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Horus Lugo
Horus Lugo

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at horus.dev

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.

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!

Browser Source Properties

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:

Plugin that retrieves my latest dev.to publications

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.

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
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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.





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Top comments (4)

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hazz3r profile image
Harrison • Edited

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

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horusgoul profile image
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!!

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hrn4n profile image
Hernán

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

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