Controlling OBS via proprietary protocol. Is a plugin appropriate for this task?

[mrklkrl]

Hello! I am working on controlling OBS via a custom protocol running on an embedded device.

Our company (a well known audio manufacturer) would like to integrate OBS control into our devices, and the simplest path forward for us is to send messages using our proprietary protocol to a host machine, and that host machine will then communicate with OBS, translating to and from the proprietary protocol to display things like stream status, expose start/stop stream control, audio meters, etc on the embedded device.

I am now doing research to see what the best path forward for this task would be. Would a plugin for this translation be best? We would like for users to be able to use vanilla OBS-Studio with some sort of downloadable addon. Thoughts?

 

[dodgepong]

A plugin would likely be the best option for this. I recommend checking out how Elgato handles this problem with the Stream Deck. I believe they are using an OBS plugin to able to listen to IPC signals from their device and translate those into OBS API calls, and vice versa. You can see their plugin here: https://github.com/elgatosf/streamdeck-obs-plugin

Just keep in mind that any plugin you release will need to abide by the terms of the GPL (i.e. you will need to make the source code available to everyone who you distribute the plugin to, just like Elgato are doing with their plugin on Github).