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OBS Studio 26.0 (github.com/obsproject)
382 points by haunter on Sept 29, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 154 comments



I have used obs.ninja [1] to pipe phone camera feeds as video inputs to OBS.

I then use the virtual cam plugin to make that my webcam feed. This works great, but what I'd also love to do is take the audio from the phone mic as a browser input and use it as a virtual microphone. I've only been successful by using a VBCable pipe and setting the monitoring device, but what that ends up doing is also playing all of the sound OBS is capturing from my phone into my headphones too, so I get my own voice. If I mute OBS, the monitoring doesn't work, and so I get no audio.

If I capture the audio completely outside OBS with another mic, everything's out-of-sync and I don't have portable audio.

This is so close to a seamless way to turn any phone into a portable webcam with mic, but I haven't figured out that last little piece of the puzzle. However, I wanted to 1) shout out OBS for being such an incredible piece of software, and 2) shout out obs.ninja for what it does. Seriously impressive.

[1]: https://obs.ninja/


You can do just about anything with voicemeter banana and OBS. I was hesitant to install voicemeter since I've been burned by that kind of always-on low level virtual driver software before, but it is so stable and light that I forget it's even running. I needed a fairly complex set up for my D&D streaming:

- send all desktop audio except Zoom output into Ableton live for post processing.

- send desktop audio (sans zoom) from Ableton to twitch via OBS for background music and sound effects.

- send ASIO device input (microphone) from Ableton to zoom after voice FX.

- send zoom output to monitoring headphones only, so I can hear my players, but they can't hear themselves talking over the soundtrack.

This was trivial up set up with voicemeter, and it even has a pretty amazing ASIO virtual insert device that lets you use it like a patch bay for Ableton with sub 10ms latency. It's also donationware so you don't have to pay to try it. The caveat is, while the configuration I use is indeed trivial to set up, the virtual insert device has a very steep learning curve and it took me several days to get it nailed down (though it's simple enough to communicate with two screenshots one you know what you're doing). I'm really impressed by voicemeter and highly recommend it to anyone that dabbles in streaming or video production.


I think I hit the same point as you touch on, in that I identified voicemeeter as the likely solution but due to a rather intimidating number of options I couldn't quite summon the mental clarity to piece together the correct setup to achieve it. Like, I knew conceptually what I was trying to wire together but couldn't quite map it out. With breather's sibling comment, I suspect I'll be able to tease it out now.


Hey, I made a flowchart that illustrates the setup I use with a lot of detail: https://i.imgur.com/cGXeby3.jpg

Hope it's useful!


I just remembered that voicemeter is windows-only, but on the chance that you are using windows You can see my voicemeter setup here: https://forum.vb-audio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1201&p=4282&s...

It looks intimidating but it's actually only a few changed settings. My email address is in my profile if you have any questions.


I was once where you are now.

This completes the puzzle: https://github.com/toadjaune/pulseaudio-config

Thank me later ;)


No, I think I shall thank you right now if it's all the same to you! I'm trying to do this on a Windows box so PA doesn't specifically work, but after a cursory glance over this page I think I can take this concept and work out how to map it to a Windows implementation with a bit of fiddling.


virtual audio jack


I would recommend to try https://iriun.com/ - cross-platform and it streams video + audio in very low latency to OBS.


Is it open source?


Unfortunately not, but the free version is quite reasonable (small logo).


Have you tried DroidCam?

https://www.dev47apps.com/

Maps your phone to a virtual webcam, works over WiFi or USB


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

OBS is amazing.


As a counter anecdote - my 2015 MacBook Pro stutters within 30-40 seconds of OBS streaming a 1080p feed to YouTube.

Is there anything to tweak? Or is my machine too old?


The CPU/GPU usage for streaming depends mostly on the encoder that you're using. Programs like OBS allow you to use different encoders with different settings. This will place a very different load on your system. Eg x264 slow at 1080p would use a lot of CPU resources on most CPUs. On the other hand, if you have an nvidia GPU capable of nvenc and use that then you get next to no CPU usage. Same goes if you have an Intel CPU with an iGPU and use QuickSync or AMD's GPU encoder.

I'll say that even most modern desktop CPUs would use about a CPU core when encoding x264 even on fast preset at 1080p. It's pretty CPU intensive. That's why hardware encoders such as nvenc are popular. You most likely want to check what kind of encoder you're using. Maybe there are no other options than x264. In that case you might want to drop encoder settings and perhaps the resolution.


