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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what OBS is? And yeah, some rando tried to trademark "Linux" some years back, lol. After a fair amount of hassle it ended up getting transferred to Linus Torvalds, which I guess was the best solution.

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It's the solution to the "Unregistered HyperCam 2" problem.

In simplified words, it's a screen recording software that also lets you stream to twitch and other streaming portals. In practice it does way more than that though.

that's like saying Word lets you create a text document, but in practice it does way more than that though.

..which is true?

maybe, but if you asked me "What is Word", and I replied "you can make a text document with it" would be not a very useful answer.

Sadly, most people just scratch the surface of what OBS can really do. If you really want to dig in to it, it is has the capabilities of a TV Broadcasting Studio for the financially constrained yet fanatically devoted to the cause level of features. I have used it in place of a TriCaster. I find myself constantly amazed at the things that can be achieved with this software to the point that I shake my head and think this shouldn't be possible. And then grin as other people think it was done in a studio.

So, yes, this thing can make a text document.

OBS is a live / real time compositing system. It allows you do to quite sophisticated overlays, transitions, etc. You can think of it as the open source version of what traditional tv channels use to do all their on screen stuff. It's a real gem of the open source world.

OBS is software for producing and streaming live video content.

While that is its main use, it's also great for recorded video content.

Yes, these years it seems like this is the de-facto screen recorder tool.

"Open Broadcaster Software" -> https://obsproject.com

For quick recordings, the screen recorder built into the Xbox Game Bar (Win+G) also does the job.

Why Microsoft decided to put this functionality only in the Game Bar (and not also in, say, the Snipping Tool) is anyone's guess...

Arguably THE open source software that revolutionized screen recording and live streaming. Not just software.

To be fair, Xsplit (closed source) was the one that was there as streaming got established, though OBS has taken over these days by being better and free (as in beer - though also being open source obviously helped get there).

And although OBS is most well known for being incredible streaming software, the fact that it can handle smooth video recording from games too (since once you have streaming you can pretty easily have recording too) means it's also displaced other video recording software such as Fraps, which used to be the go-to tool when recording games.

Wirecast has existed since at least 2008, with most of the same core compositing and switching functionality we see in the space, although originally Wirecast did not support RTMP. It was originally only able to stream to QuickTime RTSP servers and Windows Media Server.

XSplit emerged slightly before OBS Classic but OBS innovated with a far superior game capture implementation on Windows, supporting shared texture hooking across D3D8-D3D11 and OpenGL, which helped it gain massive traction with the Twitch crowd. After retaining a large user base it was eventually rewritten as the cross-platform OBS Studio.

Thanks, and interesting. I had never heard of it before. I'm not really into video, but have used ffmpeg and icecast for that sort of thing, which worked but were very crude compared to what I see on youtube and the like.

> ffmpeg and icecast Yeah for a server/embedded solution those are probably better to use for simple setup?

But desktop usecase, OBS is pretty much a gold standard.

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