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Proposed bounty for adding virtual camera / microphone support natively to OBS
- schappim 6y agoTobi (Shopify’s CEO) has put up the bounty.
- mrlambchop 6y agoFor the purposes of pranking people on zoom calls, I setup a OBS / Syphon / Camtwist flow that works great for my alternative conference requirements (ranging from matrix style graphics, playing videos of me on the green screen doing things in the background, scrolling comments on the meeting on my video feed etc...). However... it is a major MAJOR PITA to get going when I want to jump on a quick call and more than often I'm in and out of the meeting a few times because of annoying defaults or software I forgot to start. But that 1 in 10 prank feeling? Well worth the 9 false starts. I'd love OBS to work on its own to remove a few more steps from my setup!
- schrijver 6y agoIf you can share a view details on your setup that would be great!
- jo-m 6y agoyes, seconding this
- maeln 6y agoFYI Syphon (which is used to link OBS to CamTwist) stop working since MacOS 10.15 since their "hack" that was making the whole thing work, stopped working.
- mrlambchop 6y agoFor "light" shenanigans, install: http://camtwiststudio.com/ http://camtwiststudio.com/ On the mac, Version 3.4.3 is working fine with Catalina (10.15.4). It adds in a virtual camera interface and you can configure a pipeline of sources or pipelines. An easy setup is: - Webcam (set to FaceTime HD Camera) - Matrix effect A more complex one is: - Add webcam - Select "movie" but press PIP - In the PIP Movie settings, "Swap with Video Source" - Mess with the Chroma key settings (you need a solid background color) for Chroma to work. I use a bed sheet :) I'll circle back with the OBS/Syphon Pipeline/CamTwist shortly as it was much more involved!
- Paddywack 6y agoI did this by mistake today using XSplit broadcaster + Xsplit VCam. I was playing around last night, and when I logged in this morning my work video conferences (Hangouts, Teams) all had an extra (virtual) cam with funny stuff going on in the background from the various features I had played with on Xsplit. Funny, but also frustrating until I switched it off in the background
- PunksATawnyFill 6y agoWhat's "OBS?" That would be valuable information.
- _Microft 6y agoFollowing the links leads to the Open Broadcast Studio project at https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ I concur that letting non-obvious abbreviations stand is a bad thing because it wastes the time of N readers who would need to look it up while it saves the effort for 1 writer who already knows and only has to write it out. This is inefficient.
- usr1106 6y agoI guessed it could not possibly be the only OBS I was aware of https://openbuildservice.org/ https://openbuildservice.org/
- zahrc 6y agoOpen broadcaster software (studio) is a open source broadcasting tool, mainly used for recording and streaming videos of: video games, vlogs, video podcasts, etc. Basically an open source version of xSPlit.
- cheschire 6y agoOBS is probably most widely known in the twitch / mixer streaming world. It allows you to layer your inputs and different overlays together to create a single video output that includes things such as video games, webcam feed, etc. The video output is typically either recorded straight to video file for upload to youtube, or for streaming directly to a supported streaming service. It's not purely used for video games, mind you. In this case I believe the idea is that you would use OBS on your local workstation to setup your own web cam and a view of your desktop / work space for the purposes of peer development etc, and then pipe that out as a virtual webcam to other software that only support webcams as inputs. That's my guess for what's going on here. Hope someone gets some good money from this.
- 6y ago
- Roritharr 6y agoSounds interesting, what are the common use-cases for this?
- wyager 6y agoYou can use OBS for things like compositing a video of your face over a video of your computer screen, and allowing output to a loopback monitor interface (i.e. virtual camera / microphone) would allow you to share that view via generic video conferencing software like Jitsi or Zoom.
- geerlingguy 6y agoThis. It's currently impossible, AFAICT, to use OBS to composite/produce a stream that is fed into video chat software like Zoom, Hangouts, Bluejeans, etc.
