Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to Create OBS Plugins for Your Live Streaming Sessions

A few days ago, I decided to give a try to live coding on Twitch. I developed a bot for one of the forums I visit regularly and it was a great experience, a lot of people visited the streaming and the big majority stayed for a while.

Because of that, I have been looking for ways to improve the experience of my live coding sessions and then I thought that one of these ways could be creating my own plugins for OBS (Open Broadcaster Software).

I found out that OBS plugins can be written in C++, but that's overkill! Then I thought that maybe there's another way using web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JS), that's when I discovered the Browser source.

This type of source allows you to use an internal browser that supports modern web capabilities, just point it to an URL or a local HTML file and start building a dynamic experience for your viewers!

Once I got to know about this, I decided to use Preact with HTM and plain CSS as the stack to build my plugins. I believe that this stack rocks for this use case because it doesn't require a build step, just go ahead and use the platform!

Here's a GIF of my first OBS plugin, which loads the latest posts of my dev.to profile in case someone wants to read one of my publications after the stream finishes:

After building my first plugin and seeing that this stack rocks, I have created a repository that you can use as a template to develop obs plugins with this stack: HorusGoul/preact-obs-plugin.

HorusGoul / preact-obs-plugin

Preact OBS Plugin

This is a template that can be used to build OBS plugins (or webapps!)

$ git clone https://github.com/HorusGoul/preact-obs-plugin hello-world-obs-plugin

The dependencies are downloaded from CDNs, just launch a web server with npx serve and use the local URL in your Browser source on OBS.

I recommend you to use npx live-server to develop, it will reload your website whenever you change one of the files.

View on GitHub

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Comments

[Harrison]

Anything you can do in Chrome you can do in OBS using the Browser Source. It's ridiculously powerful.

The guys who help run Games Done Quick put together a really powerful framework for creating OBS Graphics called NodeCG. It's essentially a way for you to create pages and manage them, and even having a control centre from which you can press buttons and such to control the information on the graphics themselves. What's great is that the framework is completely separate from the Page Content, meaning you can use whatever technology you want to create the Graphics. It requires a build step if you're writing ES6, but it's not difficult to put together. github.com/nodecg/nodecg

[Horus Lugo]

Wow! I'm going to take a look to that framework, it definitely sounds like something I may end up using for my streamings.

Thanks!!

[Hernán]

This is super interesting, I didn't know you could use HTML for these kind of things