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Just noticed that the OBS project makes about 2.5k per month on Patreon. That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch and the most of the YouTube scene uses it to record and stream their videos, and they tend to use and recommend Patreon to their own viewers.

They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear.

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Twitch and YouTube sponsor OBS as well. The tier below them has a minimum of $50k per year, so they probably pay a lot. Check the OpenCollective as well.

https://obsproject.com/contribute

Do you mean Twitch and Facebook? I don't see YouTube on that page

I think Patreon is just for the main guy (Jim), but the project itself is also receiving funds separately:

https://opencollective.com/obsproject/contribute

I think you left off the bit that shows the contributors. Here's the budget and contributors: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget

Another comment mentioned Facebook and Twitch contribute elsewhere.

Of course, it seems very widely used, so the point that it's under funded stands.

According to their website[0] their current balance is $97,012.47 USD, and their annual budget is ~ $47,327.66 USD, so they're probably not too badly unerfunded.

[0] https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget

That budget appears to mean no one is getting paid for OBS. The project is huge so likely a lot of hours are committed to it.

Or no one is getting paid full time. That might be a good thing for a project like this. A full time employee might bring with it some perverse incentives (if it reaches a state where the community isn't clamoring for a full year's worth an an engineer's time, what happens to that engineer when the work is gone, or what if they find things that aren't needed to justify more work?)

If their current balance is over two years worth of their annual budget and the users are happy with the project and how its progressing, I'm happy to think they're in a good place until I hear evidence to convince me otherwise.

Yeah currently the OC funds are mainly used for expenses, such as a community developer needing a piece of hardware to add or work on support for something, hosting fees, etc.

I think a few bounties have been given out as well, but there isn't an entirely formal process for those yet.

Surely this enables them to just keep up, rather than having the freedom to innovate?

It's open source, innovation is not necessarily tied to money. It may or may not be tied to it or helpful in some way. It does open a whole bunch of questions up though, like who gets the money, what if an individual contributes more work than the paid employee and the salary? I've seen situations where people are upset about where grant money is allocated and who it's allocated to, so I imagine having a person paid a salary is susceptible to similar possible community problems.

That's not to say money necessarily causes a problem, just that it can, and introducing a monetary incentive into a system that was working well with non-monetary incentives (traditional open source) might complicate things.

Another way to look at it is that open source is primarily a social system and context, and mixing a financial system with a social one often leads to problems as different aspects of our lives cause friction we're generally ill-equiped to deal with. Just look at any of the reports of people that have won large amounts in the lottery and had a negative outcome in their social lives.

Good find! It's pretty clear that the value provided exceeds the value provided.

and they get 10k bounties from time to time https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568

* once ;)

Great proposal and response. And a new version of OBS that supports virtual cam feature is the topic.

I interact with Jim (obs creator) pretty regularly and he definitely deserves the support. Dude is extremely talented and kind. He puts an insane amount of effort into OBS.

It really shows. I just switched back to Windows after 10 years of macs, and OBS was a driving factor. Can't believe how powerful and easy to use it is.

I ran my high school's analog TV studio 25 years ago, and we ran a live news broadcast everyday for the lunch room. Effects that took half a room of gear and thousands of watts of power are all a few clicks and sliders away.

> OBS was a driving factor

Why? OBS runs on macOS too

It runs horribly on macOS. Like a night and day difference. If I understand correctly the difference is primarily regarding the encoder.

I also switched my streaming machine over to windows recently.

Edit: ok, “horrible” is dramatic, but it was honestly shocking the first time I booted into windows and gave OBS a try there. Exact same computer that struggled with OBS in macOS produced a much better output without breaking a sweat.

Using Boot Camp or a Hackintosh to be able to do that on the same computer? Might help to make the distinction between it overperforming via Boot Camp or underperforming on a Hackintosh.

Over-performing via Bootcamp. The machine is a fairly new Mac Mini.

Beside horrible, it's terrible, Just upgraded and can't even resize the panes. And the CPU usage is high even when not streaming or do any capture etc.

Huh. Happy OBS macOS user here.

Do you do any picture-in-picture of other apps with heavy CPU utilization, or apply any filters (chroma key/crop) or animated overlays? Multiple cameras or input sources? Multiple audio sources?

