Live data from Hacker News

OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

obsproject.com

171–180 of 371 posts

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it breaks the entire linux philosophy of using input and output streams to pipe data between different modular applications? Not really. To use your analogy, the way that X works - every application being able to read the framebuffer of any other - is the equivalent of every application running as root and being able to read and modify any file on the system. When you consider that applications running under Way…

Maybe a stupid question, but can't any program read the memory of other programs from the same user? Can't you attach to it for debugging?

On many systems, and by default, yes - but the other part of what's going on is that Wayland allows applications to be sandboxed like they couldn't be before, as they can no longer use your X server as a conduit to spawn an unsandboxed shell and run commands. You can, today, run e.g. Firefox in a sandboxed environment and be certain it can't access anything you don't want it to.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#172
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I can say that on Windows it may require a lot of fiddling. Hardware drivers appear to be a big factor. Another concern is the many overlays that accompany game launchers and drivers, including: Nvidia, Steam, GOG, etc. These add latency and sometimes private notifications.

The fiddling step was what I hoped to minimize. Did you have better luck with Linux or MacOS?

Interface is similar across the platforms; I had to do a few test streams on macOS before I could find settings that didn't cause streaming hiccups or problems with other software. I also had to make sure the OBS app interface was on a monitor separate from the one I was streaming; otherwise sometimes it would have some weird stuttering issues.

No matter what, you'll probably need to spend a little time tweaking things to get it all working like you want. But the 'scenes' and preferences are pretty good about letting you lock things down once you do find something you like.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#173
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what makes it more robust?

One example: keeping Preview and Program windows open (common for realtime stream prep/mgmt) on Mac with OBS will kill your frame rate (dropping 20%+ of frames) due to GPU rendering issues in Qt [1]. Streamlabs has no issues with this. I guess there's a question about whether that == "robust", but in terms of the app's features performing as it should, I would guess so. Some simple/weird workarounds: literally move t…

Link you are referring to: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/low-framerate-in-studio...

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#174

I've been using OBS for a couple months for live streams on YouTube (see https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/ansible-101-jeff-geer... ), and I have had rock-solid reliability, using an external mic interface, an external camera (displayed PIP), and sharing one of two displays during some instructional sessions. One thing to keep in mind, though—unless you have a dedicated video card, and it's supported by OBS (the…

have you ever thought about getting a PC?

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep an eye on the waypipe project for the equivalent functionality: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

I don't think any solution based on video streaming can ever match what X11 provides, which is, remote apps use the settings of the client computer for rendering. e.g. with ssh -X, if I set my dpi in my .Xresources, no matter the machine to which I'm ssh'ing to, I'm always getting a correct font size for my local screen.

I haven't tested but there is no reason that can't be done in waypipe. It works by intercepting certain protocol messages and proxying them over the network. The client just has to be given the output information from the remote machine.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#176
post #111

I've been using OBS to run a trivia game over YouTube. It's kind of a piece of shit. The Mac port is horrible. None of the widgets work properly, all the menu items are in the wrong place, and it supports essentially no system keyboard shortcuts. Like cmd+F doesn't do "Find…", it randomly resizes the thing you're editing. It's everything bad about Qt apps in one place. It also ships with its own 180MB copy of Chromiu…

Can you share your trivia game?

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#177
I don't use it for streaming but for recording screencasts and it does an excellent job there. I'm sure if I dig in a little, I'd find more features that would my videos better but even the default settings (on mac and Linux) work very well.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#178
post #89

I use OBS Studio with OBS-VirtualCam [0] to attend virtual lectures & hold meetings for my team. I've found it to be incredibly convenient because you can control nearly everything with scenes and the audio controls. Before meetings start, I can broadcast music and display announcements, and then without having to hit a jarring "End Screenshare" can switch to my webcam and start a meeting. Live demos and presentation…

I'm doing something similar on Linux, although a bit more complicated. I'm using v4l2loopback [0] to create a dummy video device, ffmpeg to create a stream endpoint that streams into the dummy video device, then setting up OBS to stream to localhost. It is actually really nice to have the capability to fully control what is going in to the video input. I haven't run into a need to also change the audio input yet but…

Are you using this with zoom, by any chance? I had no luck trying to capture my Webcam with ffmpeg, add text to it with ffmpeg, and output everything to a fake Webcam with video4linux. Actually, it works perfectly well, but this particular stream I can't open with zoom, even though zoom will accept it perfectly if instead of my Webcam, I add text to a video file.

I suppose zoom detects that my actual Webcam is in use, and therefore refuses to display... any webcam whatsoever, including the virtual one...? Makes little sense but maybe...

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#180
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> easier to develop and maintain wayland may be easier to maintain than X. But from what I've seen writing a compositor for wayland is more difficult than writing an X window manager, because things you got for free with X have to be implemented by the compositor in wayland. And many applications are more difficult to target wayland, because there aren't (at least yet) standard protocols for things like screenshots,…

Take a look at wlroots [0] for a library that massively simplifies the task of writing a wayland compositor. It also gives many of those lower level things "for free". For an even higher-level API built on top of wlroots, you can look at wltrunk [1]. There are standard APIs for screenshots and screencapture, implemented through the desktop portal and pipewire. Check the top-level post for more info about this -- it's…

I'm aware of wlroots. But KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, etc. don't use it, so each of those have to implement things separately.

Concerning the desktop portal API. It's basically just a wrapper around the native custom API's of the underlying compositor. And it is pretty limited in functionality. For example, the screenshot API just has a way to request a screenshot, it doesn't have a way to specify that you would like to select a window, region, or display/screen/monitor. In the case of wlr-portal, from what I could tell it just always gives you a screenshot of the full desktop.

Post reply on HN