OBS Studio 27.0
github.com
github.com
I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events.
It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS.
Easily a top 5 app for me.
Is it just me?
There is a lot that you can do to optimize OBS streams before you may need to jump to Windows, however :)
It crashed the first time I tried to set up the most basic stream on Mac, so I never tried again.
But you should check to see if you have activated hardware encoding. Go to "Settings" and "Output", select "Output Mode: Advanced" and then in the "Encoder"-dropdown you should now see an option called "Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder". That should hopefully help somewhat with CPU.
But basically, anything you can render in a browser can happen on the screen. Get JavaScript to show your current time in a browser, then pull in that URL into your OBS scene. The background will be transparent.
I think it's using Blink to render things underneath, that's what it seems like at least.
I'm surprised "simple overlays" aren't a thing in any of the video conference software yet.
https://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-use-obss-virtual-camera
(There are other articles that talk about using a plugin, that isn't required after OBS v25, they integrated the feature).
It was trivially easy to get it formatted properly without me having to know anything about the GUI programming language OBS uses. Definitely an enlightening moment when I realized you can overlay anything with HTML!
But generally speaking, if you can get JavaScript to display the current time in a browser, you can pull in that file via a browser source (using a file:// protocol) and show it on the screen. From there, it's a matter of doing anything else you can get JS to show in a browser. Or, if you have a local server running, you can display entire websites along side your face.
At that point, it's an interesting shift in mindset — you're not designing stuff for the browser, but to be displayed next to you.
I wouldn't call it passive-aggressive; it's a pertinent bit of information that could be easily missed by some otherwise.
Is there some way we could help with the arm64 patching?
Somebody actually did write a Metal renderer and contributed it in a pull request a few years ago. The comments were like “Oh, why did you do this? OpenGL is fine” from the lead developer. The backend just didn’t get merged (I think the developer who contributed it didn’t have great English so struggled to explain why they’d want it, and nobody who commented really seemed to know much about the Mac platform… the code looked fine though).
So that renderer was never merged, and then about six months later OpenGL was deprecated on macOS. The contributed backend is probably quite out of date with changes to OBS’s APIs etc. now.
It’s a shame, there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you for them doing much “optimising for ARM”.
This has definitely become a trend as of late. If I had to guess, the lead devs are (rightfully) frustrated that Apple depreciated OpenGL so quickly for a proprietary solution that nobody really likes working in. Furthermore, maintaining a Metal compositor would be a royal pain in the ass, since there's no real middleware layer to help with debugging or tuning.
Honestly can't blame the poor people. Maintaining Mac software is a neverending chore.
The external monitors cause the GPU to draw more power, but I'm not sure why that combined with hardware encoding in OBS caused issues. When I switched to software encoding the cpu was a bit higher but everything was fine.
Apparently this is related to VRM overheating and people have workarounds posted on reddit, but it seem like switching to software encoding made it go away for me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/gs6bal/2019_mbp...
I have cabinet fans under mine and it works great, just don’t ask me to use a MacBook Pro as a laptop.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an...
OBS does it seamlessly and across all combinations. And the staging is neat too.
I first used OBS to create a video presentation for school. Most of the time I was showing slides, but occasionally I would switch to a full view of myself (as required by the assignment). Or you can do the common view of big slides and a small video of the speaker in the corner.
FWIW I've used iVcam until recently, and I'm now an happy user of Reincubate Camo
Meanwhile we walk around with a quasi-DSLR in our pockets.
but the convenience of the webcam is too much for me to ignore
I bought it at a premium at the height of the COVID-related hardware shortage and I regret it every time I see it in my drawer.
I got into that stuff in the earlier days of Streaming when OBS wasn't even out/was too new. I have perpetual licenses for XSplit and other softwares, but OBS still usually come up on top. It's impressive how good it is.
Wooooh! That's going to turn so many instances of "Oh I've just deleted 30 minutes of filter tuning" into "whoopsy, undo"
also:
* "(Windows only) Added support for NVIDIA Noise Removal in the Noise Suppression filter"
Nice! I wonder how that compares to the old RNNoise option...
However, there's still no way to save/export scenes, aside from simply copying your entire app data directory. I just have a basic layout with few tweaks so it's not the worst thing ever, but for any streamer with a complex setup and carefully adjusted filters, moving to a new computer or whatever must be an enormous pain point.
If you keep all of your media and such in the same folder, then the new Missing Files dialog on startup will also auto detect every source after you point one to the new location.
