I haven't spent much time in the video processing/streaming space, but I was delighted to discover OBS Studio this week while putting together what has turned out to be an incredibly cozy little entertainment setup by feeding the two gaming consoles and geriatric gaming desktop I've acquired over the years into an HDMI switcher and USB HDMI capture box that in turn streams the feed into an OBS Studio preview (launched from Steam) running on a dummy display.
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 (:
What's the negativity? Anything wrong with OBS in particular? I haven't used it in a while, but recently saw DHH saying it's awful. I reckon that's the usual Twitter hyperbole/rhetoric that attracts attention, so just wondering.
That's not what he said. OBS decided to not support streaming to Rumble for political reasons. So Omarchy is gonna ship a leaner alternative soon-ish, that's all.
Yes, I know that Rumble is clearly a fascist enterprise. I was talking about Omarchy. It feels like a red flag when a distro rejects software simply because it doesn't allow them to publish to fascist outlets.
Is there any other reason to use this distro other than signal political alignment? I looked into it a few months ago without even being aware of the political controversy surrounding it (I was curious about the whole "Agentic Linux" angle) and all I found was a poorly configured Arch Linux install with some rather crappy bash scripts on top.
Well, ok, I think there's another use case which is to LARP as a Un*x "pro user" without actually having any idea how to properly use a shell.
Is this sarcasm or are you really completely unaware of how ridiculous this statement is when it applies just as much to OBS' decision to restrict where their users can stream to?
I was specifically talking about OBS' decision to restrict where their users can stream to, so I'm not sure what you think it is I'm completely unaware of.
I hate that this whole cluster of beliefs exists, but software on my own computer enforcing what I can and can't do for ideological reason is a bit much.
Unless they just didn't implemented it for whatever reason, but someone else can implement this as an extensions or something. Your software obviously doesn't need to support everything.
The snowflakes rounding up people for holding up signs also think volunteers not actively promoting their views are engaged in civilization ending suppression of speech.
That's the most frustrating aspect. They act as if we've trampled on their rights, but all we're doing is conserving our own energy and not carrying water for their ideology.
Since when is anyone freely entitled to my time and attention?
As far as I can tell, it's the latter option. Rumble has a whole section of their website explaining how to use OBS with it [0]. The complaints seem to be entirely based around Rumble not being available in a drop-down menu [1]. It's kind of pathetic honestly.
I may be completely stupid but these instructions by Rumble either completely unhelpful or something on my end isn't loading content in that site. But if that's the actual instructions to get OBS to stream to Rumble, I get why just upstreaming it would've been user-friendly.
But apparently I'm a fascist for this type of wrongthink.
What's confusing about using RTMP or a virtual camera? It's extremely straightforward. I genuinely do not understand how you could possibly need more instructions than this. Do you want screenshots or something?
Regardless, this just means that Rumble needs better documentation. It's clearly possible and fairly easy.
I saw somebody else besides DHH talking about their decision not to accept PRs with AI written code briefly. I believe there’s a Rust fork in progress.
Funny how you went the huge app route for such a narrow scope where I would have just used a lightweight tool like ffplay given the setting would never really change.
Adjacent to OBS, I want to give an unsolicited shoutout to VDO.ninja.
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.
You can find why it was complicated [0] and why it took so long [1] on GitHub. I do wish I had been faster on it. That said, the RCE required the user to be using a vibe-coded web-based chat overlay that didn't properly sanitize chatter inputs, so has a (hopefully) limited scope.
Unfortunately, most streamers don't have the best IT security knowledge, and with AI tools now allowing them more and more than what was previously possible, it also opens the door for more vibe coded apps that could have serious security holes.
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.
Thanks for chiming in and linking that, that was an interesting read. As much as I understand CEF's reasoning for making this shift, it's baffling that they don't provide a universal way to implement what you now had to implement yourself.
>> My vibe coded apps tend to over sanitize inputs. Not sure what was the point of blaming LLMs.
> LLMs weren’t blamed … If you don’t know what you are doing any tool can be dangerous
If we're not talking about LLMs but instead about humans (who might be coding by hand, or from stackoverflow, or who might be using an LLM regardless of whether it frequently sanitizes by default), then shouldn't the original comment have more accurately referred to humans, as vibe-coding specifically refers to LLM use, right?
Did you mean to reply to my comment? Was your issue with the original claim that lack of sanitization *"required"* "vibe-coded" functionality, or with the counterclaim that lack of sanitization can and has occurred even for code that is 0% related to vibe-coding or LLMs (let alone "requiring" vibe-coding for it to occur)?
