talking about WebRTC P2P meeting limited to 10
participants, but a stream that could be published to 100,000+ people. I'm
open to paid development solutions.

~~~
markvdb
Hi! You mean just pick up from the browser, then publish stream to 100k+
people? That's not too difficult...

If you're ok with introducing a little bit of latency, the easiest way forward
is webrtc to rtmp conversion. You could easily introduce headless mixing
capability on top of
[https://github.com/voc/voctomix](https://github.com/voc/voctomix) . We hacked
together a quick and really dirty web frontend in
[https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible](https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible)
. It does the job, so we never felt the urge to change it...

Scaling the stream to ∞ viewers is easy using only free and open source
software.

Feel free to get in touch.

~~~
rexreed
Interesting! We've been looking for a replacement for our webinar platform
which struggles with high load. How can I use Voctomix with guests who can
join from their webcams via browser?

How do you get 100k+ people on a stream without having to have massive
bandwidth? Where is the stream actually hosted?

sorry if I'm asking basic questions.

~~~
markvdb
Scaling a stream is really easy using free and open source software if it's
just broadcasting. rtmp backend, reverse proxy web server and hls. Done.

Scaling live interaction with really large numbers of participants is
problematic both technically and socially. My research hasn't really yielded
anything that can reliably scale beyond ~50 users using only free and open
source software.

------
ponyous
Nice, if streamers exposed this to public with some moderation it could allow
viewers to choose what they want to look at.

~~~
bredren
Would you please go into more detail about what viewers might want to see /
configure for viewing? I’m presuming it is some selection of meta overlays on
top of a primary video feed. Is that correct?

~~~
mrkwse
That's a good example, but I've seen a good few people streaming (usually
people who aren't primarily known as streamers and have dipped in their toe
during the pandemic) and now and again start doing something on their computer
without changing scene from the full screen webcam. A public voting system to
change scene could allow a person's audience to choose the right scene.

Obviously needs guards to make certain scenes ineligible for voting (e.g.,
anything showing the full desktop) so people can't attempt to see anything
sensitive, but allowing certain scenes (e.g., those capturing games) could be
quite useful.

------
pelasaco
I thought they were talking about
[https://build.opensuse.org/](https://build.opensuse.org/)

