> It also ships with its own 180MB copy of Chromium embedded because, you know, how could anyone write a desktop app without a copy of Chrome these days?

It has a browser because one of its features is a browser.

"Browser source is one of the most versatile sources available in OBS. It is, quite literally, a web browser that you can add directly to OBS. This allows you to perform all sorts of custom layout, image, video, and even audio tasks. Anything that you can program to run in a normal browser (within reason, of course), can be added directly to OBS."

Which must have been useful enough as a plugin that it got added to the standard install.

I just use Quicktime. Open up a a new video recording, but don't start recording. The video recording window has an option to "float on top" — use that to put your video on your screen where you want it. Then you can either open up a new screen recording (for offline recordings) or just share your entire screen on your favorite conferencing platform.

I also use desktop backgrounds smartly in conjunction with multiple spaces.

Hey there, OBS team member here. Want to get some clarification on these issues, as they are not really things we hear commonly, outside the lack of desktop audio capture.

First, for clarity, the macOS version of OBS Studio is not a "port". It's a native application designed to run on macOS.

The mentioned audio issues are not unique to OBS. Apple does not feel that applications need to directly capture desktop audio, so third-party programs that inject themselves in to the desktop audio using kernel drivers (iirc) and create a loopback device are required to capture desktop audio. We have a guide on how to do that here: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/505/

Can you be more specific about how "none of the widgets work properly"? Which features are you referring to (outside the aforementioned audio limitations) that are not implemented?

System shortcuts like find don't really make sense in an application like OBS. There's very few things you'd need to run a find operation on. Communicating shortcuts is something we could do better, however. We are working on an undo function that will help here in case anything is accidentally changed, but with the complexity of operations available in OBS this is a bit of a challenge and will take time to get right.

Our mixer levels are using a global audio industry standard for levels, you can see more about that in our guide here: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Understanding-The-Mixer

> It's a native application designed to run on macOS.

It's a Qt app that happens to compile and run on macOS.

If you want a few really obvious example of how the UI works wrong, try scrolling any of the lists with a trackpad. It won't bounce properly. It also won't autohide the scrolling indicator correctly. You need to repurpose cmd+F, ehm, ok, but why did you remove cmd+W to close a window entirely?

It get much worse when you get into accessibility. Turn on keyboard navigation in the system (in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> "Use keyboard navigation…"). Now open a dialog box, like, say, the Add Image source sheet. Hit tab. It won't actually move between the widgets properly; it cycles between the radio buttons, text fields, and checkbox, but can't highlight the push buttons. This is catastrophic for people who depend on this functionality.

Yeah it's an amazing accomplishment from a video engineering perspective but a train wreck from a UI/UX perspective.

Sounds like most open source apps

Have you tried Streamlabs OBS?

I was about to point out that they're using a Mac, but apparently Streamlabs just announced a beta for Mac in the past 24 hrs.

But yeah, "vanilla" OBS feels like using an ancient version of Gimp or something.

Can you share your trivia game?