Portable builds of OBS Studio for Linux, pre-loaded with extra features and plugins for live streaming and screen recording
Made with π for π§
Running OBS Studio in Portable Mode means all settings (Profiles and Scene Collections) are saved within the same directory tree as the OBS Studio executables, plugins, and configuration. You can copy the whole folder to another computer and use it.
OBS Studio Portable is also a container image for Distrobox, so you can run OBS Studio Portable on any Linux distro.
Ubuntu Release | OBS Studio | SRT | RIST | Plugins | Scripts | Themes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) | EOL | |||||
Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) | 30.0.2 | β | β | 54 | 2 | 2 |
Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar) | 30.0.2 | β | β | 54 | 2 | 2 |
Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic) | 30.0.2 | β | β | 54 | 2 | 2 |
You can safely install these OBS Studio Portable builds alongside .deb
, Flatpak, or Snap installs of OBS Studio.
The installation process is simple:
obs-dependencies
, included in the tarball, to make sure the runtime requirements for OBS Studio are satisfied.obs-portable
to launch OBS Studio.
obs-portable
launcher to ensure OBS Studio finds all the associated libraries and add-ons.wget "https://github.com/wimpysworld/obs-studio-portable/releases/download/r23365/obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs).tar.bz2"
wget "https://github.com/wimpysworld/obs-studio-portable/releases/download/r23365/obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs).tar.bz2.sha256"
sha256sum -c obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs).tar.bz2.sha256
tar xvf obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs).tar.bz2
cd obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs)
sudo ./obs-dependencies
./obs-portable
The upgrade process is the same as an install; download and extract the new tarball and run sudo ./obs-dependencies
to ensure all the dependencies are installed.
Then copy the config
folder from your old OBS Studio Portable directory to the new one.
If anything doesn't work correctly when you start the new OBS Studio, continue using the previous OBS Studio Portable instance.
You can use Distrobox to run OBS Studio Portable on any Linux π§ distro. The container image for OBS Studio Portable is maintained under the umbrella of the Universal Blue project.
The portable nature of OBS Studio Portable is redefined when using Distrobox.
~/.config/obs-portable
directory.Running a single instance of OBS Studio Portable works great! I am currently using OBS Studio Portable this way on NixOS βοΈ
distrobox create --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/obs-studio-portable:latest --name obs --pull
The appropriate NVIDIA libraries on the host should be automatically linked inside the container πͺ However, the capability for Distrobox to automatically connect NVIDIA libraries was added in Distrobox 1.5.0, and is also not supported on all distros; NixOS for example.
Therefore, if you are running an older version of Distrobox or the NVIDIA drivers are not automatically linked inside the container you can install them as follows:
Required if the display is rendered by an NVIDIA GPU.
distrobox create --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/obs-studio-portable:latest --name obs --pull --additional-packages nvidia-driver-535
Suitable for multi-GPU systems where the NVIDIA GPU is not rendering the display and is only being used for compute.
distrobox create --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/obs-studio-portable:latest --name obs --pull --additional-packages libnvidia-encode-535 nvidia-headless-no-dkms-535
3. Run the initial setup.
```bash
distrobox enter --name obs -- true
obs-portable
launcher.distrobox enter --name obs -- /opt/obs-portable/obs-portable
If the OBS Studio Portable container cannot connect to the host X11 server, add xhost +si:localuser:$USER
to ~/.distroboxrc
.
Should you require multiple instances of OBS Studio, each with its configuration, follow the steps above to get OBS Studio Portable running in Distrobox. Then, extract the OBS Studio tarball into a different directory in your home directory on the host. For example:
mkdir ~/OBS-Studio-again
cd ~/OBS-Studio-again
wget "https://github.com/wimpysworld/obs-studio-portable/releases/download/r23365/obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs).tar.bz2"
tar xvf obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs).tar.bz2
cd obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-$(lsb_release -rs)
To launch the second instance of OBS Studio Portable in Distrobox, run the following command:
distrobox-enter --name obs -- ~/OBS-Studio-again/obs-portable
I'm incredibly thankful to the OBS Studio developers and developers of the growing list of excellent plugins, scripts and themes. These Portable builds of OBS Studio for Ubuntu celebrate the best of what's available. Thank you! π
Here are the 3rd party plugins that come bundled with OBS Studio Portable for Ubuntu:
These plugins were previously bundled with OBS Studio, but have since been removed.
Here are some additional plugins that look useful that I might add in the future:
There isn't a definitive gPhoto plugin for current OBS Studio so I'm reluctant to include it. Here's what I know:
If the builds of OBS Studio offered here don't include a plugin that you use, you can download a pre-compiled version and add it to the portable folder:
.so
files in obs-plugins/64bit
data/obs-plugins/<plugin name>/
OBS Studio Virtual Camera support is integrated. The Start Virtual Camera
button is in the Controls pane below Start Recording
. Here's how to install and configure v4l2loopback
, which OBS uses:
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.
Browser docks and streaming service integrations are currently disabled on Wayland due to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) issues. If you need browser docks or stream service integrations, click on the cog icon when logging into Ubuntu and select "ubuntu on xorg".
Alternatively, you can coerce OBS Studio to run via Xwayland without changing the desktop session:
env QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb ./obs-portable
If any of the following are true for you, you might find these builds of OBS Studio useful.
Each build is compiled in a freshly provisioned systemd container. The build scripts are included in this repository.
The build-*.sh
scripts are wrappers to help automate things, with build-auto.sh
being the main entry point.
The actual build script, obs-build.sh
, gets injected into the new container and is responsible for actually building OBS Studio. Perhaps it might also serve as a reference for users of other Linux distributions who want to create their portable builds of OBS Studio.
An OBS Studio Portable for Linux release number will be something like r23365, and the filename will indicate the version of OBS Studio and which Ubuntu release it is for:
+-- OBS Portable for Ubuntu revision
|
v
obs-portable-30.0.2-r23365-ubuntu-22.04.tar.bz2
^ ^
| |
+-- OBS version +-- Supported Ubuntu release
The purpose of the release number is to indicate a change to the composition of the portable release, most likely due to adding/updating the bundled 3rd party plugins.