Awesome new Virtual Cam. Feature creep request (virtual microphone)

[James Barlow]

The new native Virtual Camera feature is a great idea, but it seems to have a couple of DirectShow issues in comparison to Fenrir's plugin.

With Fenrir's code, the OBS output is available as a DirectShow Video and Audio device, which can be useful with some EdTech software like Panopto.

The new native Virtual Camera causes Panopto to crash, so I suspect there's some DirectShow hooks in the code somewhere that aren't being picked up. This is kind of an edge case, as in my experience Panopto is the only tool I've ever seen that actually knows how to consume a DirectShow Video+Audio device.

A couple of great things to add would be:

1. Option to Autostart Virtual Cam with OBS, similar to the checkbox in Fenrir's plugin, or even autostart OBS when camera is requested by Windows.
2. Option to hide prompt that the Virtual Cam is still active when closing OBS.
3. A Virtual microphone that presents OBS's Audio output to windows as a sound recording device, to be picked up by Teams/Skype etc. I think most people currently do the "Use Voicemeeter Banana as a monitoring device" trick, which works and doesn't seem too problematic with stability or latency, but it would be really awesome to have everything covered within OBS

 

[UrbaneBoffin]

I second the request to allow the Autostart of the Virtual Camera with OBS.

 

[dodgepong]

You can auto-start the virtual cam with the --startvirtualcam command line flag.

As for virtual microphone, you can track progress of that here: https://github.com/obsproject/rfcs/pull/16

 

[Manuel Matías]

There is one more detail I would like to add to this feature request:

When broadcasting, you can set each active sound source to monitor only, broadcast only, or both. If this feature could be carried over to the virtual audio output, then that would help a lot.

Currently I'm using a third-party virtual cable, but I can only output there whatever I have on monitor. This forces me to monitor my own microphone, which is something I don't want.

It would be a lot better if the virtual audio output got only the sound sources that are set to broadcast rather than those on monitor.

 

[therentabrain]

This is kludgey and I only write from Windows experience, so I don't know how well this translates to other platforms:

You can place an audio-only dedicated NDI output filter plugin anywhere on any media source OR scene. It can slow down OBS pretty severely, but I was able to make four scenes output simultaneous independent NDI video / audio, unaffected by the rest of my OBS show. You can set an NDI output to audio only to save bandwidth.

Presumably you could create an audio output device that goes nowhere but has the dedicated NDI filter on it, and include that device on all scenes you wish to monitor, for example.

I believe you could use NDI Virtual Input to turn that into a Windows audio source, though I think I was not able to get that to work. You can use NDI Studio Monitor over and over in several simultaneous instances, one for each NDI audio source, and redirect the audio output to different devices. Those could be channels on a multichannel audio interface, or virtual cables, or Voicemeeter mixer channels, etc.

I said it was kludgey! :) Doing this caused my frame rendering speed to plummet, but it's still a possible way to do some really cool things.

 

[MichaelPA]

That would be a good idea. How is the development progressing?

 

[paulo.matos]

Any news?

 

[hfjim]

He is right I would also like to have the weird bug that causes webex to not connect to the camera fixed