OBS Studio (also known as Open Broadcaster Software, or OBS) is a screen-casting and live-streaming software available across multiple platforms including macOS, Windows and Linux.
Over the next few weeks, The Rocket Yard is treating you to a series on a free, open-source Mac application for video streaming and recording. This app is called OBS — Open Broadcaster Software — and for many Mac users who wish to learn how to capture and mix live video and audio to create a professional-looking video stream or recording, it’s a solid alternative to pricy commercially available software.
To start, let’s take a look at what OBS is all about and some uses for it. In future articles, we’ll walk through system requirements, installation, and basic configuration of OBS, then go into detail on the powerful features of the app and how to use them.
- This tool is the most reliable free alternative to Fraps, is able to record audio (microphone or sound card), you can customize FPS (frames per seconds) and adjust resolution. The resulted video can be saved as MP4 or FLV, with good quality and a small size.
- The original Open Broadcaster Software bundle comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and is available only for Windows. OBS Classic is no longer supported.
- Open Broadcaster Software – Part 4: Recordings and Streams OBS Chapter 5: Hotkeys, More Sources, and Resources Now, OBS is quite powerful and adequate for many consumer and even professional video live-streaming or recording use cases, but it can have its limitations.
- Mar 01, 2019 The open broadcaster software alternative is developing at a frantic pace. New versions of the software should be released several times a quarter and even several times a month. Update for open broadcaster software alternative. There are several reasons for this dynamic.
Why Use OBS?
During the past several months, just about everyone has become familiar with streaming video as they work from home (WFH). Social distancing and stay-at-home restrictions have made services like Zoom and GoToMeeting household names, while many are finding YouTube and Facebook Live useful for entertainment.
This familiarity with streaming video has pointed out one glaring difference to many viewers: some live video is professional-looking, with multiple camera angles, titling, social media tickers, and crisp audio, while other video streams consist of one or more talking heads with unintelligible sound.
What’s the difference? For those streams that look professional, there’s been time and effort put into making the stream as slick as possible. That means that the person creating the stream is using OBS or another commercial application like Wirecast, Ecamm Live, or MIMOLive to capture video and audio, compose scenes, encode the stream for broadcast, and optionally record the video for future editing and distribution.
The biggest reason for considering OBS? It’s free. Similar commercial applications start at around $580 and can cost as much as $200 per month. For non-profits or companies that are counting every penny, OBS can make creating an online video presence much more affordable.
Note that there is a slightly different “flavor” of OBS available — Streamlabs OBS (AKA “SLOBS”), which is based on the Open Source code of OBS but with a more refined user interface and additional features. Like OBS, Streamlabs OBS is free. For the purpose of this series, we’ll be using the original OBS.
Use Cases
Now that you know that OBS is used to make a very “TV-like” experience for video streaming or recording, what are some possible use cases for the application?
Create Professional-looking Videos for YouTube and Vimeo
Instead of recording a video with your handheld iPhone, OBS enables even casual users to learn how to use multiple cameras and switch between them, add professional-looking titles, make smooth transitions between cameras, and then create a smooth recording for upload to YouTube or Vimeo.
Gaming
Livestreams of video games are extremely popular, which is why Twitch (a game streaming service) is one of the sponsors of the OBS project. Instead of just sending live game streams to Twitch or other platforms, OBS enables the gamers to switch between selfie cams, the game, and even add in comments or social media feeds in real-time.
Better Online Meetings and Seminars
Why have a boring meeting with those little “gallery view” images of everybody in attendance? If a small group of people are presenting at a meeting or seminar while others are not actively participating, using OBS or a similar tool to highlight the speaker, present bullet points on the screen at the same time, and introduce each presenter can capture the attention of the audience.
In one of the upcoming articles in this series, we’ll discuss using OBS with Zoom, which has become one of the most popular video-conferencing platforms during the 2020 pandemic.
Vlogging
Vlogging is essentially blogging with video, meaning that it’s usually an episodic medium done on a somewhat regular basis. Vlogging can be either live or recorded, making OBS a great free tool for the creation of vlog episodes. Some vloggers have thousands or millions of subscribers and make a good living off of their online personas.
