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Re:Show HN: OBS-web – Control OBS from the browser by mikece on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:26PM (#23577432)
How is OBS doing in terms of donors/engineers? I suspect the number of people discovering and using OBS went up exponentially in the past few months... I'm sure I'm not the only one who went from never having worked with live video before to running live-streaming for work/church/family meetings/etc and OBS has been a vital part in that.

I've certainly told many people about OBS and will continue to spread the word but short of donating I'm not sure how else I can help out (and I'm short on cash thanks to the lockdown).

Re:Show HN: OBS-web – Control OBS from the browser by dodgepong on Friday June 19, 2020 @05:13PM (#23578922)
To be frank, it could definitely use help in terms of both engineers and donors. OBS's userbase has grown from roughly 500k daily users at the beginning of March 2020 to more than 1.4 million today (on Windows -- I don't have numbers for Mac or Linux). The project only has one full-time developer, and he's frequently stretched pretty thin between developing major features, reviewing pull requests, reviewing RFCs, and having calls with industry members. Unfortunately the nature of such a complex project (both in terms of functionality and technology) is that it's hard to find people qualified to work on it who aren't already dedicated to some other project. More community contribution from skilled engineers would absolutely be welcome. For example: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/issues/219 and https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink/issues/56

And on the subject of donors, it's tough to be able to appropriately compensate contributors without some amount of stability of income. OBS accepts donations primarily though Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/obsproject), and while there's a good amount in the bank, it's not being replaced as quickly as the project might need in order to properly fund developers at the level it needs to in the long term. A broader donor base would certainly help bring the stability needed to support that sort of effort.

And you make an excellent point with the lockdown. Now's an awkward time to want to raise funds for the project with so many people struggling financially. In fact, it's probably reasonable to say that OBS's usage has increased so much specifically due to the fact that it doesn't require anyone to pay for it, so it's less likely that the people who use it are able to help fund it.

I will say that there are efforts underway to hopefully address some of the systemic shortcomings that the OBS team has in terms of funding and development bandwidth, but things still move slowly when built on the back of a largely-volunteer workforce.

Re:Show HN: OBS-web – Control OBS from the browser by karmelapple on Saturday June 20, 2020 @01:10PM (#23585045)
Thank you for posting this! I used OBS a little before the lockdown, and have used it a couple times during, but I hadn’t seen any reference to an open collective when I used the software.

Is there anything really obvious in the GUI that I missed? A small reminder, even after using it a few times, might help unobservant folks who want to support free software, like myself.

Re:Show HN: OBS-web – Control OBS from the browser by dodgepong on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:12PM (#23605830)
There's a small link in the About dialog. It could absolutely be promoted more, though.