Technical
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software)
The free, open-source app most streamers use to broadcast — it captures your game, webcam and mic, mixes them into scenes, and sends the stream to your platform.
Related terms
- Scene
A full-screen layout in OBS — like 'Starting Soon,' 'Gameplay,' or 'Just Chatting' — that you switch between while live. Each scene is built from sources.
- Source
One ingredient inside an OBS scene: a game capture, webcam, image, browser overlay, or mic. Scenes are just stacks of sources.
- Encoder
The software or hardware that compresses your video to send it online. 'x264' uses your CPU; 'NVENC' uses an NVIDIA GPU.