Proposed bounty for adding virtual camera / microphone support natively to OBS
github.com
github.com
GitHub Sponsors (https://github.com/sponsors) already exists, but I feel that they missed the point. As a user, I don't want to throw money at a project like it's a charity, I want to throw money so issues will be solved. As a developer, I don't want to accept unconditional donations (and all the unwritten, assumed responsibilities it comes with), I want to be funded in a concrete way so I can work on the issues users want so much they'd pay for it.
Yes, I'm aware this is based on a cryptocurrency system. But I would never want to force my users to navigate that mess in order to simply give me a few bucks. I'm just joking around above, but I don't think Gitcoin gets close to solving the problem.
I like the concept of a utility-based market.
To be fair, GitHub Sponsors doesn't even allow you to sponsor a specific project, but only users or organizations.
I think BountySource (https://www.bountysource.com/) was the first player on the "Bounties for GitHub issues" side of things. Long time ago I actually came across a issue with a bounty though, so not sure it's actually working at the moment.
https://gitcoin.co/ is another attempt at aligning the incentives, but it's heavily involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and also been spamming projects in order to be setup on their platform, so I've been kind of avoiding it.
I think Open Collective seems to be the best platform for supporting projects with funding, but they don't have any "per issue" funding as far as I know. But it's a open project, someone should propose that feature!
In most parts of the world, that's an extremely high level salary and could easily fund most peoples month, granted they live outside of Silicon Valley.
I'm sure many people would be more than happy to receive 300 or much less for half a day of work.
The $10,000 bounty is about right for this sort of work. In fact it might be a little low, but I have no idea how OBS works internally so I could be completely wrong.
Your talking windows audio /video internals which is not a common skill
They'll add it to issues the maintainers won't do otherwise, which in turn leads maintainers to hold the code hostage, not doing something they'd have done had there been no bounty structure, hoping that someone posts a bounty for it. Of course a maintainer is one of the world experts in that codebase so knows really well which things can or have to be done. So that behaviour will lead to maintainers not addressing issues they know will annoy users. It leads to annoyance driven development.
Regular payments are far better IMO for projects long term because they allow maintainers to actually maintain the software instead of hunting for bug bounties. They give more security to maintainers (rent is pretty much a constant for example) and less overhad for users (unless they want to save money and use it most efficiently, but IMO that's not what donations should be about). That being said, bounties aren't bad overall, they are definitely great ideas if used here and there, but funding of open source projects shouldn't be bounty-driven.
I don’t see an issue with people saying “here’s my contrib if the community is willing to pay for it XX”.
One could even see maintainers becoming the budgeteers of aforementioned projects.
If you're asking what we benefit from doing this, not much. We could have released proprietary software, but as users of software ourselves, we enjoy having these freedoms, so we don't want to restrict users of the software we write.
It's a tool where users post bounties for features. Usually the owner of an open source project would set up a bounty and say "$xxx to fix this" and open source developers can apply to work on the problem, once its approved they get the funds.
But, if community members really value the project they can chip in more funding to the issue.
Currently the system is set up to use Ethereum and DAI (an ethereum USD stablecoin) to handle transactions, and Gitcoin's smart contract acts as the escrow account for the work.
> Thus, the only way I think we as OBS would be comfortable offering a bounty is if we have set concrete requirements for the PR ahead of time. That concrete set of requirements is defined and ironed out in the RFC process.
So they want to have a RFC with a bounty attached to it, before the bounty is actually "activated".
In before all you rush to implement the feature.
However... it is a major MAJOR PITA to get going when I want to jump on a quick call and more than often I'm in and out of the meeting a few times because of annoying defaults or software I forgot to start. But that 1 in 10 prank feeling? Well worth the 9 false starts.
I'd love OBS to work on its own to remove a few more steps from my setup!
On the mac, Version 3.4.3 is working fine with Catalina (10.15.4).
It adds in a virtual camera interface and you can configure a pipeline of sources or pipelines.
An easy setup is: - Webcam (set to FaceTime HD Camera) - Matrix effect
A more complex one is: - Add webcam - Select "movie" but press PIP - In the PIP Movie settings, "Swap with Video Source" - Mess with the Chroma key settings (you need a solid background color) for Chroma to work. I use a bed sheet :)
I'll circle back with the OBS/Syphon Pipeline/CamTwist shortly as it was much more involved!
This is right up my alley, but then I guess this isn't about paying one dev to do the job, is it? More like contribution to the whole OBS project. I'm not sure how this works (?)
(FYI, if you're interested in running my app, you'll need to disable SIP on 10.14+)
I was wondering about that some days ago that how many "high profile" CEOs are outliers in their company using Windows or Linux
What of course should be done is have this as part of the operating system and for audio too - id like to use Ableton live as the audio input into my Hangouts etc.