In the next installment of this series, we’ll walk through downloading, installing, and configuring OBS. Until then, watch your favorite YouTube or Vimeo channel and see what others are doing to make their streaming or recorded videos compelling — that is a great way to begin to understand some of the concepts that are used in video production.
Open Broadcaster Software Mac Alternative Download
Related:• Video Production with OBS: What It Is and Why You Should Use It
• OBS Chapter 2: Installing and Configuring the App
• OBS Chapter 3: Sources and Scenes
• OBS Chapter 4: Recordings and Streams
• OBS Chapter 5: Hotkeys, More Sources, and Resources
• OBS Chapter 6: Open Broadcaster Software Limitations and Alternatives
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All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2018, OWC – Since 1988
Welcome back for the third installment of our series on Open Broadcaster Software, an open-source and free Mac, Windows and Linux app that can be used for live or recorded video production. In the first installment, we discussed what OBS is all about and why it’s a good alternative to commercial apps. The second chapter of our story showed how to download and install the app, then make initial settings. Today, we’ll discuss two of the key ingredients in any video production: sources and scenes.
Sources are exactly what the name implies — the sources of video or audio content that is used in OBS to create a livestream or recorded broadcast. Scenes, on the other hand, are video canvases that are made up of one or more visual (and audio) elements from those sources. All of these elements can be resized, repositioned, or filtered. Many OBS users start with a single scene, then add multiple scenes to add production value to their streams or recordings.
Sources
Much of the power and flexibility of OBS comes from the variety of sources that are available to the user:
- Audio input/output capture makes it simple to capture sound from an input like a built-in or external microphone or from a source like a Mac app
- Built-in webcams like the FaceTime camera in most MacBooks and iMacs
- External USB webcams, like those from Logitech and many other manufacturers
- High-resolution video cameras, usually connected to a Mac through some sort of interface. An example would be the OBS “Blackmagic Device” source, which adds support for a variety of cameras, capture cards, and more from Blackmagic Design.
- BrowserSource, which is a web browser extension to OBS that renders any website or HTML source directly into OBS.
- ColorSource — a solid color screen, useful for background colors or for providing a tint to a particular scene using alpha compositing
- Display Capture is perfect for capturing an entire monitor screen and sending it out on your livestream
- Game Capture — many gamers love OBS as a way to stream gaming sessions with titles, overlays, comments, etc, and game capture uses a game as the source of video
- Image — Take any type of image, in .bmp, .tga, .png, .jpeg, .jpg, and .gif formats, and use it as a video source
- An Image Slide Show is another source that uses a series of images in the above formats and displays them with a time delay and transition between each image
- Media Source — Have a pre-recorded audio or video file that you want to use as a source? OBS supports .mp4, .ts, .mov, .flv, .mkv, .avi, .gif, and .webm video formats as well as .mp3, .aac, .ogg, and .wav audio
- Scenes — As I described earlier, an OBS “scene” is a video “canvas” onto which you paint with sources. Well, would you be surprised to know that any OBS scene can be a source?
- Text sources are used to add text to scenes. For example, a text source could add a simple title or overlay a scene with a quote
- VLC Video Source uses the popular open source VLC media player as an alternative source to the Media Source. This requires VLC to be installed on your Mac in addition to OBS
- Video Capture Device is a source that is kind of a “catch-all” for adding webcams and video capture cards into your production
- Window Capture allows a specific window on a Mac to be captured as a source. For example, Window Capture can be used to grab multiple Skype or Zoom windows to act as sources that can be switched between in a scene.
As you can see, there are a lot of ways to add visual and audio content to a scene! The variety of sources adds a tremendous amount of flexibility to your OBS productions. You simply need to learn how to mix and match those sources in your OBS scenes.
Creating an OBS Scene
Now that we know where we can get all of the video and audio inputs — the sources — we can use them on our OBS canvas to create a scene. In this example, we’ll create two simple scenes — a “stream start” scene that is just a repeating promo for the stream we’re going to blast to the world, and a “talking head” scene for our announcer/host in which he/she will say various things with a lower-third title at the bottom of the screen.