Most newer gpus can encode video on the gpu. This helps tremendously.

A 2000 series NVidia GPU can encode 4K/60 at less than 5% load (and that’s gpu loaf, cpu loaf is essentially zero)

The MacBook can do none of those things, it’s old school cpu encoding.


In macbooks you can use igpu for encoding, imo works pretty well. Not sure if OBS supports that, but I was able to use it with ffmpeg


I have a 2015 mbp and just setup obs on it a few days ago. Cpu encoding is the only option.


I was in the same boat. Switched to a T495 ThinkPad with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 3700U w/ Radeon Vega 10 Gfx, and now my macs feel like toys. Unbelievable power. Would never imagine a laptop could do any of things OBS is able to deliver without breaking a sweat.


OBS supports hardware encoding ironically on Intel integrated graphics, but doesn't on discrete graphics. So a much better graphics chipset in a macbook is likely to be a hinderance for this.


Nvenc is supported, even says in the change log that they improved the messages they show if you are using old nvidia drivers.


NVENC is not supported on macOS because Apple does not expose it in their VT toolkit that OBS is required to use to access hardware encoders.


It supports nvidia gpus at least, for sure


Sorry, you probably need a "real" video card for video encode.

I really tried to make OBS work at 1080p on my 2015 MacBook Pro, but just about anything (even a simple flip the webcam output) causes my fan to spin to maximum and eventually the video lags behind.

The best thing I could do was get something like the Avaya HC020 Webcam. It does a lot of things like zoom, flip, color balance, etc. all in the camera so you're processing as little as possible. At that point, I think I got 720p reliable, but not 1080p. However, my fan was still going full blast.

Eventually, I just gave up and built a Windows 10 desktop machine solely for video. It works great and I don't have a jet engine powering up next to my face when I do video.


Make sure you're using hardware encoding if you can. Using the CPU encoder can be higher quality, but it can't beat the dedicated hardware on your GPU for encoding in terms of performance.

Even a first-gen Raspberry Pi 1 is able to encode 1080p30fps video with its hardware encoder.


Not sure, you may want to drop to 720p and maybe lower your bitrate. For my latest project I was using a Macbook pro 2015 to test it, running my app and streaming at the same time fine. I was running Windows 10 though on the mac. If you're running Mac OS try using a utility like SMC Fan Control to set the fan RPM high. Mac OS by default wants to be as silent as possible which could be leading to some performance issues.

I'm very new to streaming so take what I say with a grain of salt.


A lower bitrate (=better quality assuming constant file size) requires your encoder to work harder. If anything you want to use faster settings with higher bitrates (=lower quality). Some encoders let you cap the bitrate but what this does is basically ruin video quality in scenes where the bitrate cap has been exceeded, it doesn't actually make it less CPU intensive.


On some Macs (typically Radeon equipped ones) you can enable hardware encoding. I'm not at my machine, but it should read something like "Apple hardware accelerated $FOOBAR"


Sounds weird. We are using an old 2015 MacBook Pro for 1080p streams at work. We stream multiple webcams, browser capture, Teams capture and HDMI screen capture. It has never lagged for us.


If it’s important to be worth the $, get an eGPU


[flagged]


Considering Waylands history with lacking screen capture support and the amount of work that's gone into creating plugins like https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs to support screen capture for wlroots based Wayland compositors this really doesn't looked like something OBS can or should fix. Until there's a standard way for applications to actually do screen capture similarly to X, Wayland is going to continue to be stuck as the 2nd choice for a lot (most) people.

Not to mention all the other things that don't work on Wayland, like VM key capture and Peek's event passthrough.


You seem to project your own biases on the OBS developers. However there is already work being done for OBS supporting Wayland natively[1].

[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2482


Discord and Peek are able to capture the screen fine.


The whole design behind Peek is that you have a transparent window that shows you what is being recorded and you can interact with the window behind it to record something useful. Passing through events to the window behind it only works on X11 (or XWayland).


Are you sure you can share Wayland windows? To my knowledge screen sharing support for Electron apps is experimental or hasn't landed yet.

Xwayland windows (most games and Discord itself would fall into this category) can be shared.


An amazing piece of open-source software.

My colleagues keep spawning Teams meetings just to record their screens; meanwhile, I can open OBS, add a screen recording element, resize it however I like, set the bitrate, encoding type, resolution, scaling, and record beautiful 60fps demos.

