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 completely agree. I've had quite a few people ask me "how do I turn that on in Google Meet," to which I then have to explain, "it's waaaaay more complicated than you'd expect."
I'm surprised "simple overlays" aren't a thing in any of the video conference software yet.
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.
I used to run a daily show off a tricked out MacBook Pro, and it was really problematic (e.g. 30 second delays on live streams). Moved to PC with a good processor and video card, and now it just sips the processor at ~12% with near-live performance. If you use OBS for live streaming, I strongly recommend you move off of Mac, especially if you do anything beyond the most basic operations.
There is a lot that you can do to optimize OBS streams before you may need to jump to Windows, however :)
I’ve got a within-the-last-18-months MacBook Pro, so yeah, your mileage may vary. A dedicated graphics card helps tremendously. I’ve got a gaming PC with a recent NVIDIA card and it does even blink at it.
I haven't tried embedding a browser window in OBS on Mac yet, I'll have to try it.
But you should check to see if you have activated hardware encoding. Go to "Settings" and "Output", select "Output Mode: Advanced" and then in the "Encoder"-dropdown you should now see an option called "Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder". That should hopefully help somewhat with CPU.
It's just mac. On my Windows desktop OBS purrs like a gentle kitten while streaming games, running Unity, and pulling in windows from 3 4K monitors (and my CPU is from 2014, and a GTX1080).
It crashed the first time I tried to set up the most basic stream on Mac, so I never tried again.
Throttling is one thing that can cause high kernel_task usage, but you can also run ‘pmset -g thermlog’ to verify whether it’s actually due to throttling/cooling issues.
I have the same issue. How do you know if it's throttling and if so what is the action to take? My fairly recent Mac is completely failing at doing video, while my 2012 I dragged out of storage has no issue.
The command’s output is pretty straightforward. It tells you the percentage of CPU you have available to use. Leave it running and try something super intensive. It’s much easier to get my Intel MBA to throttle than my work-provided 16” MBP.
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.
As I mentioned in another comment — I used jQuery, and chose not to share anything because I don't need everyone's feedback on how old and dumb that makes me. :)
But basically, anything you can render in a browser can happen on the screen. Get JavaScript to show your current time in a browser, then pull in that URL into your OBS scene. The background will be transparent.
I think it's using Blink to render things underneath, that's what it seems like at least.
Doesn’t alter the existing stream. OBS creates new virtual camera that it outputs from your mix of input sources. You then tell zoom to use the OBS virtual camera as its source.
Instead of "altering" a stream, you use OBS to take the camera input, then output it via virtual cam. Once you have the basics setup, you can get fancy setting up scenes, overlays, color corrections etc. Works great for green screens as well.
My code isn't public because it uses jQuery and I don't need the feedback about how old I am because I like jQuery. :)
But generally speaking, if you can get JavaScript to display the current time in a browser, you can pull in that file via a browser source (using a file:// protocol) and show it on the screen. From there, it's a matter of doing anything else you can get JS to show in a browser. Or, if you have a local server running, you can display entire websites along side your face.
At that point, it's an interesting shift in mindset — you're not designing stuff for the browser, but to be displayed next to you.
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!
So I've had the reverse issue. With hardware encoding on and external monitors plugged into my intel macbook, everything would overheat and I would get kernel throttling of everything.
The external monitors cause the GPU to draw more power, but I'm not sure why that combined with hardware encoding in OBS caused issues. When I switched to software encoding the cpu was a bit higher but everything was fine.
Apparently this is related to VRM overheating and people have workarounds posted on reddit, but it seem like switching to software encoding made it go away for me.
I’ve had the same issue, it’s critical to get fans to cool your MacBook pro since they are not capable of cooling themselves under load, especially i7 or i9.
I have cabinet fans under mine and it works great, just don’t ask me to use a MacBook Pro as a laptop.
And if not fans, I actually just elevated my MacBook Pro on a cooling laptop stand (with no ventilation) and that was enough to keep it cool for hours-long streaming.
