SymStudio: Forking and Rebranding OBS Studio Into My Own Build

SymStudio is my personal rebrand of OBS Studio — the same broadcasting engine, with its own name, icon, About dialog, and eventually its own theme and starter scenes. I built it with Claude as a pair programmer, starting from a clone of the OBS repo and ending with a portable SymStudio.exe that runs straight from a folder. OBS is GPLv2, so this is allowed: GPLv2 requires keeping the source open and the license and copyright notices intact, and removing OBS's trademarks and logo while keeping a "Based on OBS Studio" note is the clean way to do it.

What it is

SymStudio is OBS Studio's engine wearing different clothes. v1 was a pure rebrand with zero new features: the executable is SymStudio.exe instead of obs64.exe, the window title and taskbar entry say "SymStudio", the app icon is a custom cyan aperture monogram, and the About dialog reads "SymStudio / Based on OBS Studio (GPLv2)". Everything underneath — capture, encoding, scenes, plugins — is untouched OBS. The internal config directory under %APPDATA% was deliberately left as obs-studio, so an existing OBS user keeps their profiles and settings.

That was the whole point of v1: prove I could take a large, real C++ application, build it from source, and reskin it cleanly without breaking the engine. Once that held up, v2 started adding things that are actually mine — an NSIS installer, a guided Welcome dock, a default "Midnight Cyan" theme, and a one-click starter-scenes pack.

The division of labor was the usual one for these projects: I decided what SymStudio should be and which trade-offs to make, Claude wrote the code and ran the build battles. I was the one clicking "yes that's the icon I want" and live-verifying each gate.

How it was built

The strategy was deliberately boring: build vanilla OBS first to prove the toolchain works, then rebrand on top of a known-good build. The rebrand started on a symstudio-rebrand branch forked from a specific upstream commit (f61619c), which means vanilla OBS is always recoverable — if I ever need a clean reference build, that commit is one checkout away. (That branch has since been merged and deleted; only master exists now.)

OBS ships a modern CMake preset (windows-x64) that auto-downloads its prebuilt dependencies — Qt, FFmpeg, CEF, x264 — so configuring is two commands:

cmake --preset windows-x64
cmake --build --preset windows-x64 --config RelWithDebInfo

That produces a portable run directory at build_x64\rundir\RelWithDebInfo\bin\64bit\, and SymStudio.exe runs from there with no install step.

The rebrand itself was kept to a deliberately small, well-defined surface so the engine stayed pristine. It touched exactly the user-facing identity and nothing else:

• The executable name in frontend/CMakeLists.txt (obs64 → SymStudio).
• The window title and Qt app display name in the frontend widgets and OBSApp.cpp.
• The application, window, and tray icons (a generated aperture "S" — I picked option 5 of five logo concepts the generator produced).
• The user-facing locale strings in frontend/data/locale/en-US.ini.
• The About dialog and its About.Info attribution string.

The v1 rebrand landed in eight commits, engine untouched, fast-forwarded onto master. The whole thing is regenerable: assets/make-logos.py re-renders all five logo concepts, and assets/make-icon.py rebuilds the multi-resolution .ico.

v2 went deeper into the frontend. The Welcome dock (frontend/widgets/SymStudioWelcomeDock.{hpp,cpp}, ~245 lines) is a real Qt dock registered in OBSBasic::OBSInit(), mirroring how OBS registers its own stats dock. It has quick-action buttons that drive OBS through its existing machinery — QMetaObject::invokeMethod for menu actions, obs_frontend_* for stream/record — plus a one-second timer that auto-detects your setup progress (do you have a source? audio? a stream key? are you live?) and a rotating tips strip. The Midnight Cyan theme is a glossy navy-and-cyan variant of OBS's Yami theme, shipped as a .ovt file and set as the default. And the starter-scenes pack builds a four-scene collection (Starting Soon / Live / BRB / Ending) programmatically from Pillow-generated overlay art.

The gotchas

The CMake preset hardcodes a specific compiler and SDK, and "newer" doesn't satisfy it. My machine had Visual Studio 2026 installed, but OBS's windows-x64 preset pins the generator to "Visual Studio 17 2022" and the platform toolset to Windows SDK 10.0.22621. VS 2026 does not stand in for VS 2022 here — the configure step just fails. The fix was to install the VS 2022 Build Tools alongside 2026 and add the SDK 22621 component. Newer is not a superset when a build pins exact versions.

The C++ Desktop workload alone isn't enough — several OBS plugins need ATL. Once VS 2022 was in place, the build still failed compiling frontend-tools, obs-qsv11, and the win-dshow virtualcam, all of which include atlbase.h / atlstr.h. The default Desktop C++ workload doesn't bundle ATL. The fix was adding the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.ATL component. One non-obvious wrinkle: a non-elevated setup.exe modify --quiet silently no-ops in a non-interactive shell (it returns in ~40ms having done nothing) — winget with --force --override handles the UAC elevation correctly and actually installs the component.

Keeping vanilla recoverable mattered more than it sounds. Because I forked from a pinned commit and kept the rebrand on its own branch, "is this bug mine or OBS's?" was always answerable by diffing against f61619c. That discipline is also what let the rebrand merge as a clean fast-forward with the engine provably untouched. The one honest caveat I'll flag: auto-update is not rebranded and won't work — updater/updater.cpp still waits for and relaunches obs64.exe and points at OBS's servers. That's harmless for a portable build, but it would need real work before any SymStudio release that actually ships updates.

What shipped

v1 is complete and live-verified: SymStudio.exe (about 9.4 MB) builds, launches, and shows SymStudio branding across the title bar, taskbar, tray icon, and About dialog, with the preview pipeline fully working. All of it merged to master.

v2 added the parts that make it feel less like a reskin and more like its own app:

• An installer — SymStudio-32.1.2-windows-x64.exe, a ~190 MB NSIS installer produced via CPack, with SymStudio branding, shortcuts, and an uninstaller.
• A Welcome dock — guided quick-start with auto-detecting setup checklist and rotating tips.
• A Midnight Cyan theme — glossy navy-and-cyan, set as the default.
• Starter scenes — one click installs a four-scene SymStudio Starter collection with Midnight Cyan overlay art.

The roadmap from here is Streamlabs-style parity: a Twitch chat dock, a stream-info dock, and alerts — most of which need a Twitch client ID and OAuth, with read-only chat being the one piece that can run on plain IRC.

This is a local, personal build — there's no public repo to link to, and SymStudio doesn't use OBS's trademarks or logos. Full credit for the engine belongs to the OBS Project and its contributors. It's one of a series of projects I've been building this way; the running list is on the projects page.