And that's literally the simplest scenario. The amount of stuff you can do with video compositing in this tool is insane.


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


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


One day they will figure out how to implement undo without impacting performance too much :p


Could you ask someone to make a video of you while you are using this setup? Like a friend/family member in your room holding a phone? I would like to show an older piano teacher this setup.


> If there is interest I’d love to write more about it and share, let me know!

Please do, that sounds awesome! I'd love to read more - but also seconding the request for a short video overview.


OBS is such a great tool. It does its job in a clear and specific manner, and exposes as many levers as you need in the controls. The plugin system seems a bit unrefined though, I think it could be a major win if it was somewhat more accessible.

Platform-specific stuff kinda sucks but it's the nature of the beast.

Unfortunately, at some point they seemed to have removed support for the AMD encoder used with my old GPU, so I can't enjoy the recent software updates until I update my hardware.


Some kind of plugin manager/installer is certainly something that will get added to OBS, probably sooner than later.

The AMD AMF encoder is still preset in OBS, it just requires somewhat recent GPU drivers to work (19.7.1 minimum, 19.9.2 or newer recommended)


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

They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear.


Twitch and YouTube sponsor OBS as well. The tier below them has a minimum of $50k per year, so they probably pay a lot. Check the OpenCollective as well.

https://obsproject.com/contribute


Do you mean Twitch and Facebook? I don't see YouTube on that page


I think Patreon is just for the main guy (Jim), but the project itself is also receiving funds separately:

https://opencollective.com/obsproject/contribute


I think you left off the bit that shows the contributors. Here's the budget and contributors: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget

Another comment mentioned Facebook and Twitch contribute elsewhere.

Of course, it seems very widely used, so the point that it's under funded stands.


According to their website[0] their current balance is $97,012.47 USD, and their annual budget is ~ $47,327.66 USD, so they're probably not too badly unerfunded.

[0] https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget


That budget appears to mean no one is getting paid for OBS. The project is huge so likely a lot of hours are committed to it.


Or no one is getting paid full time. That might be a good thing for a project like this. A full time employee might bring with it some perverse incentives (if it reaches a state where the community isn't clamoring for a full year's worth an an engineer's time, what happens to that engineer when the work is gone, or what if they find things that aren't needed to justify more work?)

If their current balance is over two years worth of their annual budget and the users are happy with the project and how its progressing, I'm happy to think they're in a good place until I hear evidence to convince me otherwise.


Yeah currently the OC funds are mainly used for expenses, such as a community developer needing a piece of hardware to add or work on support for something, hosting fees, etc.

I think a few bounties have been given out as well, but there isn't an entirely formal process for those yet.


Surely this enables them to just keep up, rather than having the freedom to innovate?


It's open source, innovation is not necessarily tied to money. It may or may not be tied to it or helpful in some way. It does open a whole bunch of questions up though, like who gets the money, what if an individual contributes more work than the paid employee and the salary? I've seen situations where people are upset about where grant money is allocated and who it's allocated to, so I imagine having a person paid a salary is susceptible to similar possible community problems.

That's not to say money necessarily causes a problem, just that it can, and introducing a monetary incentive into a system that was working well with non-monetary incentives (traditional open source) might complicate things.

Another way to look at it is that open source is primarily a social system and context, and mixing a financial system with a social one often leads to problems as different aspects of our lives cause friction we're generally ill-equiped to deal with. Just look at any of the reports of people that have won large amounts in the lottery and had a negative outcome in their social lives.


Good find! It's pretty clear that the value provided exceeds the value provided.


and they get 10k bounties from time to time https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568

* once ;)


Great proposal and response. And a new version of OBS that supports virtual cam feature is the topic.


I interact with Jim (obs creator) pretty regularly and he definitely deserves the support. Dude is extremely talented and kind. He puts an insane amount of effort into OBS.


It really shows. I just switched back to Windows after 10 years of macs, and OBS was a driving factor. Can't believe how powerful and easy to use it is.

I ran my high school's analog TV studio 25 years ago, and we ran a live news broadcast everyday for the lunch room. Effects that took half a room of gear and thousands of watts of power are all a few clicks and sliders away.


> OBS was a driving factor

Why? OBS runs on macOS too


It runs horribly on macOS. Like a night and day difference. If I understand correctly the difference is primarily regarding the encoder.

I also switched my streaming machine over to windows recently.