And don't get me started on the total Goat Rope that Windows Audio seems to have turned into - for what ever reason a lot of laptop's using realtek sound has been broken since an update about 6 7 months ago
I love this solution too, but just making a note for folks who use GoToWebinar: the max webcam output resolution is still just a miserable 720p, so this approach doesn't work as well for sharing apps & desktops there.
You can have a higher-resolution webcam (like this trick), but GoToWebinar still only sends your webcam stream out at 720p, so it looks terrible on the other end.
I currently composite a view of my local harbour, my webcam, and a chroma-keyed nyancat gif, with a second scene for full-sized webcam. Works a charm, and actually uses less CPU that Chrome does when Chrome is routing that video to the VC.
A bunch of friends and I were listening to a live quiz, on Facebook and we were in a Messenger video calls together to solve it together. The issue was that it was quite hard to watch it together while being live together, so I just pointed my phone at my computer screen, but it was far from ideal.
Essentially my goal was to screenshare on my computer and then the sound quality would have been much better. Messenger does support screenshare but it's weird and doesn,t seems to works if someone is on his phone (which we all were).
So essentially the use case is to share your screen, but also be able to add stuff to it, like your own webcam, and use that on ANY streaming software. Many does support screensharing, but not all of them, and even if they do, adding a camera on top of it is most probably not possible.
Not saying Wirecast is better or worse than OBS - although for me, on the Mac platform, Wirecast was way better. I can capture a desktop or app window, overlay my webcam on top of it in the bottom corner, use chroma key to remove my background, and then I float on top of apps. That video feed can be outputted as a webcam stream that works with GoToWebinar, Skype, Hangouts, etc.
You can see examples of what it looks like to attendees via my blog: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2020/03/free-fundamentals-...
One drawback is that some webcasting apps (GoToWebinar in particular) have a max webcam output resolution, like in GoToWebinar's case, 720p. That means you have to be really careful about which apps/screens you try to share as a webcam.
Right, that's literally the title of the article we're commenting on: OBS can't do that thing that we need.
Note that I don't have a horse in this race. I've only used basic features of OBS and have never heard of Telestream. I'm just pointing out the possible miscommunication here.
That would be valuable information.
I concur that letting non-obvious abbreviations stand is a bad thing because it wastes the time of N readers who would need to look it up while it saves the effort for 1 writer who already knows and only has to write it out. This is inefficient.
It allows you to layer your inputs and different overlays together to create a single video output that includes things such as video games, webcam feed, etc. The video output is typically either recorded straight to video file for upload to youtube, or for streaming directly to a supported streaming service.
It's not purely used for video games, mind you.
In this case I believe the idea is that you would use OBS on your local workstation to setup your own web cam and a view of your desktop / work space for the purposes of peer development etc, and then pipe that out as a virtual webcam to other software that only support webcams as inputs.
That's my guess for what's going on here. Hope someone gets some good money from this.
Indeed. I also use it to stream sports with the scores as an overlay, and to record training videos.
Basically if you're doing anything "live" with video, it's the tool you want.
The more complex the setup, though, the more likely you'd need additional people working the controls. (But also, the more flexibility and conveniences you get).
Also, for development, why dont people ssh into a shared server and multi tmux together? Thats a kind of screen sharing.
You're solving the wrong problem. :-)
I was actually trying to get this working for myself because I'm doing a presentation in a few days and I'd like to be able to swap between myself full screen, and then either the slides or another piece of software with my face in a smaller area. If a "virtual webcam" tool was available for OS X I would be able to pipe that into Zoom.
I could just do a screen share and switch back and forth but I want to do something a little more polished.
Says you.
Do you actually not believe that other people may have goals/motivations/needs that you don't understand or see as necessary?
There are some propriety Skype solutions, but they are not cross platform and Zoom can share a feed, but neither give you access to the individual camera and audio feeds.
Even paid apps like Wirecast are having a hard time figuring out a workaround for that. I ended up using Loopback from Rogue Amoeba ($99), and it does the job absolutely beautifully. You configure your Mac's audio output to point to Loopback (which shows up as an audio output device), and then you use your broadcasting tools to use Loopback (which also shows up as an audio input device). You can do mixing, too.
I took a quick look at the issues list & features request, and I'm going to disagree with you there. For example, you can't route the output to different monitor devices and change their volumes. (I often use my headphones as a mixing monitor.) It looks like a neat free alternative, though.
Oh. Yeah, the self quarantine - of course many will be find out about OBS these days.
What's the problem with it?