OBS is such a staple among streamers, for a long time I thought "OBS" was the generic term for video screen sharing software. Only recently learned that it's a specific software, and it's free and open source!
I love OBS! I’ve been using it for years now to record talks and it just makes it so easy to screen capture slides (even under wayland) and combine it with different video/audio inputs. Granted, I’m not a power user, but I’m (luckily) not encountering the bugs people here seem to be annoyed about :)
There are a handful of comments here rueing buggy behaviors. These days with 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. Yes, it may incur a small to moderate cost, but it's a contribution to an open source project that apparently provides some value in return.
I think this is what the whole "AI killed software" fallacy came from.
>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.
> There are a handful of comments here rueing buggy behaviors. These days with 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. Yes, it may incur a small to moderate cost, but it's a contribution to an open source project
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.
Okay, I'll bite the bait. Assuming that I am a regular user (think gamer), I have a Windows PC, no dev tools, no AI subs or accounts, no GitHub. How specifically can I do the steps required to propose the fix they way you suggest?
> "Appeal to personal responsibility" is not a fallacy.
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.
Out of interest- what is your recommended path for this? I mean the path of least resistance where I don’t even have to check out the code locally or similar.
Officially and unofficially, the most you need to do is create an Issue report with valid reproduction steps. You'd be surprised how quickly some issues get fixed just because someone finally provided the missing link in an Issue.
Yeah, I don't agree that using an LLM to generate a PR in a code base is the best line of action. I could see using an LLM to generate information to provide to create an Issue with would be potentially useful. It doesn't generate code in a way that may not be in the project's style. It doesn't hide anything from the devs. Instead, it points the devs to the specific problem and allows the devs to grok what/why/how of the issue. As we've all seen before (I'm assuming), fixing a bug in one place might not be the best fix place for the fix or a fix might reveal an issue somewhere else.
> 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.
Did they finally fix the bug where if you have less than ~40gb storage the recording will just randomly die for no reason with no notice, it is unimaginably annoying
Is this on macOS [0] or another platform? I don't think I've heard of this issue - if you have a log of such a session, please create a bug report [1].
Man I get exhausted just by reading other people's complaints (without environment description or steps to reproduce). I am puzzled by what keeps OSS maintainers going.
- use obs any of the latest versions on macos any version
- 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
I'm not denying you're experiencing this, I believe this issue occurs for you and likely has occured across OS and/or application versions.
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.
How does one operate with only 8GB of free storage? Are you not constantly receiving OS pop ups about low disk space? Are all of your USB ports dead so you can not attach external storage to move some of you (likely) unused files off? Maybe you like living dangerously? Wonder what other aspects of your life you choose to live so dangerously close to the edge as well?
Are you sure that's not time machine stomping all over it? You system might be snapshotting and having trouble at low disk space. Or if you're swapping a lot, then that could also be a reason?
OBS is much more aimed at livestreaming to platforms like Twitch and managing multiple cameras incl one of you, one of your screen etc. Well beyond what Cap is for.
But yes, use the most specialized tool for the task at hand.
I tried a bunch of "open" tools last week, but turns out they are a paid tool in disguise most of the time. I eventually paid for CleanShotX for my work and have peace of mind because it just works. OBS is IMO much more stable and aimed at live streaming anyway.
ShareX has been around for ever but just updated the UI and now super easy to do capture work with annotations and cam output etc (no studio but it's light weight)
btw I use OBS virtual camera its one of my fav features with masking etc for a video avatar vlogger effect
Cap completely ate several recordings for me. Admittedly they were over an hour long, and I should’ve broken them up a bit, and perhaps it’s not what it’s used for. Switched back to OBS, while it’s not as easy to use it’s pretty reliable
I’m working on a side project to rebuild OBS-like tools with a focus on an agentic workflow. Currently testing at https://arclightlive.com if anyone wants to try.
While we're here, does anyone know a screen recording application that automatically takes into account display changes, audio device changes, camera resets, etc.?
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 too frequently plug and unplug dock and external displays. It's a little painful to keep checking and sometimes re-add display source to get the default screen and voice recording working.
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)
Yes, please, that would help so much. OBS seems to be designed for static setups and a single output stream. In my case, I have a setup that changes often (for example, connect a USB video device that processes input from a microscope). I thought I would be able to record multiple video streams at once without burning them into a single output stream (e.g. to multiple files, or a multi-stream file), but this turned out to be difficult without hacks.