Edit: ok, “horrible” is dramatic, but it was honestly shocking the first time I booted into windows and gave OBS a try there. Exact same computer that struggled with OBS in macOS produced a much better output without breaking a sweat.


Using Boot Camp or a Hackintosh to be able to do that on the same computer? Might help to make the distinction between it overperforming via Boot Camp or underperforming on a Hackintosh.


Over-performing via Bootcamp. The machine is a fairly new Mac Mini.


Beside horrible, it's terrible, Just upgraded and can't even resize the panes. And the CPU usage is high even when not streaming or do any capture etc.


Huh. Happy OBS macOS user here.


Do you do any picture-in-picture of other apps with heavy CPU utilization, or apply any filters (chroma key/crop) or animated overlays? Multiple cameras or input sources? Multiple audio sources?

The framerate was terrible, the entire machine would lag, and the audio would constantly glitch out at best. Saved recordings were unwatchable.

I tried tweaking everything with the process priorities in OBS and the other apps, and could never get an acceptable result. AMD ThinkPad worked out of the box, did everything I described above, and CPU utilization stayed around 2-3%, and I couldn't even notice it was running while using other apps. All of this while I had it hooked up to extend the desktop onto 3 monitors. Streams and recordings are flawless.


Yeah, this is news to me too - we’ve been using it on a Mini (granted, it’s an i7 - but still, it’s a laptop in an aluminum case) with zero issues. Integrating NDI, no less!


What version of OS X are you running? What GPU do you have?


I guess YMMV. Used OBS a couple of times on macOS and was impressed with how smooth it ran.


"horrible" is not dramatic.... it was unusable.


I'm about to buy the first license for Windows in the past decade specifically because I believe that OBS runs better on Windows and want to switch my next broadcast to be OBS on Windows instead of OBS on Linux. To be clear, OBS has run amazing on Linux, but there appears to be more mature high quality 3rd party plugins for Windows. The fact that OBS works so well on Windows and Linux is amazing to me, and a ton of respect for the team to make that happen. But with empirical evidence that both you and I are paying Microsoft for an improved OBS experience is a good enough reason that Microsoft should also financially sponsor OBS.


Pretty interesting how streamlabs managed to capitalize off OBS


I think I remember two big streamers Destiny and HasanPiker donated a combined 4k or 5k to the project last year on stream. Really wish streamers would know that these are open source projects where their only source of income is from donations.


> "They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear."

Well it's an open-source project right? Anyone can pick up where they left off.

Side note: Has an abandoned project of this size ever been forked and continued by another team?


OpenOffice maybe.


I thought LibreOffice has (approximately) continuity of maintainership with the OOo team, which itself had continuity of maintainership with the StarOffice team. Apache OpenOffice is moribund and has never really regained active development, despite being the official successor according to Oracle corporate.


Gogs -> Gitea?


Gogs was a relatively small codebase, and it had a single maintainer before, not a team.


I don't know - I'm really surprised that anyone is willing to do the incremental work necessary to keep projects like these going, for free.

I guess there are people far better than I on this earth and that's excellent news if you ask me :)


I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. Just got 26 installed on my Gentoo box, seamless upgrade. I've only been a user for a short, short time but it's amazing.


I'm sorry, I don't understand how to parse your first sentence


Excuse me, I speak Jive.

I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. =

I am about to increase that amount by $100 per month.


Surely, it's a rare occurrence to hear that reference from Airplane!.


Don't call me Shirley


Roger, Rodger.


Excellent Airplane reference.


He's saying he is about to up (or increase) that by $100/mo.


> That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch

Do they? I heard XSplit was used by bigger streamers?


I know of adult games making orders of magnitude more :(


If I was OBS owner I would totally charge for it, don't even quote me


One of the reasons why OBS got so popular compared to Xsplit is that it is free.


Interesting – Xsplit is reported as a $20K sponsor on the website: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget

(Scroll down to see the list of contributors.)


No better publicity than on your competitor’s website?


The OBS team has a very friendly relationship with XSplit folks, they're nice people and strive for a better product for all users.


Well, yes, it's Free Software, but at this quality level it is be totally fine to sell the ready-to-run binary at a cost.


This is a good example of why I like open source. If someone decides to pull a move like that it can be forked and the project can live on.


That mostly works if the owner isn't also the person doing most of the work on the project.


More to the point, it only works if the owner isn't the only person who is willing and able to maintain the project. Open licensing lets you maintain your own fork, but it doesn't by itself grant you the drive, general skill, and project-specific knowledge to do so.