- cricalix 6y agoUsing a plugin for OBS (Windows at least), you can absolutely output to a virtual camera, and use all of the compositing, filters, scenes etc in OBS. You don't get audio output, but you could probably solve that with a virtual audio cable. I do the video thing with Workchat and Bluejeans without issue, and just use my headset for audio. I currently composite a view of my local harbour, my webcam, and a chroma-keyed nyancat gif, with a second scene for full-sized webcam. Works a charm, and actually uses less CPU that Chrome does when Chrome is routing that video to the VC.
- dwild 6y agoYesterday (actually 3h before that bounty was posted), I wanted exactly that feature, but I couldn't get it soon enough (I did find obs-virtual-cam at the same time as the bounty was posted, what are the odds). A bunch of friends and I were listening to a live quiz, on Facebook and we were in a Messenger video calls together to solve it together. The issue was that it was quite hard to watch it together while being live together, so I just pointed my phone at my computer screen, but it was far from ideal. Essentially my goal was to screenshare on my computer and then the sound quality would have been much better. Messenger does support screenshare but it's weird and doesn,t seems to works if someone is on his phone (which we all were). So essentially the use case is to share your screen, but also be able to add stuff to it, like your own webcam, and use that on ANY streaming software. Many does support screensharing, but not all of them, and even if they do, adding a camera on top of it is most probably not possible.
- diggan 6y agoLet's not jump to conclusions here. The 10k bounty has been _proposed_ but not yet accepted by the maintainers of OBS. As dodgepong writes: > Thus, the only way I think we as OBS would be comfortable offering a bounty is if we have set concrete requirements for the PR ahead of time. That concrete set of requirements is defined and ironed out in the RFC process. So they want to have a RFC with a bounty attached to it, before the bounty is actually "activated". In before all you rush to implement the feature.
- dang 6y agoOk, we've proposed the title above. Thanks!
- haunter 6y ago> I personally use obs-virtual-cam on windows but most of my company and most of the tech world lives on mac for work. I was wondering about that some days ago that how many "high profile" CEOs are outliers in their company using Windows or Linux
- C1sc0cat 6y agoOnly some of the tech world lives on MAC and basically streamers use PC's.The other way of course is to use a second PC. What of course should be done is have this as part of the operating system and for audio too - id like to use Ableton live as the audio input into my Hangouts etc.
- SonOfLilit 6y agoAt least on Windows this has existed forever. On Windows 10 Config Panel -> Sound -> Manage sound devices -> Recording and choose your sound card to set as default input
- C1sc0cat 6y agoI wasn't clear I want to route the output of a programs like Abeltron, Audacity etc and maybe route more than one audio source And don't get me started on the total Goat Rope that Windows Audio seems to have turned into - for what ever reason a lot of laptop's using realtek sound has been broken since an update about 6 7 months ago
- xal 6y agoits just because my home office is a gaming PC. But now it turns out its significantly better because of the obs-virtualcam plugin working well on windows. This should be a default feature, hence the bounty.
- haunter 6y agoAh thanks for the personal reply, appreciate it
- schrijver 6y agoNot exactly the same scenario, but I just wanted to share a neat little hack I discovered yesterday… I work with a team who now meet in Google Hangouts but it doesn’t work over the company’s internal network yet… so I couldn’t share my screen to do a demo of an internal app. Instead, I got another computer which was on the internal network, plugged the HDMI output into an Elgato Camlink, which made it show up as a Webcam. Beyond needing two computers, it worked much easier than I thought—more reliably actuallly than any camera I’d plugged into the Camlink until now.
- Tepix 6y agoYou can get a noname HDMI in USB 3.0 Capture box from AliExpress for around $50 that will also work.