The Branchoutput plugin[1] is what you are looking for for multi recording/streaming. It allows you to add recording (or streaming destinations) to individual sources, scenes and outputs via the video filter settings. It is really quite powerful.
Thanks -- this does look like it would do this. But I'm wondering if this entire setup isn't completely overkill. All I need is to record multiple video streams simultaneously. I currently do this by launching multiple Quicktime Player apps and clicking "record" in each one of them...
Have you considered using GStreamer pipelines for this? And taking it one step further, if you want to use OBS generally, there's a plugin for OBS that allows you to integrate pipelines too.
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.
This could probably be automated using either an OBS plugin (if you really want deep integration and not running another program) or a standalone program (written in whatever language you want) that listens for display changes and pokes OBS using its websocket API. The hooks are definitely there to update source configs.
Surely the main function of a capture program should be to capture video, no matter what, even if that means capturing too much / uninteresting sources some of the time?
Except it's really designed to composite video from a bunch of different places and broadcast the result, whether they are windows, screens, cameras, etc. And a rather lot of people don't want every screen to be captured, just the ones that they have selected. It's not a "screen recorder" program, really. And it's explicitly designed with an API to be remote controlled if hardware changes out from under it, so you can encode exactly your own policy logic on what to do. (External display plugged in? Disable my laptop source at full resolution and enable my laptop and monitor sources, side by side, with one scaled as necessary, and in this layout. But if I'm currently recording or streaming, don't do anything. - this is user-specific logic)
I love that I can stream from my iPhone directly into OBS on my Mac. I don't love that Metal shaders aren't supported, and I have to rely on janky extensions to get them working.
Since there's a lot of talk about the CEF update, does anyone know why they compiled it in instead of having it as a normal plugin? It's incredibly annoying that compiling OBS means compliling almost all of chromium...
The plugin-loading overhaul and improved source snapping look like useful updates. OBS continues to show how much attention to detail matters in open-source software. Excited to see how creators and plugin developers adapt to version 33.0!
I haven't spent much time in the video processing/streaming space, but I was delighted to discover OBS Studio this week while putting together what has turned out to be an incredibly cozy little entertainment setup by feeding the two gaming consoles and geriatric gaming desktop I've acquired over the years into an HDMI switcher and USB HDMI capture box that in turn streams the feed into an OBS Studio preview (launched from Steam) running on a dummy display.
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 (:
It's very heartening to read testimonials from users who aren't jaded. I hate negativity around OSS online
To misquote the classic about programming languages.
"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.
What's the negativity? Anything wrong with OBS in particular? I haven't used it in a while, but recently saw DHH saying it's awful. I reckon that's the usual Twitter hyperbole/rhetoric that attracts attention, so just wondering.
That's not what he said. OBS decided to not support streaming to Rumble for political reasons. So Omarchy is gonna ship a leaner alternative soon-ish, that's all.
Are they simply accepting the fact that they are the distro for fascists now?
they’ve been leaning into that since 2020, are the hosting platform for truth social etc
Yes, I know that Rumble is clearly a fascist enterprise. I was talking about Omarchy. It feels like a red flag when a distro rejects software simply because it doesn't allow them to publish to fascist outlets.
Is there any other reason to use this distro other than signal political alignment? I looked into it a few months ago without even being aware of the political controversy surrounding it (I was curious about the whole "Agentic Linux" angle) and all I found was a poorly configured Arch Linux install with some rather crappy bash scripts on top.
Well, ok, I think there's another use case which is to LARP as a Un*x "pro user" without actually having any idea how to properly use a shell.
do you have any non-political / demographical arguments against omarchy?
what is it good at, what is it bad at?
I'm not the person to whom you asked this question, but it seems redundant considering that their post literally contained this critique:
> a poorly configured Arch Linux install with some rather crappy bash scripts on top.
Sure, but arch notoriously is very small, I'm not sure how you can really configure it that poorly at the install level.
What makes the bash scripts crappy, etc?
I asked what it's good at, too, didn't literally contain that critique.
> It feels like a red flag when a distro rejects software simply because it makes political decisions on behalf of the users
Fixed that for you.
Is this sarcasm or are you really completely unaware of how ridiculous this statement is when it applies just as much to OBS' decision to restrict where their users can stream to?
I was specifically talking about OBS' decision to restrict where their users can stream to, so I'm not sure what you think it is I'm completely unaware of.
I just made his quote read more accurately.