Even then though, you can continue to keep using it as is and not have to worry about them doing some shady updates now that they sold out.


I feel compelled to point out that selling software isn’t “selling out”.


Indeed. And there's nothing wrong with charging for FL/OSS.


I particularly enjoy that they added Mozilla's RNNoise library for AI noise suppression. It is not as good as Nvidia's RTX Voice but it does the job.

This is very helpful to get some noisy microphones to behave nicely.


Or buy a $5 headset from your local gas station, so the microphone is close to the mouth and doesn't pick up the speaker...


That is not always preferable, especially in front of an audience. We have some cheap lavalier mic and with this noise suppression it sounds great.

The problem was not with picking up the speaker, it was with the noise of the microphone.


I'll be very interested to see what happens to OBS now that Nvidia is directly competing with them with Nvidia Broadcast: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-broadcast-a...

While it's community supported (though only at 2.5k/mo) I highly suspect that NB is going to outperform OBS in the coming years, just given the market Nvidia is trying to capture. Most youtubers / streamers don't need the full configuration capabilities of OBS, but rather just want something that works out of the box with the basic nice to haves (overlays, noise cancellation, basic text compositing / donation integrations).


Isn't nvidia broadcast just some tools that plug into your existing streaming software?

>NVIDIA Broadcast is a universal plugin that works with most popular live streaming, voice chat and video conferencing apps. It’s supported on any NVIDIA GeForce RTX, TITAN RTX or Quadro RTX GPU, using their dedicated Tensor Core AI processors to help the app’s AI networks run in real-time, right alongside your games.


Can't you describe any software as 'just some tools'? If the tools do what you want and achieve the same things as OBS then isn't that what you want?


It's a bit of both. It can configure itself to be a virtual camera (similar to OBS), which could then be consumed by OBS. It also has built in features for directly streaming to twitch/youtube/etc and skipping OBS entirely. Likely an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy on their part.


> It also has built in features for directly streaming to twitch/youtube/etc and skipping OBS entirely.

This is not true lol


Sorry, you're correct. The stream to twitch/youtube/etc is part of Nvidia's Geforce experience, which Nvidia Broadcast can tie into.


> It can configure itself to be a virtual camera (similar to OBS) [...]

OBS can be used as a virtual camera? I assume not out of the box but only with some third party software/plugin, right?


There was a plugin available for a few years now, but as of this release (Version 26.0) there is official support for it out of the box


OBS is worlds ahead - Nvidia only wins if they somehow cripple OBS on Nvidia graphics


I’ve had quality issues with NVENC on OBS at 4K that went away if I either used cpu encoding in OBS or used NVENC with Shadowplay. I don’t know what caused this (I have a 1080) but it was super frustrating


Twitch also has its own broadcasting tool it is pushing.


If curious see also

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


OBS is an amazing piece of software. When the Streamlabs OBS fork came out, many people switched - but the original OBS keeps improving.

If you're looking to control OBS through a web interface (e.g. to switch scenes from a phone/tablet), see my project https://github.com/Niek/obs-web


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


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

Is it some DRM problem? Because otherwise I can't explain it.


OBS 0.659 is "Classic" OBS which has been discontinued for years. If you're having issues capturing games with OBS Studio, stop by our forums or Discord with a log and we may be able to help. If the game uses any kind of anti-cheat engine, it's possible the developer only whitelisted older capture DLLs but this is rare.


There is no log. OBS "captures" but the image is black while the game sound is there. One common attribute I found for all these games are that they are "true full screen". One example is "Tomb Raider", the series reboot from 2013. OBS 0.659 has no problem capturing my gameplay, while newer versions gives, like I said, black screen on recording.

Quick question if you indulge me: Why was classic discontinued?


OBS Studio is a full rewrite of OBS, and the old version was renamed to Classic to avoid confusion. It's been deprecated for many years now, and is no longer maintained. There is no real reason to use it anymore. If I had to guess the issue here, you're on a laptop with two GPUs and OBS Studio is running on a different GPU than OBS Classic is, which is why you're running in to issues. We'd need a log file to know for sure, but it's likely a simple fix (which you can stop by our Discord or forums with and we can take a closer look, feel free to ping me @fenrir in either location).

If you'd rather do your own testing, here's a starting point for my guess as to the issue: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Laptop-GPU-Selection-Windows-10


Desktop system, only one card (GTX 1070). Thank you for the starting point.


