OBS is commonly used for video game streaming, but it's a great tool for any scenario where you need to take live audio and video from different sources and display them at the same time or transition between them.
I've been using it to make a corny music interview show with my local musician friends during the coronavirus shelter in place. Whereas a lot of my fellow musicians are streaming from their phone, I'm able to connect a mixer to my computer and stream the show with really good audio quality.
The B in OBS hints at streaming, but it's also fantastic for purely recording. It's honestly surprising how lacking that space was before OBS. I remember using FRAPS/Taksi a bit, and stuff like Camtasia, but there were all pretty awful to be honesty and definitely not free or open source.
It feels like OBS has been here forever but I remember the days when I had to use Camtasia. The software was actually surprisingly good and easy to use but for the amount you were paying, it wasn't worth it, not to mention the proprietary recording format wasn't doing it much good.
Agreed. I used it just this week to record my screen (have used it in the past for streaming) and was blown away at not only how easy it was to use, but how small the files were and how well it integrated the encoders my system supported.
I really like using the recording feature to do sound checks. We go through all of our checks, then I watch the video locally in VLC. That way I'm certain when it goes live it'll sound the way it's supposed to.
I wish more people would do this. Or maybe OBS should have some (opt-out) warnings for when your audio is either unbalanced, too low or too loud. I seen way too videos or streams with bad audio levels.
OBS is really great, but beware the latest version has some serious crash issues on Catalina. Seems related to password managers and HTML forms with password inputs. Had my stream crash over and over until I stopped using my browser during the session.
I started using OBS when our church moved our services to live streaming due to the pandemic. Our mostly non-technical volunteer media team has had zero issues using it to stream to Facebook or a self-hosted Restreamer instance. Easy to use, straightforward interface. I'm sure we'll keep using it for streaming even after the pandemic is over.
I know I've been getting a number of questions around livestreaming for churches lately (since I used to do that a lot more in the past), and I've been gathering my thoughts in a blog post here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-livestream-masses...
It depends mainly on the budget, but with Easter coming up (probably _the_ major day in many (if not most) Christian churches), it seems many groups are scrambling to find a way to get a decent quality stream set up in time.
Many groups on the lower end of the budget scale are using an iPhone on a tripod (but the audio is terrible). Medium range you have one or two cameras plugged into a laptop with OBS, and you can get audio from the church's sound system. High end many places already have PTZ camera systems installed, and they just need someone to control the video system during the event.
Yep, same here. Went from zero to a fairly professional streaming experience in a few hours. I had a couple Logitech C920 webcams, and a Presonus Audiobox lying around. Combined with an older iMac, I was able to set up a pretty "fire and forget" rig.
There’s one feature of OBS that’s missing for me, and that’s recording sources to separate files. I believe this is called “multicording”, and it something I’ve only found in paid software, like screen flow.
Exporting to something like iMovie to manage chroma keys (video alpha channels), or manage the two videos separately: zooming in, highlighting in the background recording, effects for the foreground recording etc.
If you are using any of the many hardware-accelerated encoders available on desktop today the CPU is not at all limiting. Quicksync can run 9 HD h264 encodes, NVENC can run 4 to 17 depending on the card, etc.
Most OBS users don't configure software encode because of the resource issues.
The main big one for me is similar - not recording but being able to stream to multiple servers.
We can do things like run nginx with nginx-rtmp-module as a proxy, but then you have to put stunnel or something in front of it for Facebook because nginx-rtmp-module doesn't support rtmps (and development seems completely stalled).
I've been looking into building a containerized FFMPEG stream routing solution but haven't been able to think of a good use-case. What is your alternative destination after Facebook RTMPS?
FFMPEG is a great tool for any IP video streaming workflow. You can easily define multiple outputs. Check out the live streaming guide: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide
I just haven't yet found a good way to export active stream status from the CLI out to other interfaces for the tool I'm working on.
The protocol is one thing, the other nearly more important one is the bandwidth/encoding for each platform. On YouTube you may want to put out a high-res/high bitrate version and let YouTube handle the churning down to lower resolutions. On Twitch, unless you're a partner, you want to pick a low enough bitrate, otherwise your viewers will be hit with a high bitrate and some end up unable to watch the stream.
So lots of reencoding happening on the fly, which is why I know of some streamers using dedicated streaming computers, that take the OBS stream as input, but I don't know what software they use to distribute it.
[0]There are services that do this. Of course, this goes against TOS for affiliate and partnered streamers on twitch. As of my last check, it's not an issue for other platforms yet.
Being able to do this is actually the number one reason why I strongly believe nobody should ever become a Twitch affiliate.
I wasted a good chunk of a day looking into this. If you start multiple instances of OBS (you need to do this on the command line otherwise clicking will just foreground the current instance) then "multicording" should work fine, though perhaps using lots of system resources (the fan goes nuts). This was on macos.
Overall, I realized it's better to just use OBS and have it mixed into one file/stream. You trade off a bit of flexibility to do after-the-fact editing but save a lot of production/editing time.
It's not better--you're just not paying for tools that do it. When it works it solves entire categories of problem and it's one of the reasons I pay a lot of money for vMix. (In fairness, the OBS developers I know are super sharp and I'm pretty sure that this is somewhere on their to-do list.)
Much more details in those links than the forum thread you posted that explains why we haven't done it already. Most of the issue is UI, which is most of what is discussed in that RFC. We need to change the paradigm on how outputs are handled in the UI to support things, and UI is really, really hard. We basically have to throw out a large portion of the application UI and start over to accomplish this, which is a monumental undertaking, and we just haven't had the time or resources to devote to it with all the other higher priority items that keep coming up.
We want it. Users want it. It's definitely not an if, it's a when. Unfortunately, I don't have any timeframe I can give you. OBS still only has one single full-time developer working on it, so resources are limited.
Just started using it last week, and we'll be using it for our first virtual meetup next Thursday!
It's a great project, but the area that would make it absolutely amazing would be a better layout UX. It requires lots of clicking around to get things lined up and sized properly. Some UX practices from existing layout systems like inkscape would go a long way.
As a seasoned user, I love the UI. But also I'm a seasoned user.
It is a highly complicated software, but it's extremely flexible and surprisingly reliable for all things streaming and screen recording. A dead-simple mode might suffice but if you do anything with streaming or recording it's worth it to learn the deeper idiosyncrasies of OBS.
It looks like whenever the scene, source, and audio panels on the bottom of the window are on screen but in the background the frame times become choppy.
