My favorite OBS feature is that you can bring in transparent browser windows all over the place. As such, I have my work conferencing set up so my time appears in the upper-right corner. I’m on the east coast and everyone I work with is on the west coast. It’s a nice way to remind them of my current time. (It also passive aggressively animated to purple with a moon when its “after hours,” a/k/a 5pm for me.)
I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events.
It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS.
I realized you could do that a few months back and finally built a little HTML/CSS/JS-based 'TODO' list so people could more easily follow along with my progress completing a set of tasks during live streams: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/obs-task-list-overlay...
It was trivially easy to get it formatted properly without me having to know anything about the GUI programming language OBS uses. Definitely an enlightening moment when I realized you can overlay anything with HTML!
This is fantastic. I really like the local-time clock idea. Now that I’ve been enlightened, I think it should be a standard option in all conferencing software.
I've embedded a browser window in an OBS stream on my mac, and it just about ground my computer to a halt; the CPU was pegged at 100%, and using it with Zoom basically meant not using anything else.
As part of a school project this past year, my son had to do a historical video report. Together, we hacked together a set of 17th century evening news overlay graphics complete with scrolling headline ticker. OBS was great.
Excited for this release since it contains M1 Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoding support[1] — I know on my Intel Mac, OBS would massacre the CPU if I didn't have the hardware encoding enabled. On the M1 it's not quite so bad, but being able to use hardware encoding does save a lot of CPU cycles when streaming at higher bitrates!
OBS is such wonderful software. It's immensely powerful yet approachable and performant. I am not a streamer, but I've found it really useful as an audio/video swiss army knife. Many thanks to the team and community behind it!
Yeah; I'm not a streamer either, but it took me all of an hour to go from "what's OBS?" to enabling use of my iPhone as the video camera for Zoom calls. Haven't had time yet to do anything interesting with OBS "scenes", but it looks similarly, surprisingly straightforward. A+!
Agreed. PSA: OBS can be used to create videos as well.
I first used OBS to create a video presentation for school. Most of the time I was showing slides, but occasionally I would switch to a full view of myself (as required by the assignment). Or you can do the common view of big slides and a small video of the speaker in the corner.
It really is. It's hard to believe its free too. When I started using it, I was convinced it was commercial software and I had just missed the "Buy now" button.
I got into that stuff in the earlier days of Streaming when OBS wasn't even out/was too new. I have perpetual licenses for XSplit and other softwares, but OBS still usually come up on top. It's impressive how good it is.
Undo/redo would be me :). I put in a lot of effort and spent months working on it to get a basic workable version. I am only just a you g student, so over the last several rcs, Jim refined it and made improvements and bug fixes. I love the team and everyone involved is just a great person.
It was such an obvious missing feature. Though to be fair, implementing undo/redo functionality is often nontrivial.
However, there's still no way to save/export scenes, aside from simply copying your entire app data directory. I just have a basic layout with few tweaks so it's not the worst thing ever, but for any streamer with a complex setup and carefully adjusted filters, moving to a new computer or whatever must be an enormous pain point.
From my experience the NVIDIA filter is miles better both in detecting noise as well as suppressing just the noise but has significantly more latency and will incur a decent perf hit on the GPU (~10% FPS or so if the GPU is the bottleneck).
These days if it's live is use RNNoise and if it's for a recording I use Nvidia's filter.
> This fixes the black screen issues on laptops in particular
My youngest wanted to learn how to use OBS so he can begin making videos of his gaming. I tasked him with figuring out everything, from how to download it (I closely monitored this part), install it, and use it. He watched tutorials.
He got so far but got discouraged when he ran into the above issue and started the whole process over again because he thought he must have messed up. We eventually figured out the workaround but so happy to see they've fixed it!
This is a big deal for me. I really like to use OBS to capture things when I want to show someone how something is working. Until now using OBS has essentially meant disabling my iGPU which, for me, kills battery life and isn't worth the sacrifice. I have been using Windows Gaming (press Win+G) to capture videos and then manually cropping and re-compressing them using KDEnlive.
I considered OBS a really nice piece of software, specially after a 10-year long track record of testing desktop capture software like Camtasia and the like. After fighting myself with ffmpeg (libav) to build a simplified desktop capture software myself, my appreciation for OBS has increased even more, because dealing with libav or anything multimedia is definitely a pita.