So, you agree that it's a red flag regardless of the reason? Good to know!
yes, that exactly
I hate that this whole cluster of beliefs exists, but software on my own computer enforcing what I can and can't do for ideological reason is a bit much.
Unless they just didn't implemented it for whatever reason, but someone else can implement this as an extensions or something. Your software obviously doesn't need to support everything.
It’s the latter.
The snowflakes rounding up people for holding up signs also think volunteers not actively promoting their views are engaged in civilization ending suppression of speech.
That's the most frustrating aspect. They act as if we've trampled on their rights, but all we're doing is conserving our own energy and not carrying water for their ideology.
Since when is anyone freely entitled to my time and attention?
As far as I can tell, it's the latter option. Rumble has a whole section of their website explaining how to use OBS with it [0]. The complaints seem to be entirely based around Rumble not being available in a drop-down menu [1]. It's kind of pathetic honestly.
[0] https://studio.rumble.com/help/guides/obs
[1] https://x.com/dhh/status/2108603279345070205
(Sorry for the X link, but that is the only place that I can actually find people complaining about this).
I may be completely stupid but these instructions by Rumble either completely unhelpful or something on my end isn't loading content in that site. But if that's the actual instructions to get OBS to stream to Rumble, I get why just upstreaming it would've been user-friendly.
But apparently I'm a fascist for this type of wrongthink.
What's confusing about using RTMP or a virtual camera? It's extremely straightforward. I genuinely do not understand how you could possibly need more instructions than this. Do you want screenshots or something?
Regardless, this just means that Rumble needs better documentation. It's clearly possible and fairly easy.
I saw somebody else besides DHH talking about their decision not to accept PRs with AI written code briefly. I believe there’s a Rust fork in progress.
Funny how you went the huge app route for such a narrow scope where I would have just used a lightweight tool like ffplay given the setting would never really change.
wait, OBS is a huge app but ffmpeg is not?
Adjacent to OBS, I want to give an unsolicited shoutout to VDO.ninja.
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.
[1] https://vdo.ninja/
I've been using this for Twitch streaming. Don't need to install anything. https://flint.cam/
Whoa, this is crazy good. Although not being open source makes me wonder how long it intends to stay free.
> Updated CEF from 127/6533 to 150/7871
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...
You can find why it was complicated [0] and why it took so long [1] on GitHub. I do wish I had been faster on it. That said, the RCE required the user to be using a vibe-coded web-based chat overlay that didn't properly sanitize chatter inputs, so has a (hopefully) limited scope.
[0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/discussions/3853#di...
[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/discussions/3853#di...
Unfortunately, most streamers don't have the best IT security knowledge, and with AI tools now allowing them more and more than what was previously possible, it also opens the door for more vibe coded apps that could have serious security holes.
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.
Thanks for chiming in and linking that, that was an interesting read. As much as I understand CEF's reasoning for making this shift, it's baffling that they don't provide a universal way to implement what you now had to implement yourself.
My vibe coded apps tend to over sanitize inputs. Not sure what was the point of blaming LLMs.
LLMs weren’t blamed, vibe coders were blamed.
If you don’t know what you are doing any tool can be dangerous
>>> vibe-coded
>> My vibe coded apps tend to over sanitize inputs. Not sure what was the point of blaming LLMs.
> LLMs weren’t blamed … If you don’t know what you are doing any tool can be dangerous
If we're not talking about LLMs but instead about humans (who might be coding by hand, or from stackoverflow, or who might be using an LLM regardless of whether it frequently sanitizes by default), then shouldn't the original comment have more accurately referred to humans, as vibe-coding specifically refers to LLM use, right?
Does this even remotely matter? What’s the issue here?
Did you mean to reply to my comment? Was your issue with the original claim that lack of sanitization *"required"* "vibe-coded" functionality, or with the counterclaim that lack of sanitization can and has occurred even for code that is 0% related to vibe-coding or LLMs (let alone "requiring" vibe-coding for it to occur)?
Read where "required" was in the comment you're flipping out about: it didn't say that the software had to be vibe coded, just that it was.
The RCE was caused specifically by a custom Claude generated overlay, so finding the RCE did require using this vibe coded software.
I did and I think you’re just coming across as very eager to defend LLM’s. Totally possible I am misreading your intention though
OBS is such a staple among streamers, for a long time I thought "OBS" was the generic term for video screen sharing software. Only recently learned that it's a specific software, and it's free and open source!
