Call for testing: OBS-Studio snap

Description

OBS Studio - Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.

If you watch people playing games on YouTube or Twich, chances are they’re using OBS Studio - commonly shortened to just “OBS”.

(you too can look gormless while playing puzzle games on Linux)

How to install

The latest release of OBS is available in the candidate channel. If you wish to use your webcam, you’ll need to connect that interface.

snap install obs-studio --candidate
snap connect obs-studio:camera 

Note: This snap is built from upstream source, bundling the ffmpeg from the 16.04 repo. In the near future we’d like to bundle a hand-built ffmpeg which includes hardware accelerated video encoding. For now we’re asking you to focus on OBS itself.

How to run

To ensure you’re running the snapped version (as opposed to any other version you may have installed) while testing, you can either:-

snap run obs-studio

or

/snap/bin/obs-studio

Or just click on the familiar OBS icon in your desktop launcher/menu.

image

Requested setups

I’m interested to hear from people who actually use OBS on a regular basis, to understand if this snap has any shortcomings compared to any other packaged version. If you’re a user of OBS and have a lot of carefully crafted scenes and sources, you should be able to copy the existing OBS config into the snap directory beneath /snap/obs-studio/current.

I’m keen to hear about:

  • Streaming to popular platforms
  • Performance of the snap
  • Compatibility with themes or other added 3rd party tools
  • Any other issues

Reporting feedback

Just reply to this post here on the forum with any comments / feedback. Thanks!

5 Likes

Totally off topic, but that screenshot makes me want to play games again :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Well installed the snap no problem and as far as i can see there is no difference between the snap and a version from a repo.
To make it even better if you could bundle the web add on for it also.
There is of course the usual lag when first booting the snap, but i have got used to this.
Will post a video on it over the weekend if i get time…dozo

3 Likes

Which web addon is that @sneekylinux?

I’ll do some testing for this Snap. I plan to do this today but might take a little longer, we’ll see. So cool to see this btw. :slight_smile:


Are you referring to obs-linuxbrowser?

1 Like

Yes Linux browser is the add on

@popey Thanks, is your OBS source repository publicly available? (GitHub)

The license is incorrectly reported as ‘Proprietary’ (see snap info obs-studio)

Here you go. https://code.launchpad.net/~popey/+junk/obs-studio

Fixed. Thanks!

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Please add home and removable-media plugs so that I can save the recording in home directory and /media etc.

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Done. Revision 12 has this.

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You might want to add information about manually connected plugs in the snap description.

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Great idea. Done.

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I’m not sure if this has been addressed or not, but it’s not working on my system. I can’t output/use anything in /mnt/ directories, meaning I can’t output my recordings to my secondary storage drives. I see /media/ stuffs has been addressed though, so that’s good :smiley:

For /mnt access refer /mnt mounts should be supported - snapd - snapcraft.io

Greetings! Fenrir here from the OBS Contributors team. We’ve been seeing an increase in reports for issues with the snap package, some details of which can be found here:

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/failed-to-initialize-video-your-gpu-may-not-be-supported-or-your-graphics-drivers-may-need-to-be-updated.86284/

As well as many users reporting issues with the webcam, which appears to have been discussed in this thread: Request for interface connection for obs-studio snap but never actually completed.

Is there any way you can label this as an unofficial build? We don’t particularly like the bad impression it’s giving to new users who find this package and assume we’re the ones providing it.

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Hi @Fenrir

Sincere apologies for causing additional reports for you. I have updated the app description which you can see here - is this satisfactory? Happy to take further edits.

I’m keen to get the GPU encoding working, and we’ve had a patch land in snapd which should enable this very soon, making this particular issue go away.

I originally contacted the OBS Studio project before publishing the snap, to check that it was okay to publish. I appreciate that you don’t want to have the negativity associated with your project though, so completely understand you reaching out. Once again, apologies for causing more work for you.

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No worries! I actually really like the idea of having a snap or appimage package available. It’s something I want to provide, but just haven’t had the time to sort out with our CI solution yet.

As for the hardware encoding, nvenc is the only one that will work out of the box right now, since we use FFmpeg for it. There’s an open PR work in progress to get VAAPI support implemented, so we can use the Intel and AMD hardware encoders as well, if you want to take a look: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/1256

3 Likes

Ok, great! The ultimate goal for this snap was always to enable whatever hardware encoding we could. The idea of having one single package which contained all the necessary libraries and environment setup to do it on any supported distro seemed too good an opportunity to miss :slight_smile: I know @Wimpress has done some work to get it working in ffmpeg as a stand-alone snap, and we intended to re-use that in the OBS one, once complete. Maybe he can chime in with the status :slight_smile:

1 Like