1 – Launch OBS. If you haven’t installed the app yet, be sure to read the last article to find out more about installation and configuration. Here’s what the app window looks like:
2 – We need sources before we can have scenes, so let’s add a few easy sources. To do this, click on the + button below the Sources pane at the lower left. Of course we’ll need sound so that the host can be heard on the livestream or recording, so let’s start with an audio source from the menu that appears (see below):
Selecting Audio Input Capture, we can select Add Existing (Mic/Aux) to add the built-in microphone of a MacBook Pro to OBS as a source.
Now let’s add an Image Source. We’ll use a “card”, basically just an image we’ve created that tells viewers that we’re about to go live with the show. These can be created in many apps, both Mac and web apps like Canva. The card is 1280 x 720 pixels in size — basically 720p resolution.
I chose to create a new Image Source and named it “Going Live”. Selecting the file from the Downloads folder, it’s now available to OBS:
Now let’s add a live video source, and to make this as simple as possible, we’ll use the built-in FaceTime camera in a MacBook Pro. We add a new source, select Video Capture Device, create a new source we’ll name “FaceTime Camera”. We select the device (FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in) and use a preset resolution of 1280 x 720, once again 720p and the best resolution possible from this camera.
One more source to add before we start making scenes — a simple PNG “lower-thirds” title. PNG graphics provide for transparency, meaning that your title can “float” above the video in the background. There is a built-in text source in OBS, but I found that it was quite limited and also crashed the app if I tried to change the font! Once again, I used Canva to create a nice script font PNG lower-third in bright red, and created a new image source for it.
3 – Now that we have our sources set up, it’s time to create our first scenes. Actually, when we added the sources OBS created a default scene onto which all the sources were added. We actually want two scenes: the “Going Live” scene that we’ll show prior to going live (we’ll call this “Preshow Roll”), and the second with sound, the live video from FaceTime, and the lower-third title that we’ll call “LiveStream”.
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We can rename the existing “Scene” by right-clicking on it, selecting “Rename” from the pop-up menu, and typing Preshow Roll. Next, we’ll create a second Scene by clicking the + button at the bottom of the Scenes pane and naming it Livestream.
We have four sources and two scenes; we need to make sure that the proper sources are assigned to each scene. Our Preshow Roll scene has all four of the sources, but we really don’t need all of them. We’d like it to be “silent” (no sound input) so our viewers don’t need to hear us before the livestream goes live, and we just need that “Going Live” image source.
Click on Preshow Roll, then — using the minus sign ( – ) button — remove the sources you don’t need (Mic/Aux, Lower Thirds, and FaceTime Camera). Next, click on LiveStream, and make sure that the Mic/Aux, FaceTime Camera, and Lower Thirds sources are added. For all of these items, there will be an existing source that’s saved in OBS and just needs to be selected.
4 – At this point, make sure that you save everything. Oddly enough, there is no “Save…” menu item in the Mac version of OBS. What you need to do instead is save both a Profile and a Scene Collection that you can choose from the menu the next time you use OBS.
The Scene Collection holds all of the scenes and sources you have added, as well as any global sources. A Profile, on the other hand, holds all of the OBS settings but not scenes or sources. A profile can be built for each channel you’re streaming to (Facebook versus YouTube Live, for example) or for different recording or streaming settings. Any time a setting is changed in OBS, it’s saved to whatever profile is currently active.
To “save” the default Profile and Scene Collection you’ve been working with so far, select Rename from the Scene Collection menu and give it a name — I named my example “RocketYard Live”. Do the same with the Profile; here I gave it the name “Rocket Yard” (original, huh?).
What’s Next?
In the next installment of this series, we’re going to talk about output from OBS in the form of either streams or recordings. Part of the discussion will be about transitions from one scene to the next, then we’ll make a short recording, and finally, we’ll set up a Facebook stream. In the meantime, have fun creating your own scenes and adding sources.
Related:• Video Production with OBS: What It Is and Why You Should Use It
• OBS Chapter 2: Installing and Configuring the App
• OBS Chapter 3: Sources and Scenes
• OBS Chapter 4: Recordings and Streams
• OBS Chapter 5: Hotkeys, More Sources, and Resources
• OBS Chapter 6: Open Broadcaster Software Limitations and Alternatives
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OWC is on-site wind turbine powered at 8 Galaxy Way, Woodstock, IL 60098 | 1-800-275-4576 | +1-815-338-8685 (International)
All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2018, OWC – Since 1988