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

obsproject.com

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

#201

Post by fenrirthviti »

ShamelessC wrote: post #50
bnycum wrote: post #35

If you are looking for a more robust solution Streamlabs OBS[1] is more popular in the livestreaming community, it's OBS on steroids. It is also open source, and just released a beta on Mac like this week. [1]: https://streamlabs.com/

Is this a fork of OBS or another project. If it's a fork, why not work on the OBS project to implement these enhancements there? Is there backlash to that sort of thing from the OBS maintainers?

Almost all of their changes are UI changes. They use our core OBS Studio code, with an Electron GUI instead of Qt. Not easy/basically impossible to port back over. We monitor any back end changes they make, and pull when appropriate. They do not collaborate with us, however, so it's rare they make changes that we can use.

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

#202

Post by lvh »

shmerl wrote: post #136
lvh wrote: post #20

If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland, and screencasts on that have long since been a complete pain in the neck with per-compositor "solutions" that mostly don't work quite right. Fortunately someone who works on Gnome wrote the obs-xdg-portal plugin that should fix this, at least for Gnome and hopefully soon for wlroots and KDE once they fully support the underlying portal API. Unt…

> with per-compositor "solutions" Didn't every one agree to use Pipewire for that? Or it's still bikeshedded to death? Somehow for input, everyone settled on libinput and this didn't become a problem.

That's mostly the case now, but that's a much more recent development than Wayland on the desktop becoming popular. Also, pipedrive gives you the plumbing, but you still need the portal API. My understanding is everyone more or less agrees that's the way forward, but it's still not stable and ubiquitously implemented. Even then, that resolves capture but not control: if you want something closer to ssh -X you need ways to forward input too, and IIRC right now the main answer for that is still compositor specific, e.g. krfb relying on kwin/KDE.

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

#203

Post by geerlingguy »

fenrirthviti wrote: post #197
geerlingguy wrote: post #167

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…

OBS core team member here, just a quick clarification on this post. OBS will not run without a supported GPU for compositing; that is always handled by the GPU running on OpenGL (for macOS and Linux, we use Direct3D on Windows). The available encoders, however, might change based on the available hardware. Hardware encoders are, generally, much faster and lower impact on system resources, but may have lower quality p…

Ah, thank you for the clarification, TIL!

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

#204

Post by geerlingguy »

tessla wrote: post #174
geerlingguy wrote: post #167

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?

I have one but 30 years of muscle memory and favorite Mac apps is hard to overcome. If anything I’d go Linux, where similar limitations seem to apply.

My PC laptop has almost identical specs to my Mac anyways... I haven’t owned a desktop in 10 years :/

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

#205

Post by blattimwind »

technofiend wrote: post #22

I've been using it to create videos of an infrastructure provisioning product. One of the most useful things so far is being able to record a process that may take 15 minutes to fail but only has an error for a few seconds before clearing the screen, rebooting, hanging, etc. Much easier to rewind and grab the failure from a stream than to hang poised over a keyboard waiting to bang print screen at the precise moment…

Sounds like a perfect fit for OBS Replay Buffer.

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

#206

Post by jameshe »

aarongolliver wrote: post #106
jameshe wrote: 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…

how are you getting desktop audio (music or whatever) to get sent to your meetings? I didn't see how to expose the audio output from obs as a "microphone" or whatever to video conferencing software. I ended up hacking my setup together with voicemeeter but it's pretty sloppy and error prone.

At least in my case, I haven't had to configure anything. Perhaps it's included in OBS VirtualCam? (see my original post)

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

#207

Post by jsilence »

gary-kim wrote: post #140
jameshe wrote: 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…

Could you detail on how you are creating the ffmpeg streaming endpoint? That would be very heplful!

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

#208

Post by deadbunny »

m4rtink wrote: post #98
raegis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing my classes online with Zoom. For whatever reason, under Wayland I can not choose individual windows to share--I can only share the whole desktop. I switched to Xorg and now I can share individual windows in Zoom. I honestly don't care to support proprietary software, but application writers must do extra work to support both.

Wayland by default prevents applications from accessing other application display, input and output, while on X it is basically free for all. Any application can see what any other application is displaying, read it's input & send it it input events. This might have been fine in the past, but is not really OK any more with efforts to make things more secure (eq. to prevent a malicious application to read you password…

> The side effects is that new protocols need to be developed that applications can use to request access to display/input/output of other applications in legitimate cases (such as screen sharing in your case) & not all is in place for that yet.

This is the main hurdle for most people. I would say that 99% of people agree that the Wayland way makes sense and is he better way of doing things but without the needed access controls it just not ready yet.

Like if Google said "Apps can't access [location|files|whatever] without permission" on Android with no way to grant those permissions.

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

#209

Post by fenrirthviti »

gok wrote: 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…

Hey there, OBS team member here. Want to get some clarification on these issues, as they are not really things we hear commonly, outside the lack of desktop audio capture.

First, for clarity, the macOS version of OBS Studio is not a "port". It's a native application designed to run on macOS.

The mentioned audio issues are not unique to OBS. Apple does not feel that applications need to directly capture desktop audio, so third-party programs that inject themselves in to the desktop audio using kernel drivers (iirc) and create a loopback device are required to capture desktop audio. We have a guide on how to do that here: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/505/

Can you be more specific about how "none of the widgets work properly"? Which features are you referring to (outside the aforementioned audio limitations) that are not implemented?

System shortcuts like find don't really make sense in an application like OBS. There's very few things you'd need to run a find operation on. Communicating shortcuts is something we could do better, however. We are working on an undo function that will help here in case anything is accidentally changed, but with the complexity of operations available in OBS this is a bit of a challenge and will take time to get right.

Our mixer levels are using a global audio industry standard for levels, you can see more about that in our guide here: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Understanding-The-Mixer

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

#210

Post by madars »

Biganon wrote: post #178
gary-kim wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have not tried it with Zoom but Chrome refused to recognize any loopback video devices unless they were capture-only. So the following worked:

    # modprobe -r v4l2loopback
    # modprobe v4l2loopback video_nr=7 exclusive_caps=1 card_label='Screenshare'
where exclusive_caps=1 is the work-around for Chrome (both video_nr for /dev/video7 and card_label should be able to be set to ~arbitrary values). You need to first start writing stream to the loopback device and then it would switch itself into a capture-only device and Chrome will recognize it.
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