Comment by clone1018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clone1018 | Hacker News Reader

For anyone lacking some backstory here, OBS Studio is a highly performant, completely open source, native C/C++ app. It's honestly one of the best real time video compositing tools, and works directly with ffmpeg, x264, NVENC, etc. They recently released official support for Wayland as well!

Streamlabs OBS is a fork of OBS Studio with an added Electron wrapper. Streamlabs' primary focus for their OBS fork is to integrate directly with their paid services and other integrations. Due to the electron wrapper, "SLOBS" is known to underperform and crash unexpectedly.

Personally I'm concerned for the direction of Streamlabs OBS, with more and more of it's code becoming closed source or otherwise unavailable. They are also declining new streaming services be added to the tool, unless the service pays money, or has enough clout. For their business, the direction makes complete sense however I can't help but feel this is hurting the overall open source community.

> 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.

I haven't looked into who might have built on top of OBS in the way you describe, but I agree it is a powerful possibility thanks to the efforts of its maintainers and GPLv2.

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?

It's ease of use with streamlabs (a must/default on streaming platforms), makes it the first thing people are reaching for when streaming.

I think the only concern is taking attention away from an opensourse solution when they could get more funding/attention to keep it current. Though I doubt it will ever go away, since once you deal with a crash or something weird with SLOBS you immediately go back to OBS.

Its OBS on training wheels, shiny pay for more shiny training wheels.

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.

Probably don't need additional software for that use case, just a web page.

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