I love OBS! I’ve been using it for years now to record talks and it just makes it so easy to screen capture slides (even under wayland) and combine it with different video/audio inputs. Granted, I’m not a power user, but I’m (luckily) not encountering the bugs people here seem to be annoyed about :)
Link to website:
https://obsproject.com/
(because I had no idea what this was about and probably not alone)
There are a handful of comments here rueing buggy behaviors. These days with 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. Yes, it may incur a small to moderate cost, but it's a contribution to an open source project that apparently provides some value in return.
I think this is what the whole "AI killed software" fallacy came from.
>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.
> There are a handful of comments here rueing buggy behaviors. These days with 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. Yes, it may incur a small to moderate cost, but it's a contribution to an open source project
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.
Okay, I'll bite the bait. Assuming that I am a regular user (think gamer), I have a Windows PC, no dev tools, no AI subs or accounts, no GitHub. How specifically can I do the steps required to propose the fix they way you suggest?
I'm not the person you are replying to, and I am with you. I disagree with the suggestion it's trivial to reproduce, diagnose, and fix a bug.
But at https://obsproject.com/help we see OBS has a Discord (regular gamer), a Forum, a Feedback page, and a Mastodon.
How did you end up on Hacker News?
address bar
Sir, this is a Wendy's..
paste a link to this HN article and then your comment into your favorite LLM, it will be happy to guide you.
That's two fallacies at the same time!
* Appeal to personal responsibility;
* False equivalence.
I'll strike those off my bullshit bingo card.
"Appeal to personal responsibility" is not a fallacy. Get a different bingo card.
> "Appeal to personal responsibility" is not a fallacy.
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.
Fair chance not everyone here has the same skill set, motivations, predispositions, and so on and so forth.
I tend to agree with you, but why calling it "bullshit"? You can disagree and have a discussing without belittlering other people.
Out of interest- what is your recommended path for this? I mean the path of least resistance where I don’t even have to check out the code locally or similar.
Officially and unofficially, the most you need to do is create an Issue report with valid reproduction steps. You'd be surprised how quickly some issues get fixed just because someone finally provided the missing link in an Issue.
Yeah, I don't agree that using an LLM to generate a PR in a code base is the best line of action. I could see using an LLM to generate information to provide to create an Issue with would be potentially useful. It doesn't generate code in a way that may not be in the project's style. It doesn't hide anything from the devs. Instead, it points the devs to the specific problem and allows the devs to grok what/why/how of the issue. As we've all seen before (I'm assuming), fixing a bug in one place might not be the best fix place for the fix or a fix might reveal an issue somewhere else.
That's not even remotely true.
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/blob/master/CONTRIB...
> 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.
Did they finally fix the bug where if you have less than ~40gb storage the recording will just randomly die for no reason with no notice, it is unimaginably annoying
Is this on macOS [0] or another platform? I don't think I've heard of this issue - if you have a log of such a session, please create a bug report [1].
[0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/10596
[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues
Man I get exhausted just by reading other people's complaints (without environment description or steps to reproduce). I am puzzled by what keeps OSS maintainers going.
- use obs any of the latest versions on macos any version
- 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
I'm not denying you're experiencing this, I believe this issue occurs for you and likely has occured across OS and/or application versions.
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.
How does one operate with only 8GB of free storage? Are you not constantly receiving OS pop ups about low disk space? Are all of your USB ports dead so you can not attach external storage to move some of you (likely) unused files off? Maybe you like living dangerously? Wonder what other aspects of your life you choose to live so dangerously close to the edge as well?
Are you sure that's not time machine stomping all over it? You system might be snapshotting and having trouble at low disk space. Or if you're swapping a lot, then that could also be a reason?
This is happening all time time and I lost countless video recordings because of it...
Love OBS! It's so far ahead of proprietary apps in so many areas, it's incredibly impressive
Using OBS only when it’s a must
Much happier with Cap for screencast recording https://github.com/capsoftware/cap
OBS is much more aimed at livestreaming to platforms like Twitch and managing multiple cameras incl one of you, one of your screen etc. Well beyond what Cap is for.
But yes, use the most specialized tool for the task at hand.
I tried a bunch of "open" tools last week, but turns out they are a paid tool in disguise most of the time. I eventually paid for CleanShotX for my work and have peace of mind because it just works. OBS is IMO much more stable and aimed at live streaming anyway.
ShareX has been around for ever but just updated the UI and now super easy to do capture work with annotations and cam output etc (no studio but it's light weight)
btw I use OBS virtual camera its one of my fav features with masking etc for a video avatar vlogger effect
https://getsharex.com/
Why are the binary releases hosted on a 3rd party site and not on Github?