I wish they would have explored what some of the commenters noted: does it happen when you position OBS such that it has to recursively capture itself? (The feed contains a picture of the feed which contains a picture of the feed which …)
It seemed like some positions, it would handle 2-4 recursions okay, but the positions where it had to do infinite recursions were the ones that the frame-rate plummeted.
I use OBS to record training videos for our engineers. I used QuickTime for a while, but jumped ship when QuickTime crashed and ate an hour-long session, with no recoverable backup.
Love it. I've been using it on Linux with v4l2loopback to get it into things like Skype, zoom, jitsi, and teams. Really slick.
For quarantine levity, this combined with live audio effects possible with JACK rack like voice changers and echos is hilarious. Maybe today's a good day to try that out on the engineering managers meeting.
That sounds like a great setup. I use OBS for recording and PulseEffects for some features like a noise gate. However, the latter doesn’t work well for me.
Do you have some docs you could share on the setup you describe above, please?
In any case, thanks for sharing your setup so far!
I have a video about the JACK Rack setup at least from a while back but haven't written anything about the OBS/v4l2loopback stuff. It's probably a good time to write something like that up, eh?
If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland, and screencasts on that have long since been a complete pain in the neck with per-compositor "solutions" that mostly don't work quite right. Fortunately someone who works on Gnome wrote the obs-xdg-portal plugin that should fix this, at least for Gnome and hopefully soon for wlroots and KDE once they fully support the underlying portal API. Until then, the easiest way to get screencasting working is just to run in X11.
(Ask me about ffmpeg raw GPU buffer capture one day; running a bunch of codec code as root is always exciting.)
Those will cover the capture plugins, but OBS still needs XWayland to run due to a dependency on GLX for rendering. For those interested, there is an open PR here to add native EGL/Wayland support: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484
For wlroots compositors there is also the wlrobs plugin, which can be used if you don't need pipewire: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
I think this is a better way to go to get the same performance and low latency gaming capture as on Windows with gaming GPUs.
The guy who made that PR frequently streams coding sessions on Youtube. I think he made it because he wanted a better way to stream some cool live opengl coding sessions. And even though that code isn't production ready, he has used it for some time now and it seems to work great.
If there is some company that slightly cares about Linux desktop and gaming on Linux, I would suggest helping with that pull request and getting it merged. (Anyone from Steam, AMD or Nvidia here?)
Some of the EGL portions of that PR are actually included in the one I linked :) At some point my plan is to go through and merge these all together if no one else does it, but streaming has not been a priority for me at the moment.
Right, I figured capturing is the big ticket item, and that most people wouldn't care what OBS itself runs on. Is there a reason to care about it running on XWayland other than being able to say you don't need X at all anymore? Would you expect to see major improvements for apps that are already doing all their heavy lifting in GLX on X11?
>Is there a reason to care about it running on XWayland other than being able to say you don't need X at all anymore?
I personally don't on my setup but the reason to do it is so other plugins can make use of EGL extensions. Native Wayland support just comes along with that trivially. Future development on platform-integration extensions is expected to happen in EGL instead of in GLX. For a current example the other PR that does direct KMS capture needs EGL to work, even with the X11 backend.
Does Wayland do anything better than Xorg? Every time I see it mentioned, it is about how it does not support this or that core feature of Xorg (e.g multiple displays with custom pixel densities/scaling, screen sharing apps being broken, etc...). What is Wayland's reason for existing?
Same reason systemd exists, the previous solutions were old and clunky and some people got fed up and decided to update. Plus some good old NIH. People who were dealing just fine with previous solutions then start complaining about breaking things for the sake of breaking things and not being able to do things the way they were used to.
In the specific case of Xorg I find the situation strange because I'd gladly have made the switch 15 years ago back when messing with Xorg.conf was a common occurrence for me and it kept getting in the way (although a big portion of the blame was with the proprietary drivers, especially AMD's). Xorg was sometimes a bit of a pig too resource-wise, but that's when I was running a PC with 256MB of RAM. I remember being fairly optimistic when I first heard about Wayland and Mir, the prospect of ditching X11 was enticing.
But now? I haven't really had to wrestle with X in a long time. It just works for me. I'm definitely not looking forward to reworking my entire workflow for minor benefits although I suppose I'll have to one day. I also use X forwarding pretty extensively, but I'm probably a small minority these days.
I agree with this. Wayland had taken so long and is still lacking in a few areas, while Xorg somehow managed to reach a point where it actually "just works" first try, with some minor problem every other year. I don't need Wayland anymore.
It actually works in a way which makes sense for modern compositors and GPUs, which means the rendering is much smoother without tearing issues and so on. Issues with getting this to work reliably in Xorg is what lead to the maintainers abandoning it to work on a replacement. It just turns out shifting a bunch of software built around a core and complicated interface to another system is quite difficult.
Nitpick: This is not a meaningful comparison. Wayland is a wire protocol. Xorg is a display server, and the wire protocol it implements is called X11. There are several other display servers that implement the Wayland protocol. Some of these display servers do support those core features, and some of them don't (yet). It depends on which one you're using. The display server used by GNOME should support those features.
>What is Wayland's reason for existing?
From the website [0]:
>Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain.
wayland may be easier to maintain than X. But from what I've seen writing a compositor for wayland is more difficult than writing an X window manager, because things you got for free with X have to be implemented by the compositor in wayland.
And many applications are more difficult to target wayland, because there aren't (at least yet) standard protocols for things like screenshots, screencapture, etc. So they have to either choose one desktop environment to target, or have implementations for all of them.
Take a look at wlroots [0] for a library that massively simplifies the task of writing a wayland compositor. It also gives many of those lower level things "for free". For an even higher-level API built on top of wlroots, you can look at wltrunk [1].
There are standard APIs for screenshots and screencapture, implemented through the desktop portal and pipewire. Check the top-level post for more info about this -- it's part of why Wayland support for OBS has progressed.
I'm aware of wlroots. But KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, etc. don't use it, so each of those have to implement things separately.
Concerning the desktop portal API. It's basically just a wrapper around the native custom API's of the underlying compositor. And it is pretty limited in functionality. For example, the screenshot API just has a way to request a screenshot, it doesn't have a way to specify that you would like to select a window, region, or display/screen/monitor. In the case of wlr-portal, from what I could tell it just always gives you a screenshot of the full desktop.
>But KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, etc. don't use it, so each of those have to implement things separately.
I am not sure how this is relevant if you're trying to write your own compositor. If those projects want to create extra work for themselves, that's on them.
>the screenshot API just has a way to request a screenshot, it doesn't have a way to specify that you would like to select a window, region, or display/screen/monitor.