- schrijver 6y agoSure, I imagine any kind of HDMI capture solution would work! I was just amused that this gadget I had which is marketed for capturing camera output—for which it frankly doesn’t do a stellar job—worked so well for this specific purpose
- BrentOzar 6y ago> plugged the HDMI output into an Elgato Camlink, which made it show up as a Webcam I love this solution too, but just making a note for folks who use GoToWebinar: the max webcam output resolution is still just a miserable 720p, so this approach doesn't work as well for sharing apps & desktops there. You can have a higher-resolution webcam (like this trick), but GoToWebinar still only sends your webcam stream out at 720p, so it looks terrible on the other end.
- teruakohatu 6y agoSlightly on topic: Does anyone know if a solution to get remote guests into OBS? Vimeo Studio 6 supports sharing a web link to a page that then feeds the guest webcam back to Studio and guests appear as video sources. There are some propriety Skype solutions, but they are not cross platform and Zoom can share a feed, but neither give you access to the individual camera and audio feeds.
- jacobush 6y agoWow, what a badermeinhof, yesterday I tinkered with installing the virtual camera plugin in OBS to prank my coworkers with some Fraggle Rock action. Video works, but not audio. Which maybe is just as well for my use case. Oh. Yeah, the self quarantine - of course many will be find out about OBS these days.
- akerro 6y agoLinux is supported with V4L2 https://imgur.com/a/BvkPfP9 https://imgur.com/a/BvkPfP9 What's the problem with it?
- Latty 6y agoMy first guess would be a lot of people use OBS for game streaming and a lot of games are Windows-only.
- kbumsik 6y agoLooking at the OP Windows already have a similar solution. Only macOS doesn't have one.
- bbrazil 6y agoThis isn't about getting input from a camera (which works fine), but making the output of OBS appear as a camera to the rest of the system.
- jnwatson 6y agoThat's what the above software is for.
- kbumsik 6y agoThe OP also wants a similar one for the sound/mic, not only for the video. Also he wants a working solution for non-tech people.
- nemetroid 6y agoYour example is (from the looks of it) using V4L2 as a source, the linked bounty wants to use V4L2 as a sink.
- wdroz 6y agoI'm using the v4l2sink plugin to stream into v4l2loopback and tell google Meet/zoom/whatever "hey, dummy 0x00002 is my webcam".
- bjonnh 6y agosame here it works well and I use it to do share screen with my video on it and stuff like that. the only thing is that many video places are degrading video so much that text is impossible to read (zoom for example). I wish they would allow the use of the same encoding they use for share in these cases... another way is to have a single virtual window shared but it doesn't work well with wayland for example which made me wish about the ability to have a virtual screen managed by OBS.
- lostapathy 6y agoWhat distro? Nobody I know has been able to make that work!
- vortico 6y agoThis makes me think. Is there a service that handles crowd-sourcing and processing payments a bit like Kickstarter but on a smaller scale? Say, if someone proposes a feature and the developer says "I'll do it for $300", users could donate until the goal is reached. With the promise of payment, the developer can go ahead and spend the time/effort, and everybody wins. But setting up a Kickstarter, IndieGogo, etc is too big of a deal for a $300 feature/bug fix. GitHub Sponsors (https://github.com/sponsors https://github.com/sponsors) already exists, but I feel that they missed the point. As a user, I don't want to throw money at a project like it's a charity, I want to throw money so issues will be solved. As a developer, I don't want to accept unconditional donations (and all the unwritten, assumed responsibilities it comes with), I want to be funded in a concrete way so I can work on the issues users want so much they'd pay for it.
- whb07 6y agogitcoin is one i've seen.
- vortico 6y agoTo test this, I signed up and pretended to contribute to a random project. "Where's the place to enter my credit card info to fund a grant??" 99% of users would leave at that point. Yes, I'm aware this is based on a cryptocurrency system. But I would never want to force my users to navigate that mess in order to simply give me a few bucks. I'm just joking around above, but I don't think Gitcoin gets close to solving the problem.
- ekianjo 6y ago> I want to be funded in a concrete way so I can work on the issues users are willing to pay for. I like the concept of a utility-based market.
