OBS has officially announced the start of the OBS bounty program to get commonly requested features some development time that is beyond the scope of what the core development team is currently working on.
This kind of post is fairly different from the how-to type posts I tend to focus on, but I felt that this was an important enough subject to write about and raise awareness for, as it benefits all creators who use OBS Studio. I’m not very experienced in writing this kind of post, so bear with me if things seem a little bit awkward.
As a bit of acknowledgment, I first heard about this from Eposvox in his Streamer Newz Segment, so if you’re reading this, thank you, Adam, for bringing this to my attention!
Table of Contents
What is the OBS Bounty Program?
Bounties are paid opportunities designed to incentivize individuals who have the programming knowledge necessary to create features that have been requested. Traditionally, only the accepted proposal is paid out. However, the OBS team has put a lot of thought into the process to make it fairer to the contributors to the programming assignments.
In their official announcement post, the OBS team has an entire section dedicated to telling you how they plan to run the bounty program. In it, they outline the fact that the program will be:
- Curated, meaning that bounties will be defined and published by the OBS development team
- Well Defined, meaning that there is as little ambiguity as possible
- and Non-competetive, meaning the bounty program isn’t intended to become a race to see who develops the feature first before anyone else.
The reasons for their choices are explained in the announcement post, but I wholeheartedly agree with this approach – the best design should win, not the first available. It tends to be more resistant to breaking too, which is essential for a program like OBS Studio that needs to work well for multiple hours of use when encoding a live stream.
Available Bounty Projects as of 08/13/2021
The first four features that the OBS bounty program will cover include:
- VST 3 Support
- Hotkey Duplication Detection
- Scene Organization Tools
- Automatic File Splitting
If you’re not a programmer with the knowledge necessary to attempt adding these features to OBS, you can instead contribute by donating money towards the bounty that you’d like to see the most. This money is what is then used to pay the developers working on the bounties, so a more lucrative option for them will hasten the development process for that feature.
You can see the full list of bounty proposals on their GitHub page for when these are out of date – I won’t be updating this post often enough to guarantee that these features are what you will see when you encounter this page. So check out the official bounty page to see what is actually available.
The Feature I am most Hyped For in the Bounties – OBS VST 3 Support
If you guys have been reading my blog for a while, you will probably know I love VST plugins. Playing with audio stuff is something of a zen activity for me, so anything that expands the support of said plugins to encompass a whole new class of VST plugins is a welcome addition in my eyes. Plus, there are a few VST plugins that I know of that don’t currently work with OBS Studio that have a VST 3 version available. If properly implemented, these plugins could become usable.
This, in my eyes, makes it worth contributing to the project. I have done so, and I encourage you to do the same if you use OBS to create your content.