So they can see how many people download each binary
'download_count' is part of the REST API https://docs.github.com/en/rest/releases/assets
I rest my case then.
I'm not sure that means what you think it means
I'm not sure it means what you think it means
Ba dum tschhttp
Marketing.
Cap completely ate several recordings for me. Admittedly they were over an hour long, and I should’ve broken them up a bit, and perhaps it’s not what it’s used for. Switched back to OBS, while it’s not as easy to use it’s pretty reliable
Cap routinely fails to render videos properly. The mouse ends up way off where it was, overlays somehow fail to be rendered.
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.
I’m working on a side project to rebuild OBS-like tools with a focus on an agentic workflow. Currently testing at https://arclightlive.com if anyone wants to try.
While we're here, does anyone know a screen recording application that automatically takes into account display changes, audio device changes, camera resets, etc.?
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'm working on a project for the mac that may address this - arclightlive.com - open to feedback on it.
I too frequently plug and unplug dock and external displays. It's a little painful to keep checking and sometimes re-add display source to get the default screen and voice recording working.
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)
Yes, please, that would help so much. OBS seems to be designed for static setups and a single output stream. In my case, I have a setup that changes often (for example, connect a USB video device that processes input from a microscope). I thought I would be able to record multiple video streams at once without burning them into a single output stream (e.g. to multiple files, or a multi-stream file), but this turned out to be difficult without hacks.
The Branchoutput plugin[1] is what you are looking for for multi recording/streaming. It allows you to add recording (or streaming destinations) to individual sources, scenes and outputs via the video filter settings. It is really quite powerful.
[1] https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/branch-output-streami...
Thanks -- this does look like it would do this. But I'm wondering if this entire setup isn't completely overkill. All I need is to record multiple video streams simultaneously. I currently do this by launching multiple Quicktime Player apps and clicking "record" in each one of them...
> launching multiple Quicktime Player apps and clicking "record" in each one of them...
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)
Have you considered using GStreamer pipelines for this? And taking it one step further, if you want to use OBS generally, there's a plugin for OBS that allows you to integrate pipelines too.
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.
This could probably be automated using either an OBS plugin (if you really want deep integration and not running another program) or a standalone program (written in whatever language you want) that listens for display changes and pokes OBS using its websocket API. The hooks are definitely there to update source configs.
Surely the main function of a capture program should be to capture video, no matter what, even if that means capturing too much / uninteresting sources some of the time?
> even if that means capturing too much
People streaming things mights disagree.
As the name (Open Broadcaster Software) suggests, it isn't primarily a capture program.
Except it's really designed to composite video from a bunch of different places and broadcast the result, whether they are windows, screens, cameras, etc. And a rather lot of people don't want every screen to be captured, just the ones that they have selected. It's not a "screen recorder" program, really. And it's explicitly designed with an API to be remote controlled if hardware changes out from under it, so you can encode exactly your own policy logic on what to do. (External display plugged in? Disable my laptop source at full resolution and enable my laptop and monitor sources, side by side, with one scaled as necessary, and in this layout. But if I'm currently recording or streaming, don't do anything. - this is user-specific logic)
Not sure if and has bugs but is fast and easy: https://github.com/MathewSachin/Captura
I made a little script that reconnects everything the way I want it on launch via WebSocket. Works great
which OS ?
I love that I can stream from my iPhone directly into OBS on my Mac. I don't love that Metal shaders aren't supported, and I have to rely on janky extensions to get them working.
One of my very favorite pieces of software, period. Props to all involved.
Since there's a lot of talk about the CEF update, does anyone know why they compiled it in instead of having it as a normal plugin? It's incredibly annoying that compiling OBS means compliling almost all of chromium...
Problem still persists where OBS cannot capture it's own window.
Is solved the source disconnection with macOS ? Even it's an OS problem.
Easily fixable with a script that sets things up as you want it on launch via websocket
Do you have that posted anywhere? I'd love to peek at it
No, but it was very trivial (Claude did it in maybe a minute). It just made a new launcher that opens OBS, then refreshes/checks all my sources.
Answer this thread if you struggle and I can post when I get to the office
The plugin-loading overhaul and improved source snapping look like useful updates. OBS continues to show how much attention to detail matters in open-source software. Excited to see how creators and plugin developers adapt to version 33.0!
I use Lifelog Timeline
Great, another project with an asinine and backwards-thinking AI policy:
> 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
Thank you for pointing this out, I just went ahead and donated to OBS Studio explicitly mentioning this policy as a reason