Any idea when it’s coming? I know no one likes that question, but... well, I have an M1 Air, and I’d love to stream some coding sessions or tutorials. So arm64 support would be tasty.
Is there some way we could help with the arm64 patching?
I actually managed to build OBS for M1 Mac. All the dependencies do have arm support. I only had to make small changes in the cmake file for arm64. Right now I am stuck at the part of signing the OBS app package. Without code signing Mac cannot open it.
My smoothbrained take is that it'll be a little bit, since optimizing it for ARM is going to take a little effort. Like GP said, it's really about the encoders slowly being updated to better support the hardware.
There’s still also the lack of Metal support - OBS still uses OpenGL to composite everything together, and Metal should be more highly optimised on newer macOS versions and the new chips than the long-deprecated (on Mac) OpenGL.
Somebody actually did write a Metal renderer and contributed it in a pull request a few years ago. The comments were like “Oh, why did you do this? OpenGL is fine” from the lead developer. The backend just didn’t get merged (I think the developer who contributed it didn’t have great English so struggled to explain why they’d want it, and nobody who commented really seemed to know much about the Mac platform… the code looked fine though).
So that renderer was never merged, and then about six months later OpenGL was deprecated on macOS. The contributed backend is probably quite out of date with changes to OBS’s APIs etc. now.
It’s a shame, there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you for them doing much “optimising for ARM”.
> there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform
This has definitely become a trend as of late. If I had to guess, the lead devs are (rightfully) frustrated that Apple depreciated OpenGL so quickly for a proprietary solution that nobody really likes working in. Furthermore, maintaining a Metal compositor would be a royal pain in the ass, since there's no real middleware layer to help with debugging or tuning.
Honestly can't blame the poor people. Maintaining Mac software is a neverending chore.
I was able to build OBS from source for M1 Mac. I don’t know how optimized it is. But with few changes to the cmake files you can build it without errors. The only part I am stuck is with code signing. You need to code sign, if not it crashes.
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+!
You can display RTMP streams in OBS. I don't have an iPhone, but once helped a friend get a GoPro working with OBS this way using its wireless streaming. Just plugging it in didn't work, it wouldn't just be a USB webcam. So, anything that'll let you stream with RTMP will probably work, and then you just have to input the URL on the OBS side.
That sounds great - I need a webcam for my desktop workstation and I’d love to just use my iPhone. Can you share more about your setup? What software are you using on your phone to connect it?
(which will appear as a camera source on its own, no OBS required. I was for a while a happy Camo user too, but eventually bought a webcam so I didn't have to hook and unhook my phone; it's good software)
I'm an iPhone webcam user because commercial webcams are incredible worse in quality than modern day smartphones. I regret purchasing one of the better rated Logitech ones and appearing like a washed out zombie on video calls.
Meanwhile we walk around with a quasi-DSLR in our pockets.
It's awful. I've got a C920 as well, and it turns me into a washed-out green/yellow goblin. There's an exposure slider in the driver but it's buggy so if you set it to manual exposure, after a few minutes the whole image goes super exposed as if pointing straight at the sun and you can't see anything anymore until I unplug and plug it back again.
I bought it at a premium at the height of the COVID-related hardware shortage and I regret it every time I see it in my drawer.
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.
Absolutely, before this you had to use stuff like FRAPS, Camtasia, proprietary webcam software, etc. There was no all-in-one way to record any webcam/desktop.
OBS does it seamlessly and across all combinations. And the staging is neat too.
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.
Exporting and saving scenes can be done with export scene collection. It’s kind of clunky in terms of workflow but I’ve had success exporting/importing scenes across computers.
You can export your entire scene collection to a json file and import it on another computer.
If you keep all of your media and such in the same folder, then the new Missing Files dialog on startup will also auto detect every source after you point one to the new location.
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.
Interesting. I have a PC just for streaming (I encode with CPU as well) with a[n] nvidia card, so I'm not concerned about GPU usage. I'll give it a go.
