OBS (macOS) Virtual Camera 🎥

Creates a virtual webcam device from the output of OBS Studio. Especially useful for streaming smooth, composited video into Zoom, Hangouts, Jitsi etc. Like CatxFish/obs-virtual-cam but for macOS.

This code was spun out of this OBS Project RFC which was itself spun out of this issue from @tobi. The goal is for this (or something with equivalent functionality) to eventually be merged into the core OBS codebase 🤞.

Donating 💸

Consider sending some money in the direction of the OBS Project via Open Collective, Patreon, or PayPal. Obviously, without OBS, this plugin would not be very useful! Hugh "Jim" Bailey is OBS Project's full-time lead developer and project maintainer. This money helps him continue to work on OBS!

If, after you donate to the OBS Project, you also want to send some cash my way that's appreciated too! Feel free to Buy Me a Coffee or PayPal me.

Known Issues

• Zoom, Slack, Webex, Skype and probably some other applications have disabled virtual cameras by default via application restrictions. Check out the wiki to see if your app is supported. Please edit the wiki if you try other software that we should include in that list. In most cases you can work around these restrictions by re-codesigning those applications.
• Photo Booth and FaceTime do not support virtual cameras as of macOS 10.14 Mojave since they disallow loading any plugin that's not provided by Apple. Photo Booth can simply be duplicated and renamed (e.g. Photo Booth copy) and it will work. There is no known workaroud for FaceTime.
• You may need to restart your computer after installing new versions of this plugin (not sure why 🤷‍♂️).

See also the open issues for other reported issues.

Installing

• Download and install the latest version of OBS from the official website.
• Download the latest .pkg installer on the Releases page
• Run the .pkg installer (entering your password when required)
• If you're already running OBS, make sure to restart it.
• Restart any app that was running during the installation process that is supposed to pick up the camera.
• To start the virtual camera, go (in OBS) to Tools→Start Virtual Camera.

Your OBS video should now show up in the target app!

Uninstalling

You can easily uninstall this plugin by deleting the OBS plugin (in /Library/Application\ Support/obs-studio/plugins/) and the DAL plugin (in /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/).

sudo rm -rf /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/obs-mac-virtualcam.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-mac-virtualcam

Discussion / Support

The official place for discussion and chat related to this plugin is in the #plugins-and-tools channel in the OBS Studio Discord. For questions or troubleshooting, ping @gxalpha#3486 and attach the OBS log, screenshots, and/or crash logs (from Console.app).

Reporting Issues / Bugs / Improvements

🚀 Wonder How to contribute? Have look at our notes for contributors. There are ways non-technical or minimally-technical folks can contribute too!

This plugin is still very much a work in progress. If you are having an issue there's a good chance someone has already run into the same thing. Please search through the issues before reporting a new one.

Also, make sure you're running the most recent version of OBS. We're only officially supporting the most recent version of OBS at any given time.

If you still believe you have found an unreported issue related to this plugin, please open an issue! When you do, include any relevant terminal log, Console.app log, crash log, screen recording and/or screenshots. The more information you can provide, the better!

Development

Please help me make this thing not janky! See the this wiki page for build instructions and tips & tricks for developing.

License

As the goal of this repo is to eventually get merged into obsproject/obs-studio (or die because someone made a better implementation), the license for this code mirrors the GPLv2 license for that project.