Yes, that's on purpose. What's supposed to happen is that the portal daemon (NOT the application) pops up a dialog asking the user to choose which one they want. Unfortunately the wlr portal is still not done yet and doesn't implement this.
> I am not sure how this is relevant if you're trying to write your own compositor. If those projects want to create extra work for themselves, that's on them.
I'm actually more concerned about the fact that wlroots has/had to duplicate work done by Gnome and KDE (wlroots is more recent than much of gnome and kde's wayland support).
> Yes, that's on purpose. What's supposed to happen is that the portal daemon (NOT the application) pops up a dialog asking the user to choose which one they want. Unfortunately the wlr portal is still not done yet and doesn't implement this.
Yeah, the problem is that each compositor has to implement it's own screenshot dialog, and you _have_ to go through that dialog for that compositor. So on wlroots, currently, an app can only get a full screen screenshot. And a tool like flameshot becomes awkward if the compositor opens it's own dialog. In X, if you don't like Gnome's screenshto tool, you have a handful of other options. With wayland, tough luck, the most you can get is a better editor/annotation tool.
>I'm actually more concerned about the fact that wlroots has/had to duplicate work done by Gnome and KDE
I don't think so, GNOME and KDE have never had the goal of making a reusable and generic compositor library like wlroots. You can try to build something with their internal compositor libraries (libmutter or kwayland) but they probably won't be as nice.
>The problem is that each compositor has to implement it's own screenshot dialog, and you _have_ to go through that dialog for that compositor.
This is on purpose and it's not the problem. It's the only way to do it securely. The problem is that you are trying to perform a privileged operation, which is the only way that something like flameshot can even work. Allowing random unprivileged programs to scrape your screen without confirmation is how you get trojans and other spyware. It's not worth adding more APIs to the portal just to support this because it's intended to be a secure API that can be accessed from within sandboxed applications.
Sure there are other tools on X but unfortunately none of those options are secure either.
> This is on purpose and it's not the problem. It's the only way to do it securely. The problem is that you are trying to perform a privileged operation, which is the only way that something like flameshot can even work.
That's not true. One way is to have secure protocols that can only be used by whitelisted programs in a secure context. sway has something like this (although by default I think it is pretty open), but there isn't any kind of standard mechanism for privileged protocols in wayland.
Also, I don't see why the screenshot API couldn't take a value for the type of screenshot to take. Like an enum with values for Region, Window, Screen, Full, and Any. To hint at what kind of screenshot to prefer.
Yes, one way to have a whitelist is to pop up a dialog asking to approve elevated permissions for a certain application. This is what mobile operating systems already do. The security implementation in sway is incomplete and has stalled, and is not going to work for all other types of desktop anyway. Pluggable security configuration should probably be added to wlroots at some point. This would allow any compositor to implement their preferred security policy and support whatever MACs or auditing they need.
I'm doing my classes online with Zoom. For whatever reason, under Wayland I can not choose individual windows to share--I can only share the whole desktop. I switched to Xorg and now I can share individual windows in Zoom. I honestly don't care to support proprietary software, but application writers must do extra work to support both.
Wayland by default prevents applications from accessing other application display, input and output, while on X it is basically free for all. Any application can see what any other application is displaying, read it's input & send it it input events.
This might have been fine in the past, but is not really OK any more with efforts to make things more secure (eq. to prevent a malicious application to read you password entry, make screenshots of sensitive data, inject input events to your secure sessions, etc.).
The side effects is that new protocols need to be developed that applications can use to request access to display/input/output of other applications in legitimate cases (such as screen sharing in your case) & not all is in place for that yet.
>Wayland by default prevents applications from accessing other application display, input and output,
So it breaks the entire linux philosophy of using input and output streams to pipe data between different modular applications?
>This might have been fine in the past, but is not really OK any more
Says who? Personally I like my computer being able to access other things on my computer. It kind of makes it more useful that way. The ability for applications on linux to fairly seamlessly work together using a set of standard protocols is one of the primary reasons I use it.
Arguably the end state planned for Wayland in this regard (having access to specific applications provided) is conceptually closer to streams than the current situation with X (one big shared ball of global state).
> So it breaks the entire linux philosophy of using input and output streams to pipe data between different modular applications?
Not really. To use your analogy, the way that X works - every application being able to read the framebuffer of any other - is the equivalent of every application running as root and being able to read and modify any file on the system. When you consider that applications running under Wayland may include e.g. banking details, any app being able to read that is like anything being able to read /etc/shadow.
If your computer is perfectly secure, with no untrusted code running, that's great - and also far more secure than 90% desktop computers out there.
On many systems, and by default, yes - but the other part of what's going on is that Wayland allows applications to be sandboxed like they couldn't be before, as they can no longer use your X server as a conduit to spawn an unsandboxed shell and run commands. You can, today, run e.g. Firefox in a sandboxed environment and be certain it can't access anything you don't want it to.
AFAIK graphical application disttribution/sandboxing systems such as Flatpak pretty much require this to be avaialable if they ever want to provide reasonably secure sandboxing & might be already making use of this on Wayland systems.
Not really - I should have bean clearer - by input i mean keyboard input and its manipulation.
You can pipe stuff to other executable all you want under Wayland, you might just not easily (eq. user granting permission using the correct protocol) inject keyboard events from on application to another (sey malware masking as a game injecting code in the form of keyboard events into a running terminal emulator or ssh client).
> The side effects is that new protocols need to be developed that applications can use to request access to display/input/output of other applications in legitimate cases (such as screen sharing in your case) & not all is in place for that yet.
This is the main hurdle for most people. I would say that 99% of people agree that the Wayland way makes sense and is he better way of doing things but without the needed access controls it just not ready yet.
Like if Google said "Apps can't access [location|files|whatever] without permission" on Android with no way to grant those permissions.
I'm kinda new to Linux as a desktop, and thus went straight to Wayland, so these kinds of comments from ol'-timers are super interesting to me.
I run a Wayland desktop, and I start it by typing it's executable from the TTY after I log in. No fuss, no muss.
Everything works great, except there was this one game I wanted to try out that's a Windows .exe and needs to run in Wine and I couldn't quite get it to run in Wayland. So I installed xorg-server and an X window manager. Tried to just run it from TTY and it complained that there was no X server running. Okay, turns out I need another program to start X, then start my window manager, as a kind of desktop chaperone. Finally get that worked out, try running my game, and the screen tearing is a nightmare. So now I have to run a compositor in there as well to be an intermediary in the already extremely complicated X protocol. And since X needs to run as root (I think?), half the time I try to start it, I get odd permissions errors, or it tries to use the wrong TTY. As someone going the _other_ direction, I can't fathom how anyone puts up with X.