- bauruine 6y agoSounds like https://www.bountysource.com/ https://www.bountysource.com/
- diggan 6y ago
- songshuu 6y agoI'd like the audio input to be able to pick up desktop sounds on MacOS the way it works on Windows. Is there a bounty on that?
- BrentOzar 6y ago> I'd like the audio input to be able to pick up desktop sounds on MacOS the way it works on Windows. Even paid apps like Wirecast are having a hard time figuring out a workaround for that. I ended up using Loopback from Rogue Amoeba ($99), and it does the job absolutely beautifully. You configure your Mac's audio output to point to Loopback (which shows up as an audio output device), and then you use your broadcasting tools to use Loopback (which also shows up as an audio input device). You can do mixing, too.
- haywirez 6y agoBlackhole[1] is a better, newer and free solution for these kinds of internal OSX audio routing issues. [1] https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole
- BrentOzar 6y ago> Blackhole[1] is a better I took a quick look at the issues list & features request, and I'm going to disagree with you there. For example, you can't route the output to different monitor devices and change their volumes. (I often use my headphones as a mixing monitor.) It looks like a neat free alternative, though.
- songshuu 6y agoVery thoughtful replies! Thanks to both of you!
- wyager 6y agoFWIW, I was unable to get Blackhole working reliably (having dealt with this problem several times on Windows, Linux and Mac in the past). It seems very sensitive to which devices are being used in aggregate audio outputs. Might be MacOS's fault, but in any case it didn't work very well when I tried it.
- BrentOzar 6y agoOn the Mac, Telestream Wirecast ($599) [1] does this. Not saying Wirecast is better or worse than OBS - although for me, on the Mac platform, Wirecast was way better. I can capture a desktop or app window, overlay my webcam on top of it in the bottom corner, use chroma key to remove my background, and then I float on top of apps. That video feed can be outputted as a webcam stream that works with GoToWebinar, Skype, Hangouts, etc. You can see examples of what it looks like to attendees via my blog: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2020/03/free-fundamentals-of-query-tuning-week-part-5-common-t-sql-anti-patterns/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2020/03/free-fundamentals-... One drawback is that some webcasting apps (GoToWebinar in particular) have a max webcam output resolution, like in GoToWebinar's case, 720p. That means you have to be really careful about which apps/screens you try to share as a webcam. [1]: https://www.telestream.net/wirecast/ https://www.telestream.net/wirecast/
- frankc 6y agoOBS can do all of that except nativley output a virtual camera. I use windows and the virtual cam plugin works well for that, though it doesnt do the audio. I think you can set it up externally to obs using a virtual audio cable driver but I haven't really needed it.
- BrentOzar 6y ago> OBS can do all of that except nativley output a virtual camera. Right, that's literally the title of the article we're commenting on: OBS can't do that thing that we need.
- tyrust 6y agoI think that person's reply was prompted by you saying that Telestream was "way better for you" but then listing all but one feature provided by OBS. Note that I don't have a horse in this race. I've only used basic features of OBS and have never heard of Telestream. I'm just pointing out the possible miscommunication here.
- ojirge 6y agoWasn't the title 10K Bounty ... before?
- rahimnathwani 6y agoWebcamoid (which can add special effects to video) has virtual camera support for MacOS but, due to driver signing requirements, it only works if you're willing to disable SIP. https://webcamoid.github.io/ https://webcamoid.github.io/
- checker659 6y agoMan, I created ScreenTime (https://tryscreentime.com https://tryscreentime.com) (yes I'm aware of the name), which at its core, is a virtual camera driver. This is right up my alley, but then I guess this isn't about paying one dev to do the job, is it? More like contribution to the whole OBS project. I'm not sure how this works (?) (FYI, if you're interested in running my app, you'll need to disable SIP on 10.14+)
- dodgepong 6y agoYou could probably do it yourself if you wanted, I don't see any reason why not. I suppose the main concern is whether anyone else is already working on it, and if it will be a race. If you want to work on it, I suggest you post saying so, and start working on a design document to post on the RFC page.