The framerate was terrible, the entire machine would lag, and the audio would constantly glitch out at best. Saved recordings were unwatchable.

I tried tweaking everything with the process priorities in OBS and the other apps, and could never get an acceptable result. AMD ThinkPad worked out of the box, did everything I described above, and CPU utilization stayed around 2-3%, and I couldn't even notice it was running while using other apps. All of this while I had it hooked up to extend the desktop onto 3 monitors. Streams and recordings are flawless.

Yeah, this is news to me too - we’ve been using it on a Mini (granted, it’s an i7 - but still, it’s a laptop in an aluminum case) with zero issues. Integrating NDI, no less!

What version of OS X are you running? What GPU do you have?

I guess YMMV. Used OBS a couple of times on macOS and was impressed with how smooth it ran.

"horrible" is not dramatic.... it was unusable.

I'm about to buy the first license for Windows in the past decade specifically because I believe that OBS runs better on Windows and want to switch my next broadcast to be OBS on Windows instead of OBS on Linux. To be clear, OBS has run amazing on Linux, but there appears to be more mature high quality 3rd party plugins for Windows. The fact that OBS works so well on Windows and Linux is amazing to me, and a ton of respect for the team to make that happen. But with empirical evidence that both you and I are paying Microsoft for an improved OBS experience is a good enough reason that Microsoft should also financially sponsor OBS.

Pretty interesting how streamlabs managed to capitalize off OBS

I think I remember two big streamers Destiny and HasanPiker donated a combined 4k or 5k to the project last year on stream. Really wish streamers would know that these are open source projects where their only source of income is from donations.

> "They'd be in a pickle if tomorrow OBS Studio were to disappear."

Well it's an open-source project right? Anyone can pick up where they left off.

Side note: Has an abandoned project of this size ever been forked and continued by another team?

OpenOffice maybe.

I thought LibreOffice has (approximately) continuity of maintainership with the OOo team, which itself had continuity of maintainership with the StarOffice team. Apache OpenOffice is moribund and has never really regained active development, despite being the official successor according to Oracle corporate.

Gogs -> Gitea?

Gogs was a relatively small codebase, and it had a single maintainer before, not a team.

I don't know - I'm really surprised that anyone is willing to do the incremental work necessary to keep projects like these going, for free.

I guess there are people far better than I on this earth and that's excellent news if you ask me :)

I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. Just got 26 installed on my Gentoo box, seamless upgrade. I've only been a user for a short, short time but it's amazing.

I'm sorry, I don't understand how to parse your first sentence

Excuse me, I speak Jive.

I'm boutta up that by $100/mo. =

I am about to increase that amount by $100 per month.

Surely, it's a rare occurrence to hear that reference from Airplane!.

Don't call me Shirley

Roger, Rodger.

Excellent Airplane reference.

He's saying he is about to up (or increase) that by $100/mo.

> That's a bit sad, considering basically all of Twitch

Do they? I heard XSplit was used by bigger streamers?

I know of adult games making orders of magnitude more :(

If I was OBS owner I would totally charge for it, don't even quote me

One of the reasons why OBS got so popular compared to Xsplit is that it is free.

Interesting – Xsplit is reported as a $20K sponsor on the website: https://opencollective.com/obsproject#section-budget

(Scroll down to see the list of contributors.)

No better publicity than on your competitor’s website?

The OBS team has a very friendly relationship with XSplit folks, they're nice people and strive for a better product for all users.

Well, yes, it's Free Software, but at this quality level it is be totally fine to sell the ready-to-run binary at a cost.

This is a good example of why I like open source. If someone decides to pull a move like that it can be forked and the project can live on.

That mostly works if the owner isn't also the person doing most of the work on the project.

More to the point, it only works if the owner isn't the only person who is willing and able to maintain the project. Open licensing lets you maintain your own fork, but it doesn't by itself grant you the drive, general skill, and project-specific knowledge to do so.

Even then though, you can continue to keep using it as is and not have to worry about them doing some shady updates now that they sold out.

I feel compelled to point out that selling software isn’t “selling out”.

Indeed. And there's nothing wrong with charging for FL/OSS.

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