Node.js binding for libobs – OBS studio's internal library

> Streamlabs OBS is a fork of OBS Studio with an added Electron wrapper.

Somehow this is the first time that I'm learning that OBS has a documented internal interface that can be separated from its UI at all, let alone imported into other projects. It's not really Streamlab's product that makes this interesting, so much as that there are a number of other scenarios where it might be nice to build a tool around OBS without building an extension into the app itself.

https://obsproject.com/docs/backend-design.html

I'm kind of curious now to see what would be possible here. Maybe it would be overkill, but it would be interesting to try and get OBS's backend working as, say, a quick command line gif tool. OBS also supports setting itself up as a virtual camera, which is really useful, but it's a little cumbersome to manage that through the UI itself, maybe a smaller wrapper would be more useful. Or even if it's possible to embed libobs and use it headlessly on a Raspberry Pi with a couple of webcams as the source.

Maybe people have already done this stuff and I'm just out of the loop.

If SLOBS is just a fork, then why is that a concern? Am I missing something here that will mean that the main OBS project suffers from this?

Curious, is SLOBS not architected to run OBS separately as service? Electron has its issues but, for example, a Slack client crash does not take down the service.

I don't want a real time video compositing tool, I want a tool that records (one window, one region of the screen, or one capture device) at its native resolution. And ShareX (a Windows-only screenshot tool) manages to achieve the first 2 with a better UI than OBS Studio (though possibly with lower performance), though OBS Studio recently added "Resize output (source size)" which makes OBS's UI substantially smoother for this use case.

It looks like gyp is basically dead too.

Yeah but like... It's ~node~ how would one go about helping maintain it?

> Guess which one is easier to do?

I'm guessing 2) would be easier to implement as 1) would require using the FFI of the wrapping language, which can be challenging. Also, the scripting language is likely to be well-documented as I assume it's core functionality readily available from the GUI. (Although, as a counter-example to this, I found GIMP's Scheme scripting terribly under-documented, so not always.)

> For bonus points, present a case for one of them being better than the other

2) is clearly better because it treats the whole OBS application as a black box and just pipes (or whatever) scripting command strings to OBS.

1) is clearly better because performance. Ee're talking about a video streaming app, so performance is essential.

Automation. The same reason that Office apps can be scripted with VBScript. It seems like OBS is GPLv2 so may be somewhat amenable to having external automation, but I suspect that may be a controversial opinion. Going that path depends on how risk averse you are.

OBS is open source software and various third parties have tried to wrap it up into a commercial services offering. They embed it in something like an Electron app and then have it talk with their paid-for services, all through node.

My specific use case is for automating the creation of videos that require a full desktop setup to record:

I run a few channels similar to this one, which provide value by showcasing how the top-end League of Legends players play the game:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMvtjPFhJR0BeErid-s1Zbg/vid...

Manually curating all of these videos would take a lot of time and effort.

In order to record these videos, I have scripts set up that load high level games ready to spectate, start watching via the League of Legends spectator client, play the replay back, start recording using OBS, programmatically adding an overlay to the videos showcasing information (which would be much harder to do post-production as this would require re-encoding a full 25-50 minute video each time), stop recording with OBS, and then upload to YouTube with relevant title / description / thumbnail.

I could (and have looked into) hooking directly into windows APIs to do the recording, and editing of the videos, but it is much easier with OBS.

I notice that these bindings are published by StreamLabs. I think their whole application is an Electron based monstrosity. It sure had the sluggishness to indicate that it was when I tried it. Meanwhile vanilla OBS has been performant for as long as I’ve been using it.

So that’s one use case; building bloated Electron based software where a native application was doing the job excellently already.