The good news, is that after it did it's initial setup and install in X, the game now seems to run fine in Wayland. :D
I don't think any solution based on video streaming can ever match what X11 provides, which is, remote apps use the settings of the client computer for rendering. e.g. with ssh -X, if I set my dpi in my .Xresources, no matter the machine to which I'm ssh'ing to, I'm always getting a correct font size for my local screen.
I haven't tested but there is no reason that can't be done in waypipe. It works by intercepting certain protocol messages and proxying them over the network. The client just has to be given the output information from the remote machine.
Debian 11, AMD RX560, KDE on X, FreeSync on and working, screen tearing appears in landscape orientation and isn't there in portrait. If that's the driver problem, then show me any reason it works fine on the same buffer size.
X11/Xorg was the default on many distros, so often it was preconfigured in a working state. I started my Linux journey around...2004? And booting into Mandrake or Slackware (or a Knoppix Live CD, my true beginning), X would work fine. But as soon as I had to install it myself (minimal Fedora, minimal Debian, or my fave, stage 1 Gentoo), I'd hit all kinds of issues with configuration and starting the X server.
As a counterpoint, I tried to set up Wayland a couple years back on Ubuntu and Fedora before it was default anywhere, and that was also a nightmare.
It's easy to forget sometimes just how much the distro maintainers make our lives easier.
Xorg has definitely become easier to configure. Back in the old days, you had to write the XF86Config file, either manually or automatically during installation, or else it wouldn’t do anything. These days, Xorg auto-detects everything and you only need an xorg.conf if you’re doing something weird.
Yeah, back then I was using one of the glorious Trinitrons at 75 Hz and 1600x1200. To work at all, I had to manually look up the horizontal and vertical sync ranges and put 'em in the XF86Config.
See chapter 7 of the Unix haters handbook from 1994, which was linked here the other day: http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
The amazing thing about Wayland is that it's taken over 25 years to happen. Over those 25 years, X has become less of a problem as CPU speed and RAM have grown exponentially, and we now have GPUs to help it too.
I had to turn on X11 for screen recording once (the screen recording was done by a windows only app running under wine). It didn't take a minute to see extreme tearing. I seriously don't understand how anyone can use X11 other than as a fallback.
Wayland won't be a thing until they agree on the common API for the real time capturing of the screen. I've read some Wayland developers said screen capturing is not a priority and I can't understand it. The screen capturing demand is higher than ever now we have ubiquitous live streaming sites everywhere and people earn the money from it. Besides, the easiest way to explain how to use GNU/Linux desktop for the complete beginners is by the videos.
The common API is the desktop portal and pipewire. The major projects (GNOME/KDE/wlroots) all agree on this one. Take a look at the links in the GP comment more info.
THe common API is whatever gains traction. Wayland has even less direction than Xorg development (especially in its early days), because it's a spec with lots of holes that others have to implement and fill in, respectively. Even Keith Packard doesn't think Wayland is on a good track anymore.
The Linux ecosystem needs a standard and unified API or SDK for its desktop endeavour like macOS and Windows does.
This is why this whole thread on having the user to find out if an app like OBS is running on KDE, GNOME with X11 or Wayland on Linux is something which risks itself in losing traction with general users. I always recommend people to don't bother trying out the other distros and use Ubuntu instead.
The Linux community is eternally stuck with its micro-ecosystem of alternatives of alternatives of the desktop stack which is best described by Howl's moving Castle of components.
Also for future Linux app developers, never tell the user to 'compile' something as a way of distributing your app.
>The Linux ecosystem needs a standard and unified API or SDK for its desktop endeavour
In my opinion, this is incredibly unlikely to happen any time soon. The closest existing thing to that is building web apps targeting Chrome and Chrome OS. If that's not your thing, then I would advise against operating on the assumption that there will ever be a unified SDK. At least for me it's gotten easier to understand and work with the open source world after internalizing that. There are both upsides and downsides to it.
Ubuntu is a funny example because they were ready to drop both X and Wayland for a while. They came very close to shipping their own incompatible display server called Mir.
Maybe ChromeOS could do since it is the closest to this idea.
But distro-wise, if that's the case then the second last sentence in my previous reply is an unfortunate tautology which doesn't look good for those who just wants work done or needs to reproduce/trace bugs in subsystems. :(
My point with web apps is that you can target both Chromebooks (technically a "Linux desktop") and any other system that has the Chrome browser installed.
If you're shipping a native B2B application the standard solution I see is to target a specific distro version (Latest RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, etc) and tell customers you only support the default desktop. If they want support for some other weird configuration they can pay extra for that.
The desktop portal has gained traction. This is what we have right now, I don't know how to solve the problem of vendor- or desktop-specific features that need to be supported in extensions. X has experienced fragmentation from having to do this through its entire existence. I think the only thing a protocol designer really can do is make it easier to ship extensions. If Wayland does that for you, you probably know it already.
> If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland
I missed the point when Wayland took over all the major modern distros. Did supersede Xorg now? I've been using X11 forever and never thought of alternatives.
Debian Buster (which is "stable" now) defaults to Wayland in Gnome, but you can switch to Xorg at the login window, which I had to do this week for screencasting to work as expected.
I am currently running Gnome in wayland and multiple displays with different fractional scaling settings, it works fine. On the other hand in Xorg I can't set different scaling factor for each monitor (at least gnome doesn't allow it), neither can I use fractional scaling.
That's mostly the case now, but that's a much more recent development than Wayland on the desktop becoming popular. Also, pipedrive gives you the plumbing, but you still need the portal API. My understanding is everyone more or less agrees that's the way forward, but it's still not stable and ubiquitously implemented. Even then, that resolves capture but not control: if you want something closer to ssh -X you need ways to forward input too, and IIRC right now the main answer for that is still compositor specific, e.g. krfb relying on kwin/KDE.
I've been using screen sharing on Plasma/Wayland for a while now and it works absolutely fine. With krfb remote desktop control is also fully available. The latter uses a KWin specific protocol though IIRC as virtual input isn't part of the portal API.
> If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland
I'm a single data point but I'm running Ubuntu 19.10 and I'm not running Wayland. I don't remember if I opted out during the installation or if I wasn't given the choice.
The top reason to stay on X11 is that no screen sharing application work with Wayland (Meet, Slack, Skype) and I need them a few times per week to work with my customers.
