OBS Studio

This is the snap of OBS Studio, pre-loaded with extra features and a curated collection of 3rd party OBS Studio plugins for live streaming and screen recording.

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 OBS Studio snap is built from wimpysworld/obs-studio-portable. Additionally, the OBS Studio snap includes the following features:

• Includes 50 of the best 3rd Party plugins for OBS Studio!
• Chromium Embedded Frameworks (CEF) to enable Browser Sources
• NVENC (NVIDIA) and VA-API (AMD & Intel) accelerated video encoding
• Shader and GStreamer effects filters
• Fraunhofer FDK AAC Codec
• Pipewire application specific audio capture
• VLC and GStreamer Media sources
• AJA NTV2 SDK
• WebSockets 5.x and 4.9.1-compat are both included
• NewTek NDI™ integration and Teleport support
• SRT & RIST Protocol support
• Markdown, Pango and API text sources

OBS Studio Plugins

Thanks to the OBS Studio developers and developers of the growing list of excellent plugins. OBS Studio Portable for Linux celebrates the best of what's available. Thank you! 🙇

Here are the 3rd party plugins that come bundled with the OBS Studio snap:

Audio 🔉

• Audio Pan plugin; control stereo pan of audio sources.
• Local Vocal plugin; local speech and text AI processing routines and AI transcription.
• Mute Filter plugin; to mute audio from a source.
• PipeWire Audio Capture plugin; capture application audio from PipeWire.
• Scale to Sound plugin; adds a filter which makes a source scale based on the audio levels of any audio source you choose
• Soundboard plugin; adds a soundboard dock.
• Waveform plugin; audio spectral analysis.

Automation 🎛

• Advanced Scene Switcher plugin; an automated scene switcher.
• Directory Watch Media plugin; filter you can add to a media source to load the oldest or newest file in a directory.
• Dummy Source plugin; provides a dummy source to execute arbitrary commands when a scene is switched.
• Source Switcher plugin; to switch between a list of sources.
• Transition Table plugin; customize scene transitions.
• Websockets plugin; remote-control OBS Studio through WebSockets.
  • 5.x and 4.9.1-compat are both included

Effects ✨

• 3D Effect plugin; 3D effect filter.
• Browser Transition plugin; show a browser source during scene transition.
• Composite Blur plugin; comprehensive blur plugin that provides several different blur algorithms, and proper compositing.
• 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.
• Face Tracker plugin; face tracking plugin
• Freeze Filter plugin; freeze a source using a filter.
• Gradient plugin; adding gradients as a source.
• Move Transition plugin; move source to a new position during a scene transition.
• Multi Source Effect plugin; provides a custom effect to render multiple sources.
• Pixel Art plugin; create retro-inspired pixel art visuals.
• 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.
• Scene as Transition plugin; use scenes as transitions.
• Shader Filter plugin; for applying an arbitrary shader to a source.
• Stroke Glow Shadow plugin; provide efficient Stroke, Glow, and Shadow effects on masked sources.
• Time Shift plugin; time shift a source using a filter.
• Time Warp Scan plugin; a time warp scan filter.
• Vintage Filter plugin; a filter to make source black & white or sepia.

Encoding & Output 🎞

• Game Capture plugin; Vulkan/OpenGL game capture.
• GStreamer plugin; feed GStreamer launch pipelines into OBS Studio.
• NDI plugin; Network A/V in OBS Studio with NewTek's NDI technology.
• Source Record plugin; make sources available to record via a filter.
• StreamFX plugin; unlocks the full potential of NVENC along with encoders for Avid DNxHR, Apple ProRes and CineForm.
  • Only the stable StreamFX encoders, Color Grading and Dynamic Mask filters are enabled in OBS Studio Portable for Linux.
• Teleport plugin; open NDI-like replacement. (not NDI compatible)
• VA-API plugin; GStreamer-based VA-API encoder implementation.
• Vertical Canvas plugin; make content for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Live, and more without the fuss.

Tools 🛠

• Scene Notes Dock plugin; create a Dock for showing and editing notes for the currently active scene.
• Source Clone plugin; add source cloning
• Source Copy plugin; adds copy-and-paste options to the tools menu.
• Source Dock plugin; adds browser sources as custom docks.

Text 📝

• Markdown plugin; add Markdown sources
• Text PThread plugin; Rich text source plugin with many advanced features, including multi-language support, emoji support, vertical rendering and RTL support.
• URL Source plugin; fetch data from a URL (API), parse and display live update in scene.

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.

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