Slight tangent: Is it best to say "An nvidia card" or "A nvidia card"? 'An' sounds better, but 'a' is right according to my 4th grade english lessons. I think 'an' sounds better because you're really saying "(e)nvidia". I don't know if the "an before a vowel led word" rule applies to the pronounced or the written word...
“A” versus “an” is all about the next syllable (and its sound), not the next letter—they’re the same word, just with context-dependent pronunciation which happens to be materialised in the spelling.
My favourite way of demonstrating this practically is to observe usage of “a” versus “an” on words that have developed or lost a silent “h”.
For example, in the days of long ago, “herb” had a silent “h”, so it would be spelled “an herb” as a vowel sound followed; and in American English it still is silent, and is consequently still “an herb”: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb.... But in British English, people started sounding the “h”, so that in the 1870s, “a herb” became more popular than “an herb”, and it has remained so ever since: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb... (though “an herb” is still much more common there than I’d have expected).
I normally read more recent translations of the Bible, but still sometimes read the KJV aloud, so there are many cases of silent aitches that are no longer silent (a regular expression search for `\ban h` has 711 matches in the KJV, compared with only 11 in the WEBBE, which are for “honour”, “honest”, “hour” and “heir”); I decided it’s better to read “a house” rather than “an house”, given that the original spelling was only chosen because at that time they pronounced it “an ’ouse”—or at least, I think so; the ngrams there aren’t quite so conclusive, I suspect that one might have already been shifting in some parts of England, as is the case with quite a few other such words; the KJV was written in a style that was already overly formal and sometimes slightly archaic when it was new, let alone 400 years later—Tyndale’s translation from the best part of a hundred years earlier reads much more easily once you normalise spelling as was done in the KJV between 1611 and 1769.
The Nvidia solution also has a great camera background filter for streaming but it's not integrated directly into OBS yet (you have to use it via a virtual camera).
> 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.
The mechanism of action I've seen is that sometimes OBS will start on, say, internal graphics, and you'll need to force it to run on your discrete graphics card in order to get it to screen capture your video game.
This affects computers that have both integrated and discrete graphics (say, to save power on a laptop).
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 will keep it short, say you have 4 perspectives, each with the same setup in 1080p60 @ 2500Kbps, combining in to a 4K video at the ingest server.
Now, your ingest server needs to map each perspective on to a 4K canvas and upload that stream somewhere, let's assume a 5 Mbit 2160p60 stream this is what you get:
Clients 2.5 x 4 = 10 Mbps upload.
IServer 10 Mbps download.
IServer 5 Mbps upload.
EDIT: Twitch caps @ 6 Mbps for streaming so it doesn't matter if 5 Mbps is enough or not, 6 is max for Twitch.
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.
I used to use OBS to capture game clips, but it recently started capturing at shitty 5fps framerates and tanking my in-game FPS. I tried a ton of things to fix it but eventually gave up. Based on this changelist it doesn't look like the problem is solved. Oh well.
If you use OBS, I would love show you our product https://www.stream.club. We're bringing OBS into the browser, making it really easy to create live video content.
Our customers find that they can get setup in Stream Club much faster than they can with OBS, and they don't need a powerful computer to do it.
Great question! We like to onboard each livestreamer personally to understand their livestreaming workflow and goals. Completely understand the disdain for our ambiguous website, and would be happy to send a beta invite directly to your email if you (or anyone else on here) is willing to give it a shot!
This looks like a slightly inferior version of https://streamyard.com/ (in particular, fewer participants at each price level) - do you have any value propositions above what they offer?
Streamyard is a great company so I'll take slightly inferior as a major compliment!
We're actually have all the features of their Professional plan ($50/month) at half the cost.
The on-screen participants per live stream is something we've capped at six for usability reasons (livestreams just don't look good with 10 faces on a stream).
My particular use case depends on more than 6 participants, which is why I asked - but I think it may not be a common one.
Thanks for explaining! Hope you're able to get it into public beta soon.
edit: I also realized that "slightly inferior" was denigrating, which wasn't really how I intended it, even if you took it as a compliment. Sorry about that.
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.