This was more or less your point but from a different perspective.
> If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland
I believe the big exception to this is Nvidia. It looks like things might be changing, but until quite recently, the Nvidia proprietary driver was X11 only, so anyone running Nvidia graphics would automatically fall back to X11.
There's still plenty of things which don't work with Wayland. And even Gnome Shell, which perhaps has the best support for Wayland, doesn't work very well with Wayland on some of my machines (Gnome Shell is extremely slow and jerky at least on my one machine if I try to run it with Wayland).
I've been using it to create videos of an infrastructure provisioning product. One of the most useful things so far is being able to record a process that may take 15 minutes to fail but only has an error for a few seconds before clearing the screen, rebooting, hanging, etc. Much easier to rewind and grab the failure from a stream than to hang poised over a keyboard waiting to bang print screen at the precise moment needed.
Absolutely. However this isn't my code and it can fail in strange ways with an ephemeral error message. If I can't change the code, this is my workaround.
If you are looking for a more robust solution Streamlabs OBS[1] is more popular in the livestreaming community, it's OBS on steroids. It is also open source, and just released a beta on Mac like this week.
If it's a fork, why not work on the OBS project to implement these enhancements there? Is there backlash to that sort of thing from the OBS maintainers?
That aside, I think it specializes OBS in a way that is too specific for OBS, which tries to be more generic. I think they both have their place, but personally I use OBS for recording videos and SLOBS adds no value for me.
I didn't know about slobs, but the idea of a "theme store" maybe would be something worth to explore on obs, It actually could be a revenue stream, just like wordpress, where the core is open source but you have several theme stores.
Almost all of their changes are UI changes. They use our core OBS Studio code, with an Electron GUI instead of Qt. Not easy/basically impossible to port back over. We monitor any back end changes they make, and pull when appropriate. They do not collaborate with us, however, so it's rare they make changes that we can use.
I wouldn't say Streamlabs is more robust - it's the same core of OBS Studio, with Electron instead of Qt for the frontend and better Streamlabs integration.
For newbies, it also comes with a ton of demo content and setups (pre-roll, transition, etc), to ease the learning and spin-up curve. Agree that doesn't make it more robust (see my other comment). I have no affiliation with either project, just an Old Guy learning/doing some streaming projects.
Streamlabs OBS has support for alerts (subs/followers, donations, etc), themes, overlays/widgets, etc. Most livestreamers use it for a more interactive experience. Just depends on what you need.
One example: keeping Preview and Program windows open (common for realtime stream prep/mgmt) on Mac with OBS will kill your frame rate (dropping 20%+ of frames) due to GPU rendering issues in Qt [1]. Streamlabs has no issues with this. I guess there's a question about whether that == "robust", but in terms of the app's features performing as it should, I would guess so.
Some simple/weird workarounds: literally move the Preview window offscreen, and/or open a Windowed Projector (popup) for Preview (but again keep Preview off screen).
[1] Can't find the thread on it now, but it's something about the way the two views are structured in a container
It's still in beta, so it's not actually better yet. I tried it out for a week and it didn't work out. After about 30 minutes of streaming, my dropped frames went up to 90%, despite my connection being strong. OBS never had a problem with this.
The main issue I have with Streamlabs is that they _heavily_ push their "Prime" SaaS model.
I started to get myself set up on Streamlabs for the first time the other day, and accidentally deleted my free Theme/ Scenes that I set up during install. So I went to their Store to re-find it (https://streamlabs.com/library#/), and it's almost impossible to filter through to find the non-prime things -- none of their filters / sorts allow filtering by price or Prime.
I stumbled upon that I could type "free" in the search bar to finally do it, but it was quite painful, and without that I was having to filter out the first 20-30 pages to get past all the "Prime" addons.
Their latest Windows version has some weird DLL blacklist which blocks the ffmpeg DLLs used by the virtual camera. I made an inert version of the DLL[1] but this will break screen sharing due to a set of digital signature checks Zoom does before screen sharing.
Thank you for doing that! I'm using ManyCam for now (also Canadian) since it seems to be one of the only other mac apps that does camera switching easily right now. But, I'd much rather use OBS. Thanks again.
PS: I was going to build a shopify app a few years ago but I've got so many projects on the go. If you're interested in the short domain, let me know: shpfy.com
If you use the "preview to projector/monitor" with an extra monitor, then you can share that screen in the teleconference. I've done that with zoom while moving to online teaching these past weeks. I also got an idea from folks at the libre graphics track at SCaLE (southern California Linux expo) this year that you could use the preview feature but run the video out (eg HDMI) to a video capture device then back into your computer. I haven't tried that yet though.
On Linux I have used a v4l2loopback kernel module and an obs plugin called v4l2sink. The obs module has not had any development activity for 2 years but seems to work. This a such a useful feature it should be upstreamed for all platforms.
I'm looking for an actively-developed macOS virtual webcam tool, as CamTwist's website is showing a PHP error, and their Mac software doesn't seem to be notarized: http://camtwiststudio.com.
I didn't mean to suggest they're better developers per se, but there's very little malware that comes out of Canada so with limited information about the trustworthiness of this application it might be inherently less sketchy than camera/mic capture software that comes out of some other countries. That said, they are in Quebec. :D
This.
Just a few days ago I wasted a few hours playing with OBS, CamTwist, and a few other "chroma key capable apps"... all with no luck... Zoom's built in beats them all....
What I really would like to do is have my green screen capabiity regardless of the video conference app (e.g. Facetime, FB, etc)...
I ran into the issue with syphon and Camtwist... and I gave up :)
OBS is amazing. Half our faculty just went all-out and spent thousands of dollars on some commercial screen recording software.
Meanwhile I'm doing my online courses with OBS, and it works beautifully. I have multiple scenes set up in OBS that grab different parts of my screens, and I switch between them with simple key strokes, while narrating on my actions as I do them.
It's a very simple, and very effective setup, and my students love it.
To me, it is immensely powerful to be able to switch scenes and narrate live, instead of doing these things in post. This saves a ton of time, that I can instead spend on refining my content.
Not OP but I can say that on Windows it may require a lot of fiddling. Hardware drivers appear to be a big factor.
Another concern is the many overlays that accompany game launchers and drivers, including: Nvidia, Steam, GOG, etc. These add latency and sometimes private notifications.
Interface is similar across the platforms; I had to do a few test streams on macOS before I could find settings that didn't cause streaming hiccups or problems with other software. I also had to make sure the OBS app interface was on a monitor separate from the one I was streaming; otherwise sometimes it would have some weird stuttering issues.
