OBS Studio 33
github.com
github.com
Launching OBS Studio through Steam lets me stream that preview to my VR headset over a 6GHz WiFi dongle and play games wirelessly in what feels like my own little private theatre. OBS Studio was the puzzle piece I hadn't figured out when the headset showed up last weekend, and I've been really impressed by its performance so far... I think this setup even shaved some latency off when playing online, since consolidating the consoles next to the router let me hardwire them.
Many many thanks to the OBS Studio team for making software that's helping me live out a small part of what I remember hoping technology could be like back in the 90s. I am grateful (:
Was envious for a second there. Then I was reminded that I quite enjoy thinking.
"There are the live video compositors everyone complains about and there are the ones nobody uses."
But really, it is great to see a piece of open source software as the default choice in a field where they tend to suffer, desktop applications.
But many OSS programs are awesome, and OBS is one of them.
And then most people are in for a surprise, that usually the above is only true in theory. But in reality there are driver issues, missing firmware, outdated repositories, broken updates ... critical missing features and in general a need to understand technical details with no polished UI.
And speaking of, with OBS I really liked the UI to just get started, but performance/quality of produced video was way worse for me, then simple screencapture with ffmpeg.
- size on disk
- cpu usage
- size in memory
- impact on user lives
- impact on developer lives
- impact on our industry as a whole
- <insert other criteria>
The thing is, ffmpeg is a dependency of obs, so if you install obs you have ffmpeg installed while the opposite is not necessarily true.
I also discovered that OBS Studio can be installed directly from the Steam store, which makes makes the whole thing feel just a little more seamless (I'm streaming to the Steam Frame). I don't mind trading the extra install space for that feeling, especially since OBS is OSS. It was really pleasant to have this all "just work" end-to-end on both Linux and Windows stacks.
I had initially only planned to use this setup for turn-based games, but after this pleasant surprise, it looks like I get to explore some other kinds of games :D
It's a very lightweight way to push low latency video between devices via the browser. I've used it to turn my phone into a webcam, to jointly watch movies remotely (with simultaneous voice chat included), to make a multi-person video call, to stream my phone's screen to my desktop, etc All kinds of cool uses.
Of course, it can feed into OBS, which was sort of the original purpose, but it is so more flexible than that. Of those above examples, only using my phone as a webcam involved OBS.
There's a linked series of videos demoing it at the page, if you scroll down.
Finally... The CEF they used was 2 years out of date, and after RCE exploits [0] occuring in the wild getting big enough that they got picked up in the media [1], we finally have a fix 1 month later.
[0] https://blog.scrt.ch/2026/09/22/how-one-twitch-chat-message-...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49852143
[2] https://www.scworld.com/brief/vulnerable-obs-overlay-and-chr...
[0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/discussions/3853#di...
[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/discussions/3853#di...
If you don’t know what you are doing any tool can be dangerous
Whew, thanks for putting my fears at rest. You're only pwned some of the time, not always.
Should the streamers' apps be more secure? Absolutely, but the underlying tool should also strive to be secure enough for all use cases.
Anyway, thanks for the two links, they were interesting reads.
* Appeal to personal responsibility;
* False equivalence.
I'll strike those off my bullshit bingo card.
The bigger issue is perhaps whether one views someone else politely pointing out something they would like to see improved/changed as a complaint. I suspect a not insignificant portion of users of English unfortunately would interpret it that way. However, the ubiquity of the LLMs might give us some hope that the sending side over time ceases contributing to the problem by saddling the people they wish to freely sacrifice their lifetime for them with their frustration.
It is one when you deflect criticism instead of addressing it. Maybe you should have read more than the first sentence after you googled what a fallacy is.
But at https://obsproject.com/help we see OBS has a Discord (regular gamer), a Forum, a Feedback page, and a Mastodon.
>nearly the same amount of effort to post a complaint you can delegate the task of reproducing the issue, diagnosing the root cause, and proposing a fix.
Is the effort the same though?
And even it is the same, making a meaningful contribution to an open source project doesn't mean just fixing your problem, but you also need to stay in line with the contribution guidelines, the project's direction and many more, which takes much more effort than just vibe coding a version for yourself.
