// the find
obsproject/obs-studio
OBS Studio - Free and open source software for live streaming and screen recording
OBS Studio is the de facto standard for live streaming and screen recording on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It handles capture, compositing, encoding, and output in one application, with a plugin system that has produced a massive ecosystem. If you stream to Twitch, YouTube, or anywhere else, this is almost certainly what you're using or competing with.
The scene/source compositing model is genuinely well-designed — you can build arbitrarily complex layouts with nested scenes, filters, and transitions without it falling apart. The plugin API is stable enough that plugins written years ago still work, which is rare for a C project of this size. FFmpeg integration means codec and container support is essentially unlimited without the OBS team having to maintain it. The CI/CD setup (GitHub Actions with per-platform build scripts, Flatpak manifest validation, PVS-Studio static analysis) is more disciplined than most open-source C projects of this age.
The build system is CMake with a lot of custom Find modules and platform-specific scripts — getting a development build working locally is a multi-hour exercise, especially on Windows with the deps bundle approach. The codebase mixes C and C++ throughout, and the older C portions show their age with manual memory management patterns that are easy to get wrong in plugins. The UI is Qt, which means it looks and feels slightly out of place on every platform it runs on. There are no automated integration tests for the actual capture and encoding pipelines — if a codec regression slips in, you find out from users, not CI.