No matter what, you'll probably need to spend a little time tweaking things to get it all working like you want. But the 'scenes' and preferences are pretty good about letting you lock things down once you do find something you like.
Probably any of the education-specific tools that are maintained similar to enterprise software platforms, where they add 'online video tutoring' capabilities to check off a feature/table-stakes box, but it has a painful UI that makes OBS look like a dream to use, and adds an extra few thousand dollars to the school's bill every year.
Love hearing stories like this! Often, we only hear the negative or when people are having issues (it's rare for folks to speak up when everything is working well!), so it's genuinely heartwarming to hear how much people are able to use our program to keep their livelihoods moving.
In OBS, a Scene is an arrangement of video inputs, images, texts written on the screen, ...
If you're a teacher and you're going through a PDF exercise opened on your screen while drawing things on a whiteboard behind you, you may want to have 2 scenes:
* One with the opened PDF in full screen, with your camera feed in the bottom-right of the video, in small.
* One with the camera feed in full screen, where viewers can clearly see what you're writing
You'd then be able to switch between those 2 scenes at will depending on what you're currently doing. You'd show the first scene when you're reading the exercise out loud and then switch to the second scene when you're resolving it on the whiteboard.
It may be just me, but I don't find the project's main page clear and intuitive; the first screen capture looks scary and there is nothing in that page that suggests (shows) the software is easy to use. Maybe it is easy to use, it's just not showing it.
I don't think many people would describe OBS as 'easy to use'. I think that typically comes with the territory of very powerful software like OBS though. Steep learning curve and all that.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadI've been using it to make a corny music interview show with my local musician friends during the coronavirus shelter in place. Whereas a lot of my fellow musicians are streaming from their phone, I'm able to connect a mixer to my computer and stream the show with really good audio quality.
Works great!
It depends mainly on the budget, but with Easter coming up (probably _the_ major day in many (if not most) Christian churches), it seems many groups are scrambling to find a way to get a decent quality stream set up in time.
Many groups on the lower end of the budget scale are using an iPhone on a tripod (but the audio is terrible). Medium range you have one or two cameras plugged into a laptop with OBS, and you can get audio from the church's sound system. High end many places already have PTZ camera systems installed, and they just need someone to control the video system during the event.
Here is the multi year discussion in the OBS forums: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-se...
Most OBS users don't configure software encode because of the resource issues.
https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch
Windows version available in a directory of the main one, too.
We can do things like run nginx with nginx-rtmp-module as a proxy, but then you have to put stunnel or something in front of it for Facebook because nginx-rtmp-module doesn't support rtmps (and development seems completely stalled).
Actually, ffmpeg is the other solution I was looking at playing with on the weekend.
I just haven't yet found a good way to export active stream status from the CLI out to other interfaces for the tool I'm working on.
So lots of reencoding happening on the fly, which is why I know of some streamers using dedicated streaming computers, that take the OBS stream as input, but I don't know what software they use to distribute it.
Being able to do this is actually the number one reason why I strongly believe nobody should ever become a Twitch affiliate.
[0]https://restream.io/
Overall, I realized it's better to just use OBS and have it mixed into one file/stream. You trade off a bit of flexibility to do after-the-fact editing but save a lot of production/editing time.
https://ideas.obsproject.com/posts/41/multiple-video-outputs https://ideas.obsproject.com/posts/7/multi-service-streaming... https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/8
Much more details in those links than the forum thread you posted that explains why we haven't done it already. Most of the issue is UI, which is most of what is discussed in that RFC. We need to change the paradigm on how outputs are handled in the UI to support things, and UI is really, really hard. We basically have to throw out a large portion of the application UI and start over to accomplish this, which is a monumental undertaking, and we just haven't had the time or resources to devote to it with all the other higher priority items that keep coming up.
We want it. Users want it. It's definitely not an if, it's a when. Unfortunately, I don't have any timeframe I can give you. OBS still only has one single full-time developer working on it, so resources are limited.
It's a great project, but the area that would make it absolutely amazing would be a better layout UX. It requires lots of clicking around to get things lined up and sized properly. Some UX practices from existing layout systems like inkscape would go a long way.
It is a highly complicated software, but it's extremely flexible and surprisingly reliable for all things streaming and screen recording. A dead-simple mode might suffice but if you do anything with streaming or recording it's worth it to learn the deeper idiosyncrasies of OBS.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/575151695?t=00h00m25s
It seemed like some positions, it would handle 2-4 recursions okay, but the positions where it had to do infinite recursions were the ones that the frame-rate plummeted.
For quarantine levity, this combined with live audio effects possible with JACK rack like voice changers and echos is hilarious. Maybe today's a good day to try that out on the engineering managers meeting.
Do you have some docs you could share on the setup you describe above, please?
In any case, thanks for sharing your setup so far!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igca1qT8Sjs
(Ask me about ffmpeg raw GPU buffer capture one day; running a bunch of codec code as root is always exciting.)
OBS Plugin: https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal/
For GTK: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
For KDE: https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde
For wlr: https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
For wlroots compositors there is also the wlrobs plugin, which can be used if you don't need pipewire: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
I think this is a better way to go to get the same performance and low latency gaming capture as on Windows with gaming GPUs.
The guy who made that PR frequently streams coding sessions on Youtube. I think he made it because he wanted a better way to stream some cool live opengl coding sessions. And even though that code isn't production ready, he has used it for some time now and it seems to work great.
If there is some company that slightly cares about Linux desktop and gaming on Linux, I would suggest helping with that pull request and getting it merged. (Anyone from Steam, AMD or Nvidia here?)
I personally don't on my setup but the reason to do it is so other plugins can make use of EGL extensions. Native Wayland support just comes along with that trivially. Future development on platform-integration extensions is expected to happen in EGL instead of in GLX. For a current example the other PR that does direct KMS capture needs EGL to work, even with the X11 backend.
Wayland is a lot more security conscious, but once the compositors are up to parity, these things won't be a problem.
At least for me, Wayland is way smoother than X11 ever was as well.
In the specific case of Xorg I find the situation strange because I'd gladly have made the switch 15 years ago back when messing with Xorg.conf was a common occurrence for me and it kept getting in the way (although a big portion of the blame was with the proprietary drivers, especially AMD's). Xorg was sometimes a bit of a pig too resource-wise, but that's when I was running a PC with 256MB of RAM. I remember being fairly optimistic when I first heard about Wayland and Mir, the prospect of ditching X11 was enticing.
