Headless OBS with api

[digitorus]

I'd like to use OBS in a headless mode, started and callable from my Unity game.
Does such a thing already exist?

The purpose is to easily allow players to capture video play for short bursts, then either save or upload video to social media or video sites like vimeo or youtube.

If this does not exist, is anyone interested in helping code or test? The resulting code could come with a Unity5 plugin to make it really easy for game developers to interface to OBS. Same approach could be done for Unreal4.

I have years of experience with Qt and Unity - but do not want to re-re-re-invent the wheel.

 

[Jack0r]

I am no developer but in general and if you want to keep it open you could maybe use modules of OBS-Studio. Unfortunately at the moment there is not really a lot of documentation available yet. So you would have to dig through the code on github yourself.
https://github.com/jp9000/obs-studio/tree/master/libobs

There are already quite a few Tools out there that allow you to capture a short snip of your gaming and upload it to some site and OBS/Studio is only lacking the upload video to site part. So I am personally not really sure why you need to integrate that into a game engine.
Windows 10 DVR function, Geforce Experience with Shadowplay, dxtory, fraps, bandicam, playclaw, action etc. the list goes on.

 

[digitorus]

@Jack0r Thanks for the pointer to obs-studio github.

I should have expressed my feature intentions more clearly.

I have used fraps, shadowplay and a few others, but all of these run as separate apps outside of the game experience.
My goal is to integrate video capture into the game experience and so make it seamless to capture and upload.
I would also like to provide a run-ahead buffer that would allow the player to capture that last 5 secs and next 5 secs of play at any time.

I'll start digging into the OBS-Studio code and see what I can come up with.

 

[dnb]

Have you made any headway on this? I want to use this to merge multiple hardware input streams into one output with the nice overlays and transitions. But the hardware is headless, and will not have full X-11 on the system to render a window toolkit.

 

[dodgepong]

It should be noted that OBS currently makes heavy use of the GPU for scene rendering, so any "headless" system would still need a GPU if you want to run OBS.

 

[DoAGoldeneye]

As a user, I've wanted a feature like this so I can have my PC in my office record my PS4 from the living room (I'd Remote Play into the PS4). This way I can stream/record from there...

Or I could even let my server handle it (I'd plop an older Radeon in there for HW Acceleration).

I could even set my PS4 in my server rack! :D