Building software for one and for a bunch are two different things. AI is good at the former and can be used for the later but not without much effort. Models will get better, true, but that doesn't mean we need less engineering, in fact we need more to stay up-to-pace with AI. Imagine everyone submitting a PR to fix a bug, how fast can you review it manually? And if you use AI to review/verify them, the cost just shift from person who submitted the PR to the open source maintainer.
That doesn't mean AI is bad but that we need new systems and rules.
> All text and content submitted to our project, which includes code, descriptions, issues, and comments, must be human written.
> The use of GitHub Copilot and other assistive AI technologies is heavily discouraged.
> Low-effort or incorrect submissions that are determined to have been generated by, or created with aid of such systems may lead to a ban from contributing to the repository or project as a whole.
That would violate OBS's rules - they disallow AI-written code (or write ups) being submitted. Additionally, if you put nearly the same amount of effort into it as a comment mentioning the original bug - i.e. not much effort - they say that may result in a project ban.
- have reasonably low storage
- start recording
- couple seconds or minutes later the video on the preview gets frozen and stops being recorded, while audio continues; recording status unchanged
- the freeze usually happens in the moment of switching between apps, allthough this isn't required at all
yes maintainers do it for free for years which deserves recognition but this exact issue existed for years and has been reported in many ways, without any change, and no other apps have ever behaved this way on my devices
My personal MacBook had 8GB of free storage (4.2GB after my test recording). I experience issues with programs like xcode failing to compile or crashes when I open too many files, pages hasn't been able to save a file since the machine had 15GB+ free.
I just download, installed, and recorded 10 minutes of desktop footage with a webcam overlay and audio. Nothing unexpected happened. I watched all 9 minutes and 28 seconds of it and it looks and sounds exactly as I would expect.
I spent my time doing this and writing this comment not to belittle you or your experience, though at this point I would ask you what do you expect to happen?
You did not post an existing bug report, or write one yourself. You've provided no evidence that anyone who contributes meaningfully to the project has experienced or even heard about this issue, let alone anyone who operates the project or consumes it from macos has any notion it is an issue.
Again, I believe this is a real issue. But there is no information here to go off of, especially with my experience, that points to anyway to meaningfully improve an OSS project in regards to your experience. If nobody with the requisite experience is asking the right questions, this will not get fixed. It starts with those people having any information to start with.
The most my homedir has ever grown in one year is 3.2 GB, and I don't really go out of my way to keep things tidy. I'd be very pissed off if things started pestering me to clear stuff up years before it actually became a problem.
lol! This comment made my night. In short: low available disk space, lots of projects requiring disk space.
No I don't see OS notifications about low disk space (at least on my macbook), some 3rd party applications give me notifications about low disk space though. I can confirm that all of my USB-C ports work! I have 2 local drives and a remote NAS that backup all the 'critical' data from my machine.
Unlike other operating systems I've had experience with, macOS is the most capable of operating in a (near) 'disk full' state. Where something like Windows will go from crying about the available disk space, to failing opening explorer, macOS will continue running just fine for general usage.
> Wonder what other aspects of your life you choose to live so dangerously close to the edge as well?
As for this: I've spent the last year living in India, where most people I've met think they are invincible, so I roll the dice every day!
I used to get the OS out of space warning a lot from macOS. I used to have a 128GB SSD, and Adobe would fill up the drive with cache in the Application Support folder frequently. My newer MBP has a larger SSD, but I also manage the storage much closer now.
This experience I have of low disk space is only on Sequoia which I haven't seen give an OS notification until 5gb left, which again doesn't happen often.
Over the following year, roughly 20 releases later, my disk was full. Xcode generates a ton of hidden cruft in the DerivedData folder during every build/release that I wasn't even aware of! I spent a couple days googling and trying free & paid disk space analyzers (sidenote: I didn't realize how good we have it in Windows-land, there are so many good free tools but in Apple-land they are all so frustrating to use and most of them are totally useless for this particular case). Eventually, I found an Apple forum thread explaining where Xcode hides its generated build data, it was like 8GB of stuff per build! I set a calendar reminder for every 12 months to clean this folder.