But now? I haven't really had to wrestle with X in a long time. It just works for me. I'm definitely not looking forward to reworking my entire workflow for minor benefits although I suppose I'll have to one day. I also use X forwarding pretty extensively, but I'm probably a small minority these days.
Nitpick: This is not a meaningful comparison. Wayland is a wire protocol. Xorg is a display server, and the wire protocol it implements is called X11. There are several other display servers that implement the Wayland protocol. Some of these display servers do support those core features, and some of them don't (yet). It depends on which one you're using. The display server used by GNOME should support those features.
>What is Wayland's reason for existing?
From the website [0]:
>Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain.
[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/
wayland may be easier to maintain than X. But from what I've seen writing a compositor for wayland is more difficult than writing an X window manager, because things you got for free with X have to be implemented by the compositor in wayland.
And many applications are more difficult to target wayland, because there aren't (at least yet) standard protocols for things like screenshots, screencapture, etc. So they have to either choose one desktop environment to target, or have implementations for all of them.
There are standard APIs for screenshots and screencapture, implemented through the desktop portal and pipewire. Check the top-level post for more info about this -- it's part of why Wayland support for OBS has progressed.
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~bl4ckb0ne/wltrunk
What standard? Does anyone track how compliant the existing compositors are with the standard?
Concerning the desktop portal API. It's basically just a wrapper around the native custom API's of the underlying compositor. And it is pretty limited in functionality. For example, the screenshot API just has a way to request a screenshot, it doesn't have a way to specify that you would like to select a window, region, or display/screen/monitor. In the case of wlr-portal, from what I could tell it just always gives you a screenshot of the full desktop.
I am not sure how this is relevant if you're trying to write your own compositor. If those projects want to create extra work for themselves, that's on them.
>the screenshot API just has a way to request a screenshot, it doesn't have a way to specify that you would like to select a window, region, or display/screen/monitor.
Yes, that's on purpose. What's supposed to happen is that the portal daemon (NOT the application) pops up a dialog asking the user to choose which one they want. Unfortunately the wlr portal is still not done yet and doesn't implement this.
I'm actually more concerned about the fact that wlroots has/had to duplicate work done by Gnome and KDE (wlroots is more recent than much of gnome and kde's wayland support).
> Yes, that's on purpose. What's supposed to happen is that the portal daemon (NOT the application) pops up a dialog asking the user to choose which one they want. Unfortunately the wlr portal is still not done yet and doesn't implement this.
Yeah, the problem is that each compositor has to implement it's own screenshot dialog, and you _have_ to go through that dialog for that compositor. So on wlroots, currently, an app can only get a full screen screenshot. And a tool like flameshot becomes awkward if the compositor opens it's own dialog. In X, if you don't like Gnome's screenshto tool, you have a handful of other options. With wayland, tough luck, the most you can get is a better editor/annotation tool.
I don't think so, GNOME and KDE have never had the goal of making a reusable and generic compositor library like wlroots. You can try to build something with their internal compositor libraries (libmutter or kwayland) but they probably won't be as nice.
>The problem is that each compositor has to implement it's own screenshot dialog, and you _have_ to go through that dialog for that compositor.
This is on purpose and it's not the problem. It's the only way to do it securely. The problem is that you are trying to perform a privileged operation, which is the only way that something like flameshot can even work. Allowing random unprivileged programs to scrape your screen without confirmation is how you get trojans and other spyware. It's not worth adding more APIs to the portal just to support this because it's intended to be a secure API that can be accessed from within sandboxed applications.
Sure there are other tools on X but unfortunately none of those options are secure either.
That's not true. One way is to have secure protocols that can only be used by whitelisted programs in a secure context. sway has something like this (although by default I think it is pretty open), but there isn't any kind of standard mechanism for privileged protocols in wayland.
Also, I don't see why the screenshot API couldn't take a value for the type of screenshot to take. Like an enum with values for Region, Window, Screen, Full, and Any. To hint at what kind of screenshot to prefer.
The desktop portal does sort of support choosing a source, but only for screencast. See the enum here: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/portal-docs.htm...
This might have been fine in the past, but is not really OK any more with efforts to make things more secure (eq. to prevent a malicious application to read you password entry, make screenshots of sensitive data, inject input events to your secure sessions, etc.).
The side effects is that new protocols need to be developed that applications can use to request access to display/input/output of other applications in legitimate cases (such as screen sharing in your case) & not all is in place for that yet.
So it breaks the entire linux philosophy of using input and output streams to pipe data between different modular applications?
>This might have been fine in the past, but is not really OK any more
Says who? Personally I like my computer being able to access other things on my computer. It kind of makes it more useful that way. The ability for applications on linux to fairly seamlessly work together using a set of standard protocols is one of the primary reasons I use it.
Not really. To use your analogy, the way that X works - every application being able to read the framebuffer of any other - is the equivalent of every application running as root and being able to read and modify any file on the system. When you consider that applications running under Wayland may include e.g. banking details, any app being able to read that is like anything being able to read /etc/shadow.
If your computer is perfectly secure, with no untrusted code running, that's great - and also far more secure than 90% desktop computers out there.
You can pipe stuff to other executable all you want under Wayland, you might just not easily (eq. user granting permission using the correct protocol) inject keyboard events from on application to another (sey malware masking as a game injecting code in the form of keyboard events into a running terminal emulator or ssh client).
This is the main hurdle for most people. I would say that 99% of people agree that the Wayland way makes sense and is he better way of doing things but without the needed access controls it just not ready yet.
Like if Google said "Apps can't access [location|files|whatever] without permission" on Android with no way to grant those permissions.
I run a Wayland desktop, and I start it by typing it's executable from the TTY after I log in. No fuss, no muss.
Everything works great, except there was this one game I wanted to try out that's a Windows .exe and needs to run in Wine and I couldn't quite get it to run in Wayland. So I installed xorg-server and an X window manager. Tried to just run it from TTY and it complained that there was no X server running. Okay, turns out I need another program to start X, then start my window manager, as a kind of desktop chaperone. Finally get that worked out, try running my game, and the screen tearing is a nightmare. So now I have to run a compositor in there as well to be an intermediary in the already extremely complicated X protocol. And since X needs to run as root (I think?), half the time I try to start it, I get odd permissions errors, or it tries to use the wrong TTY. As someone going the _other_ direction, I can't fathom how anyone puts up with X.
The good news, is that after it did it's initial setup and install in X, the game now seems to run fine in Wayland. :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
So how's that Nvidia support coming along?
As a counterpoint, I tried to set up Wayland a couple years back on Ubuntu and Fedora before it was default anywhere, and that was also a nightmare.