If you can stream your games on a Zoom/Skype call as a test, then OBS should be able to handle it too with the right configuration.


On those pesty games, neither Zoom nor Skype, nor TeamViewer capture the screen. I have also my own, written long time ago, screen capture utility, that one fails too. PrtScr key fails too. All of them return the correct resolution in cliboard, full black. That's why my guess is a DRM problem.


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


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


There is a way to capture Wayland https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1758

I'm hoping this eventually gets merged in. This would not only allow capturing Wayland, but also capturing games without affecting the performance too much (similarly to Shadowplay on Windows).


We'd like to merge it as well, but it's still very much a work in progress, and there's some major hurdles with both Wayland itself and Qt that need to be addressed first.


While OBS doesn't have a built in equalizer you can use plugins quite successfully. Reaper's plugins [0] work seamlessly with OBS.

[0] https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/


I play piano and sing. When I wanted to start streaming, I went from opening OBS for the first time to having a livestream to youtube, complete with audio from my interface synced to my webcam, in about 5 minutes. Just and incredible piece of software. I'm gonna drop a few bucks Everytime I stream now.

Also, shout out to obs.ninja, which let me cast my chromebook to the stream for my little jazz theory lecture/ramblings.

Also also, shameless self-promotion time:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4fu3juqIttf7z_UbRRaI...


The biggest problem - it doesn't work[1][2] with Wayland. So, for example, with Fedora 32 default installation it is impossible to make it record either whole screen or just a selected window.

[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471

[2] https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/14


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


> Windows: Added Virtual Camera

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


All I want is for NVENC to work on MacOS. If I’m reading this correctly, we remain shit out if luck.

My laptop comes with a beefy GPU (top line 16” mbp) and OBS can’t use any of it. Even the on-board Intel GPU is wonky


NVENC only works on recent NVidia GPUs (it's in the hardware itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC ), and there haven't been any recent NVidia GPUs that are (officially) supported by macOS.

You can technically use the Mac GPU by selecting a Video Toolbox encoder, but quality varies.

FWIW, I can steam 1080p60 without too much CPU overhead (~20%) on my iMac 2020 using libx264.


Right and the 16" MacBook Pro has an AMD Radeon Pro GPU. So NVENC is not going to work.

AMD has an equivalent "Video Coding Engine" (VCE) which is supported through "Video Toolbox" (an apple API) as mentioned by another commentor although there is some talk of the quality not being as high no idea how relevant that is the current AMD cards in the MacBook Pro 16".


Quality not being as high mostly means that you have to bump up the bitrate. For local recording it'll produce larger files and for streaming it'll require a better connection (if the streaming site allows higher bitrate). That still makes it very much usable though.


Well 'recent' is since 2012, which I suspect the vast majority of Nvidia gpus out there are newer than that.


I wonder if that would require Nvidia webdrivers to be un-discontinued?


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


> The VLC source’s playlist property can now be reordered by dragging and dropping items within it [cg2121]

Finally. With big lists, this was one of the most painful and tedius things to do on a computer.

Too bad it still can't reset its stream to YouTube on its own after the overzealous AI disconnects you for nothing.


Does anyone have suggestions for running OBS in the cloud?

I have a project that is designed to run 24/7 and it would be really nice if I could use a cloud server instead of a computer on my home network.

I have it all set up... OBS in Docker with k8s templates. Just need to find an affordable online option.


Depending on what you stream or trying to achieve, just get a Windows/Linux VPS and set up everything via RDP/VNC like you would on your own box. That's what I did for a "twitch plays" channel that was up for about a year.


While OBS will run virtualized, you will get a massive performance hit if no GPU is available and everything is done in software rendering. And GPU-enabled cloud servers are quite expensive.


This has indeed been my experience. It seems to be one of those uncommon situations where a physical server is more desirable than a cloud server.


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


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


Your device must support one of the common audio protocols to work in OBS (for Windows WASAPI for example). There's also an ASIO plugin available.

OBS will probably not add any specific code to support non-conforming device(s) without an external maintainer willing to keep the needed code updated over the years.


virtual camera will be fun to abuse


The plugin with similar functionality called OBS Virtual Camera is quite old, I use it since end of March for Zoom improv and I noticed that many other improvisers do too.


I wonder if it can take one person's video feed from MS Teams and use that as an input... which is the background subbed in via green-screen.

And then re-injected into an MS Teams call via virtual camera.


Finally!


nice, they added RNNoise




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