I can't move anything else to an external drive really because what's left is necessary for build environment. I don't use the Mac for anything except development, so I've literally removed everything and it's down to barebones but it's still a struggle. If I had known I would have invested another $150 for the 512GB version.
We need the money.
Further, it's an inexplicable issue with the API; any consumer of SCK is vulnerable to the issue. I'd regard it as Apple's issue to fix, since there is no good reason for frames to randomly stop streaming just because you have less than ~40 GB of disk space free.
Any solution on the OBS side that tried to detect a frozen stream and restart it would not only be a hack and quite possibly lead to greater issues, but could also have privacy implications if we cannot positively identify that the stream was not stopped intentionally (which we cannot).
Much happier with Cap for screencast recording https://github.com/capsoftware/cap
But yes, use the most specialized tool for the task at hand.
Even if the preview player shows it correct, once it's rendered the cursor just seems to drift way off making the video useless.
I've gone back to using QuickTime.
btw I use OBS virtual camera its one of my fav features with masking etc for a video avatar vlogger effect
(because I had no idea what this was about and probably not alone)
I'm making do with OBS, but I lose more video to "plugged in external monitor and forgot to update OBS config" than I actually record.
I wonder if the "modern" way for problems of this nature is to fork the open-source repo and ask your favourite agent to strip it down to bare essentials that you need (performance gains) and add the specific feature enhancements you want (needs to work only for your configuration -- may not pass the quality standard needed for a PR)
People streaming things mights disagree.
The common case for the plugin is to do some preprocessing before importing the video into OBS, but you can also use the pipeline as a video filter, which is really powerful, because you can inject a filter into not only a single source, but also at any level of a nested scene. So you can scale/composite several inputs together and then the video filter can copy the source stream and encode/tee it to a file output. Might still be considered a hack of sorts.
[1] https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/branch-output-streami...
sigh why does Apple name things so wrong. How do you edit a pdf? In Preview, of course. How do you record a video, with Quicktime Player, of course.
(sorry for the rant)
I work at a university and occasionally make video lectures for my classes. I used to do it in Zoom, but it sometimes had weird glitches where it just… deletes the videos I recorded. It’s happened several times that I lost an hour or more of recordings and had to redo it, once it deleted all the recordings that I did that week. Also, it was a bit of work to position screen sharing vs my webcam feed in a way that looked decent. I then tried a bunch of other apps, most of them had issues with latency, laggy video, or stuttering, despite playing around with the settings a lot.
Finally tried OBS again, I bounced off it in the past because it seemed overcomplicated at first glance. But it’s FOSS, makes excellent video quality, and after some initial setup of my scenes it is very easy to make new videos. And most importantly, it has so far never lost any of my data.
I noticed in the release notes that they dropped Ubuntu 24.04. I'm kind of surprised by this and made a mental note to dig in as to why...
[0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/13900/changes
Their policy outright bans AI. So regardless if you support or oppose this policy, it is going to be fun to see if the fork becomes significantly better than the original or not.
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/blob/master/CONTRIB...
Basically I connect my camera to the computer through an AV cable -> AV to USB capture dongle
In OBS I can select that as video input, and with minimal adjustments (aspect ratio, resolution, audio input channel) I press play on the camcorder and then "start recording" on the computer and it will record it nicely as the video is streamed, though I have to make sure to press manually "stop recording" once the cassette has reached the end.
I had a bunch of old tapes, I searched for services that would digitize them and they were very expensive and would charge per tape, it was cheaper for me to get a second hand camera, the AV cable, the capture dongle, and digitize them myself.
Answer this thread if you struggle and I can post when I get to the office
> All text and content submitted to our project, which includes code, descriptions, issues, and comments, must be human written.
> The use of GitHub Copilot and other assistive AI technologies is heavily discouraged.
Use this instead: https://github.com/obs-rust/obs-studio
Nothing asinine about it. Just because many in the industry have decided they are willing to accept the downsides of using output generated by LLMs in their product doesn't mean that everyone in the industry has to. People are still free to do things differently than you do.