It's easy to forget sometimes just how much the distro maintainers make our lives easier.
The amazing thing about Wayland is that it's taken over 25 years to happen. Over those 25 years, X has become less of a problem as CPU speed and RAM have grown exponentially, and we now have GPUs to help it too.
1. Implementing a screenlocker in a secure and working manner on X is impossible.
2. Screenlockers cannot be activated when there the context menu (or something similar) is open.
3. There is a lot of screen tearing, in particular in Firefox and Chromium on X scrolling is a joke.
4. Dual-DPI is a no.
5. Everything is in a shared buffer, so security is a joke.
On Wayland these things should be fixed.
This is why this whole thread on having the user to find out if an app like OBS is running on KDE, GNOME with X11 or Wayland on Linux is something which risks itself in losing traction with general users. I always recommend people to don't bother trying out the other distros and use Ubuntu instead.
The Linux community is eternally stuck with its micro-ecosystem of alternatives of alternatives of the desktop stack which is best described by Howl's moving Castle of components.
Also for future Linux app developers, never tell the user to 'compile' something as a way of distributing your app.
In my opinion, this is incredibly unlikely to happen any time soon. The closest existing thing to that is building web apps targeting Chrome and Chrome OS. If that's not your thing, then I would advise against operating on the assumption that there will ever be a unified SDK. At least for me it's gotten easier to understand and work with the open source world after internalizing that. There are both upsides and downsides to it.
Ubuntu is a funny example because they were ready to drop both X and Wayland for a while. They came very close to shipping their own incompatible display server called Mir.
But distro-wise, if that's the case then the second last sentence in my previous reply is an unfortunate tautology which doesn't look good for those who just wants work done or needs to reproduce/trace bugs in subsystems. :(
If you're shipping a native B2B application the standard solution I see is to target a specific distro version (Latest RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, etc) and tell customers you only support the default desktop. If they want support for some other weird configuration they can pay extra for that.
I missed the point when Wayland took over all the major modern distros. Did supersede Xorg now? I've been using X11 forever and never thought of alternatives.
I think Cannonical shipped 17.10 (or other minor release) with Wayland by default, but subsequent releases reverted to X11.
Didn't every one agree to use Pipewire for that? Or it's still bikeshedded to death?
Somehow for input, everyone settled on libinput and this didn't become a problem.
I'm a single data point but I'm running Ubuntu 19.10 and I'm not running Wayland. I don't remember if I opted out during the installation or if I wasn't given the choice.
The top reason to stay on X11 is that no screen sharing application work with Wayland (Meet, Slack, Skype) and I need them a few times per week to work with my customers.
This was more or less your point but from a different perspective.
I believe the big exception to this is Nvidia. It looks like things might be changing, but until quite recently, the Nvidia proprietary driver was X11 only, so anyone running Nvidia graphics would automatically fall back to X11.
Shameless self plug: https://makecode.com/online-learning
I use it to record my screen for training my outsourcers.
Works great and is simple.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...
[1]: https://streamlabs.com/
Downloaded!
If it's a fork, why not work on the OBS project to implement these enhancements there? Is there backlash to that sort of thing from the OBS maintainers?
This is the Electron app: https://github.com/stream-labs/streamlabs-obs/
This is the wrapper library for Node: https://github.com/stream-labs/obs-studio-node
Some simple/weird workarounds: literally move the Preview window offscreen, and/or open a Windowed Projector (popup) for Preview (but again keep Preview off screen).
[1] Can't find the thread on it now, but it's something about the way the two views are structured in a container
I started to get myself set up on Streamlabs for the first time the other day, and accidentally deleted my free Theme/ Scenes that I set up during install. So I went to their Store to re-find it (https://streamlabs.com/library#/), and it's almost impossible to filter through to find the non-prime things -- none of their filters / sorts allow filtering by price or Prime.
I stumbled upon that I could type "free" in the search bar to finally do it, but it was quite painful, and without that I was having to filter out the first 20-30 pages to get past all the "Prime" addons.
See the setup section here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...
If anyone has a solution for this, I'd love to get a hint.
https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1243734261628383232
I haven't found an OSX or linux solution unfortunately.
https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1242641154576965634 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568 https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15
PS: I was going to build a shopify app a few years ago but I've got so many projects on the go. If you're interested in the short domain, let me know: shpfy.com
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TakeRemoteWorkerEducatorWebca...
(Anyone know how to fix that it changes red to blue and blue to red, when grabbing Firefox? I'm using Ubuntu MATE, Bionic Beaver.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnLtc63XJQ&feature=youtu.be
Have been tinkering with OBS: https://www.rightpoint.com/thought/2017/12/19/improving-your..., https://streamshark.io/blog/chroma-key-software-live-streami...
I'm looking for an actively-developed macOS virtual webcam tool, as CamTwist's website is showing a PHP error, and their Mac software doesn't seem to be notarized: http://camtwiststudio.com.
It's not sketchy, it's just aimed at, well, pro cammers. Or at least used to be.
Now that we're all camming, we're all in the target audience.
You might find some encouraging and helpful information there, if you haven't seen those links already.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22682022
[1] https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/15
What I really would like to do is have my green screen capabiity regardless of the video conference app (e.g. Facetime, FB, etc)...
I ran into the issue with syphon and Camtwist... and I gave up :)
Meanwhile I'm doing my online courses with OBS, and it works beautifully. I have multiple scenes set up in OBS that grab different parts of my screens, and I switch between them with simple key strokes, while narrating on my actions as I do them.
It's a very simple, and very effective setup, and my students love it.
To me, it is immensely powerful to be able to switch scenes and narrate live, instead of doing these things in post. This saves a ton of time, that I can instead spend on refining my content.
Another concern is the many overlays that accompany game launchers and drivers, including: Nvidia, Steam, GOG, etc. These add latency and sometimes private notifications.
No matter what, you'll probably need to spend a little time tweaking things to get it all working like you want. But the 'scenes' and preferences are pretty good about letting you lock things down once you do find something you like.
If you're a teacher and you're going through a PDF exercise opened on your screen while drawing things on a whiteboard behind you, you may want to have 2 scenes:
* One with the opened PDF in full screen, with your camera feed in the bottom-right of the video, in small.
* One with the camera feed in full screen, where viewers can clearly see what you're writing
You'd then be able to switch between those 2 scenes at will depending on what you're currently doing. You'd show the first scene when you're reading the exercise out loud and then switch to the second scene when you're resolving it on the whiteboard.