OBS Studio

This is the snap for OBS Studio, “Free and open source software for live streaming and screen recording; the snap comes pre-loaded with extra features and plugins!” It works on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and other major Linux distributions.

Published for with 💝 by Snapcrafters

Install

sudo snap install obs-studio
sudo snap connect obs-studio:avahi-control
sudo snap connect obs-studio:kernel-module-observe
sudo snap connect obs-studio:screencast-legacy

Batteries included

The snap of OBS studio comes pre-loaded with some additional features and plugins.

• Supports nvenc (NVIDIA) and VA-API (AMD & Intel) accelerated video encoding.
• Advanced Scene Switcher plugin; an automated scene switcher.
• Audio Pan plugin; control stereo pan of audio source.
• Background Removal plugin; remove the background using a neural network.
• Browser plugin; CEF-based OBS Studio browser plugin.
• Directory Watch Media plugin; filter you can add to media source to load the oldest or newest file in a directory.
• DVD Screensaver plugin; a DVD screen saver source type.
• Downstream Keyer plugin; add a Downstream Keyer dock.
• Dynamic Delay plugin; filter for dynamic delaying a video source.
• Freeze Filter plugin; freeze a source using a filter.
• gPhoto plugin; connect DSLR cameras with obs-studio via gPhoto.
• Game Capture plugin; Vulkan/OpenGL game capture.
• Gradient Source plugin; adding gradients as a Soource.
• GStreamer plugins; feed GStreamer launch pipelines into OBS Studio and use GStreamer encoder elements.
• Looking Glass plugin; feed VGA PCI Passthrough frame relay buffer directly into OBS Studio as a video source rather than Screen/Window Capture source
• Move Transition plugin; move source to a new position during scene transition.
• NDI plugin; Network A/V via NewTek's NDI.
• NvFBC plugin; screen capture via NVIDIA FBC API. Requires NvFBC patches for Nvidia drivers for consumer grade GPUs.
• Recursion Effect plugin; recursion effect filter.
• Replay Source plugin; slow motion replay async sources from memory.
• RGB Levels plugin; simple filter to adjust RGB levels.
• RTSPServer plugin; encode and publish to a RTSP stream.
• Source Copy plugin; adds copy and paste options to the tools menu.
• Source Record plugin; make sources available to record via a filter.
• Source Switcher plugin; to switch between a list of sources.
• Spectralizer plugin; audio visualization using fftw.
• StreamFX plugin; collection modern effects filters and transitions.
• Text Pango plugin; Provides a text source rendered using Pango with multi-language support, emoji support, vertical rendering and RTL support.
• Time Warp Scan plugin; a time warp scan filter.
• Transition Table plugin; customize scene transitions.
• VNC Source plugin; VNC viewer that works as a source.
• Websockets plugin; remote-control OBS Studio through WebSockets, compatible with StreamControl.

Wayland

Screen and Window capture in a Wayland session is supported in OBS 27.0.0 or newer.

Removable Storage

To access content on external storage, manually connect to the removable-media plug:

snap connect obs-studio:removable-media

OBS Virtual Camera

Starting with OBS Studio 26.1, Virtual Camera support is integrated. The Start Virtual Camera button is located in the Controls pane, just below Start Recording.

Here's how to install and configure v4l2loopback which OBS uses:

sudo snap connect obs-studio:kernel-module-observe
sudo apt -y install v4l2loopback-dkms v4l2loopback-utils
echo 'options v4l2loopback devices=1 video_nr=13 card_label="OBS Virtual Camera" exclusive_caps=1' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/v4l2loopback.conf
echo "v4l2loopback" | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/v4l2loopback.conf
sudo modprobe -r v4l2loopback
sudo modprobe v4l2loopback devices=1 video_nr=13 card_label="OBS Virtual Camera" exclusive_caps=1

NOTE! Using video_nr greater than 64 will not work.

NDI

If you want to use the NDI plugin you'll need to connect the Avahi Control interface.

snap connect obs-studio:avahi-control

Browser

Optional interfaces can be connected that integrate with Browser Sources and Custom Browser Socks.

Process Control

The OBS Browser does attempt to adjust the scheduler priority, you can enable this capability by optionally connecting the process-control interface.

snap connect obs-studio:process-control

Passwords and Keys

The browser in OBS can obtain user credentials from applications such as GNOME Passwords and Keys (seahorse) or Kwallet, should you want it to.

snap connect obs-studio:password-manager-service

gPhoto

The gPhoto plugin is bundled and allows DSLR cameras (mostly Canon) to be connected with obs-studio via USB. You will need to connect the Raw USB interface.

snap connect obs-studio:raw-usb

ALSA & Jack audio

If you use ALSA or Jack audio the you can enable interfaces to those audio systems.

sudo snap connect obs-studio:alsa
sudo snap connect obs-studio:jack1

3rd Party plugins

You might find that this modified snap of OBS Studio doesn't include a plugin that you use. To install pre-compiled plugins, download and extract the plugin and put it in ~/snap/obs-studio/current/.config/obs-studio/plugins/.

For example, this is how the Input Overlay plugin looks when correctly installed:

/home/username/snap/obs-studio/current/.config/obs-studio/plugins/
└── input-overlay
    ├── bin
    │   └── 64bit
    │       └── input-overlay.so
    └── data
        └── locale
            ├── de-DE.ini
            ├── en-US.ini
            └── ru-RU.ini

Input Overlay

The OBS Studio snap bundles libgamepad, libuihook and netlib so that if you want to use the Input Overlay plugin, you can install it as outlined above then connect the joystick interface as follows.

snap connect obs-studio:joystick

The Input Overlay plugin is not shipped by default in the OBS Studio snap because it introduced excessive CPU utilisation when bundled, although works fine as a user-installed plugin. So we've made it as easy as possible to add it yourself should you need it.