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obsproject
obs-studio
C2014–2026
obsproject / obs-studio

obs-studio

OBS Studio - Free and open source software for live streaming and screen recording

Creative & MediaGames & Emulation
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
80Distinct people
113Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
79.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

OBS Studio - Free and open source software for live streaming and screen recording

GitHub

Where it is used

  • Lowkey (Lowkey Electron desktop app) — Lowkey integrated OBS Studio via the obs-studio-node library into its Electron desktop application to provide native, high-performance screen recording functionality used in the shipped Lowkey app. Source

What people are saying

Seems like you need to first understand a situation before you have a knee-jerk reaction to something and start calling people assholes. From one of the OBS contributors: >…

capableweb used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 8:59:20 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year113 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-02-04 18:14:47 UTC to 2026-10-25 15:10:18 UTC.

05101520252014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 25 mentions; 4 submissions, 21 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 20 mentions; 3 submissions, 17 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 23 mentions; 9 submissions, 14 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 5 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 4 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 5 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 3 submissions, 10 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC25421
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC20317
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC23914
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1257
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC743
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC853
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13310

What Hacker News says

20 sources
cowtongue·Dec 19, 2021
An alternative approach that I've taken is to have the HDMIs from my work desktop plugged into a capture card on my main Windows desktop. I then use the preview from OBS to see the display and also hear the audio. Still need a separate keyboard + mouse, but I like being able to move/minimize my work OBS window off to the side when I'm not actively working. I also use this setup with gaming consoles so that I don't have to dedicate an entire monitor. https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio
In Display-switch: Turn a $30 USB switch into a full-featured multi-monitor KVM
1_player·Dec 17, 2021
Not only the license, the source code as well. The GPLv2 license exists for a reason. """ These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. """ https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/blob/master/COPYING
In TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS
londons_explore·Dec 17, 2021
The commitment[1] appears to say, in summary, "you can violate the license anytime, and as long as you stop violating soon after we tell you to, there can be no financial penalties". That makes the GPL substantially weaker, since now a company can use GPL code in any place they think nobody will look. They will never be on the hook for court ordered damages going back years for unlicensed use. [1]: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/blob/master/COMMITM...
In TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS
HMH·Oct 3, 2021
> In fact in the first few releases of Fedora Workstation where we shipped PipeWire we solely enabled it as a tool to handle screen sharing for Wayland and Flatpaks. PipeWire is truly a godsend for screen recording on Wayland, not very long ago, if at all, every desktop environment / compositor had their own home brewed protocol and developing anything related to screen recording on Wayland was a massive pain [1]. I still can not fathom how Wayland could even exist this long without any decent way to do screen recording and I also do not get why there is no official protocol or at least extension for this! But thanks to PipeWire some first projects finally support screen capturing on Wayland. Both Firefox (via webrtc) [2] and OBS [3] directly interface with PipeWire. For my personal project Weylus [4] I opted for the gstreamer plugin as a
Read the rest
t the time the documentation for PipeWire itself was very lacking and I could not figure out how to get it to work. Fortunately gstreamer is better documented and it turned out to be rather easy to use. But it shows that all this is still in an early stage as I hit quite some bugs, probably the most egregious (maybe even somewhat funny) one is KDE's kwin_wayland crashing if you hover the cursor over any window close button while screen recording [5], sadly it doesn't seem to be fixed yet. For some more bugs I've hit, see [6]. Something I am a little worried about is that flatpak with their xdg-desktop-portal [7] is now responsible for the de facto standard how screen recording is negotiated on Wayland. I fear that this means if flatpak does not need a feature, even if it makes sense in another context, it probably won't ever be implemented. For example something I require for my project are proper window names and their position as well as size, but apparently this is nothing essential for flatpak and the issues I have opened have largely been ignored [8]. This is by no means meant as an accusation, just an observations that things are not all good. [1]: https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus/issues/3#issuecomment-652670... [2]: https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/+/refs/heads/main/module... [3]: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/blob/master/plugins... [4]: https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus [5]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435042 [6]: https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus/issues/3#issuecomment-808940... [7]: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal [8]: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/created...
In PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack

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