Seeing as OBS is now ubiquitous for livestreaming, I have to wonder if there's one or more software companies out there who see all that usage as lost revenue from a proprietary solution and are kicking themselves over it.
I almost can't believe how good OBS is for being open source.
Wirecast has been around since the mid-2000s and has a very similar feature set to OBS. It is lacking in some areas and ahead of the curve in others (Wirecast has GPU-accelerated scene preview thumbnails instead of OBS’ flat text list). VMix is another successful proprietary desktop streaming software. You could also probably add the OG, TriCaster, to the same list as it solves many of the same problems (video switching on commodity PC hardware, real-time layering/compositing, desktop capture, etc) but is married to NewTek’s hardware.
OBS is the cat's pajamas for making zoom presentations reliable, and for making any kind of tutorial/demo video. I really like the fact that whatever layout/system you cook up "just works" for both. Love it to bits!
One setup to combine multiple computers into one video stream I don't see often is to run OBS virtual camera on each computer to capture the local screen, and then feeds the OBS virtual cam videos over NDI to other computers. One of the computers running OBS acts as the combiner to take in all the remote video sources and combine them into the final output video.
I'm happy about that personally. OBS is an example of FOSS done really well in my opinion and I'm glad to see it winning out over potentially better funded projects.
OBS and VLC have made everyones lives better. And they have been doing it for a long time now.
There should be a global fund, funded by tax payers, globally managed, like the UN, that helps developers who develop software that is used in every nook and corner of earth. A strong incentive like that, and we could see a revolution in open source software.
Some of the companies/people I know are quite happy sending portions of their revenue to e.g. Blender for its use in their commercial pipeline. As a hobbyist I do the same (not a portion of revenue, but I chuck a monthly coffee towards whatever I'm learning, at least.) That global fund? It's not the UN, it's HN. That strong incentive? It's the feeling that moved your comment. We can send that money to developers right now. Hopefully a lot of us already are. tl;dr: buy WinRAR.
Having upgraded OBS before on macOS, I backed it up first, then installed the new version. As somewhat expected to me, the new version is not launching. I had to launch it from CLI to see and see there is an error:
error: os_dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib->libpython3.9.dylib): dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib, 257): image not found
It also changes something in the stored state on disk so that next time you try to launch an older version, it cannot launch either. So the issue damages the previous versions somehow as well.
Similar errors have happened to me in the past. If you are doing important streaming stuff, do not upgrade OBS as long as it continues to work. Especially if you are on a tight deadline or have a scheduled upcoming stream.
Maybe check with otool on macOS and check to see where it is looking for the .dylib it can’t find. You can also update the executable with otool to use a different path to the dylib, if need be.
This is one of my favorite pieces of free software I've ever used. Amazingly powerful and it's cross platform! I use it to record all sorts of videos, and only very occasionally stream.
Congrats to their team + contributors, and thank you if you're lurking.
OBS is great! Microsoft Teams broke virtual cam support a couple of months back on windoss. Has anyone found a workaround to maybe fake OBS virtual cam as a physical one? I would be grateful!
Do you mean the problem with the image from your OBS virtual camera turning green and glitchy? You seem to be able to fix this (in some cases) by using 1920x1080 at 30fps.
Obs is amazing. I’m using it to record my screen for YouTube videos. I have one unrelated issue, though. My screen recording feels super washed out. The colors are awful. This happens with obs and other screen recorders as well (even quick time), but OBS it’s a bit worse. I have no idea how to fix it, so I just compensate in post, but it feels unnatural.
Double check your color space in settings. For a screen recording you want 4:4:4 (look for "rgb" or something); often video cameras are 4:2:2 or 4:2:0.
My experience is that there are all sorts of accelerations and things that may or may not enable themselves, and no way to know these even exist without trawling through a bunch of forum threads.
An "OBS performance audit/optimizer" would be an interesting add-on. Because, yeah, it can sometimes bring an otherwise-fast machine to its knees, seemingly inexplicably.
[+] [-] fredleblanc|4 years ago|reply
I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events.
It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS.