These days if it's live is use RNNoise and if it's for a recording I use Nvidia's filter.
Slight tangent: Is it best to say "An nvidia card" or "A nvidia card"? 'An' sounds better, but 'a' is right according to my 4th grade english lessons. I think 'an' sounds better because you're really saying "(e)nvidia". I don't know if the "an before a vowel led word" rule applies to the pronounced or the written word...
My favourite way of demonstrating this practically is to observe usage of “a” versus “an” on words that have developed or lost a silent “h”.
For example, in the days of long ago, “herb” had a silent “h”, so it would be spelled “an herb” as a vowel sound followed; and in American English it still is silent, and is consequently still “an herb”: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb.... But in British English, people started sounding the “h”, so that in the 1870s, “a herb” became more popular than “an herb”, and it has remained so ever since: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+herb,an+herb... (though “an herb” is still much more common there than I’d have expected).
I normally read more recent translations of the Bible, but still sometimes read the KJV aloud, so there are many cases of silent aitches that are no longer silent (a regular expression search for `\ban h` has 711 matches in the KJV, compared with only 11 in the WEBBE, which are for “honour”, “honest”, “hour” and “heir”); I decided it’s better to read “a house” rather than “an house”, given that the original spelling was only chosen because at that time they pronounced it “an ’ouse”—or at least, I think so; the ngrams there aren’t quite so conclusive, I suspect that one might have already been shifting in some parts of England, as is the case with quite a few other such words; the KJV was written in a style that was already overly formal and sometimes slightly archaic when it was new, let alone 400 years later—Tyndale’s translation from the best part of a hundred years earlier reads much more easily once you normalise spelling as was done in the KJV between 1611 and 1769.
In short: you’ve got an NVIDIA card.
My youngest wanted to learn how to use OBS so he can begin making videos of his gaming. I tasked him with figuring out everything, from how to download it (I closely monitored this part), install it, and use it. He watched tutorials.
He got so far but got discouraged when he ran into the above issue and started the whole process over again because he thought he must have messed up. We eventually figured out the workaround but so happy to see they've fixed it!
This affects computers that have both integrated and discrete graphics (say, to save power on a laptop).
I almost can't believe how good OBS is for being open source.
One setup to combine multiple computers into one video stream I don't see often is to run OBS virtual camera on each computer to capture the local screen, and then feeds the OBS virtual cam videos over NDI to other computers. One of the computers running OBS acts as the combiner to take in all the remote video sources and combine them into the final output video.
Now, your ingest server needs to map each perspective on to a 4K canvas and upload that stream somewhere, let's assume a 5 Mbit 2160p60 stream this is what you get:
Clients 2.5 x 4 = 10 Mbps upload.
IServer 10 Mbps download.
IServer 5 Mbps upload.
EDIT: Twitch caps @ 6 Mbps for streaming so it doesn't matter if 5 Mbps is enough or not, 6 is max for Twitch.
There should be a global fund, funded by tax payers, globally managed, like the UN, that helps developers who develop software that is used in every nook and corner of earth. A strong incentive like that, and we could see a revolution in open source software.
error: os_dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib->libpython3.9.dylib): dlopen(libpython3.9.dylib, 257): image not found
Similar errors have happened to me in the past. If you are doing important streaming stuff, do not upgrade OBS as long as it continues to work. Especially if you are on a tight deadline or have a scheduled upcoming stream.
Installing 3.9 from python.org might fix this. I can't see which other version they would build against but not include in the install.
Congrats to their team + contributors, and thank you if you're lurking.
The CEO of Shopify put up a bounty last year to support similar functionality on macOS, I’m not sure if it was ever completed.
EDIT: looks like OBS officially supports it for Mac and Linux since 26.1 - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0
See https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets...
It’s fantastic, but the speed difference on Windows is so much better.
An "OBS performance audit/optimizer" would be an interesting add-on. Because, yeah, it can sometimes bring an otherwise-fast machine to its knees, seemingly inexplicably.
Our customers find that they can get setup in Stream Club much faster than they can with OBS, and they don't need a powerful computer to do it.
Happy to answer any questions!
We're actually have all the features of their Professional plan ($50/month) at half the cost.
The on-screen participants per live stream is something we've capped at six for usability reasons (livestreams just don't look good with 10 faces on a stream).
Thanks for explaining! Hope you're able to get it into public beta soon.
edit: I also realized that "slightly inferior" was denigrating, which wasn't really how I intended it, even if you took it as a compliment. Sorry about that.