obs-studio - Debian Wiki

Contents

Capabilities
Installation
FAQ
External Links

OBS Studio is free and popular open source video capturing and mixing software.

It can record from multiple sources simultaneously and overlay or combine them into a single output to a streaming platform.

The project is being actively developed and benefits of the expertise of the community but also from the video broadcasting industry.

OBS Studio 26.1 from Debian Bullseye

Capabilities

Note: This is not an exhaustive list of everything OBS is capable of, but I'll try to touch on the major features.

Add PiP (picture in picture) objects such as titles, overlay one video source such as a webcam on top of another video source, etc.
Record footage to a file, or stream it live to a variety of services or even your own custom server.
Capable of capturing footage from your own screen or external hardware such as capture cards, cameras, etc..
Audio and video sources are added separately, so you can have video from a source, but not the audio, and audio from another source, without any video attached to it, and combine them together in real time for your output file/stream.
Set up multiple "scenes" that you can switch between on the fly, including transitions that play when changing.
Mix and add filters to your audio and video sources in real time.
Rearrange objects within your scene in real time without having to restart the stream.
Output footage in a variety of formats and qualities, using either a handful of presets, or using your own custom specifications for properties such as format, bitrate, resolution, framerate, etc.

Installation

OBS Studio is available in the main Debian repos and can be installed with:

# apt install obs-studio

FAQ

Q. OBS Studio consumes a lot of my CPU while I'm streaming or recording, how can I reduce the load ?: A) Every recent Intel, AMD processor and AMD graphics card has a hardware video encoder that can take the load off the CPU. To activate it, go to Setting -> Output menu, select Advanced in Output Mode, choose FFMPEG VAAPI in Encoder. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you must choose NVENC H.264, this is only possible with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and libavcodec58 7:4.4.1-2 or newer.
Q. The quality of my recording is horrible, how can I improve it?: A) If your compositor is set to 1080p you should set the bitrate to 8 Mbps, at 720p 4 Mbps. Otherwise, opt in for CQP recording with a value of 22.
Q. The quality of my stream is horrible too, how can I improve it?: A) You must follow the recommendations of the platform you are streaming to. Here are the most popular pages: Youtube, Facebook, Twitch.

External Links

https://obsproject.com/ – Project homepage