Easily a top 5 app for me.
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
It was trivially easy to get it formatted properly without me having to know anything about the GUI programming language OBS uses. Definitely an enlightening moment when I realized you can overlay anything with HTML!
[+] [-] ericbarrett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|4 years ago|reply
Is it just me?
[+] [-] vidanay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waymon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|4 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call it passive-aggressive; it's a pertinent bit of information that could be easily missed by some otherwise.
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/4170
[+] [-] zbrozek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Buttons840|4 years ago|reply
I first used OBS to create a video presentation for school. Most of the time I was showing slides, but occasionally I would switch to a full view of myself (as required by the assignment). Or you can do the common view of big slides and a small video of the speaker in the corner.
[+] [-] skrowl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shados|4 years ago|reply
I got into that stuff in the earlier days of Streaming when OBS wasn't even out/was too new. I have perpetual licenses for XSplit and other softwares, but OBS still usually come up on top. It's impressive how good it is.
[+] [-] kiddico|4 years ago|reply
Wooooh! That's going to turn so many instances of "Oh I've just deleted 30 minutes of filter tuning" into "whoopsy, undo"
also:
* "(Windows only) Added support for NVIDIA Noise Removal in the Noise Suppression filter"
Nice! I wonder how that compares to the old RNNoise option...
[+] [-] fordsmith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|4 years ago|reply
However, there's still no way to save/export scenes, aside from simply copying your entire app data directory. I just have a basic layout with few tweaks so it's not the worst thing ever, but for any streamer with a complex setup and carefully adjusted filters, moving to a new computer or whatever must be an enormous pain point.
[+] [-] zamadatix|4 years ago|reply
These days if it's live is use RNNoise and if it's for a recording I use Nvidia's filter.
[+] [-] blindfly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crescentfresh|4 years ago|reply
My youngest wanted to learn how to use OBS so he can begin making videos of his gaming. I tasked him with figuring out everything, from how to download it (I closely monitored this part), install it, and use it. He watched tutorials.
He got so far but got discouraged when he ran into the above issue and started the whole process over again because he thought he must have messed up. We eventually figured out the workaround but so happy to see they've fixed it!
[+] [-] ddtaylor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laumars|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omegote|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Buttons840|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonbirithm|4 years ago|reply
I almost can't believe how good OBS is for being open source.
[+] [-] roboyoshi|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://streamlabs.com/
[+] [-] reassembled|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iainctduncan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|4 years ago|reply
One setup to combine multiple computers into one video stream I don't see often is to run OBS virtual camera on each computer to capture the local screen, and then feeds the OBS virtual cam videos over NDI to other computers. One of the computers running OBS acts as the combiner to take in all the remote video sources and combine them into the final output video.
[+] [-] zwarag|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celim307|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoctorOW|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Warchamp7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kumarvvr|4 years ago|reply
There should be a global fund, funded by tax payers, globally managed, like the UN, that helps developers who develop software that is used in every nook and corner of earth. A strong incentive like that, and we could see a revolution in open source software.
[+] [-] rainonmoon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alpb|4 years ago|reply
Similar errors have happened to me in the past. If you are doing important streaming stuff, do not upgrade OBS as long as it continues to work. Especially if you are on a tight deadline or have a scheduled upcoming stream.
[+] [-] photojosh|4 years ago|reply
Installing 3.9 from python.org might fix this. I can't see which other version they would build against but not include in the install.
[+] [-] jes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkilgore|4 years ago|reply
Congrats to their team + contributors, and thank you if you're lurking.
[+] [-] antman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myguysi|4 years ago|reply
The CEO of Shopify put up a bounty last year to support similar functionality on macOS, I’m not sure if it was ever completed.
EDIT: looks like OBS officially supports it for Mac and Linux since 26.1 - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0
[+] [-] bbvnvlt|4 years ago|reply
See https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets...
[+] [-] luisrudge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbhl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzign|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MR4D|4 years ago|reply
It’s fantastic, but the speed difference on Windows is so much better.
[+] [-] myself248|4 years ago|reply
An "OBS performance audit/optimizer" would be an interesting add-on. Because, yeah, it can sometimes bring an otherwise-fast machine to its knees, seemingly inexplicably.