A Call for Testing Major Updates to the OBS Studio Snap

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In an effort to bring the obs-studio snap up-to-date and improve its overall usability and maintainability, we have introduced the following major changes:

These changes are available for testing from the latest/candidate channel in the Snap Store. See below for more details about these changes and how you can help test.

Upgrade to core24

Until now the snap has been running on core22; however, official builds of OBS Studio version 31.0 and subsequent releases are only available for Ubuntu 24.04 and later. We have upgraded the base snap to core24 in order to ensure close alignment with the development and validation of OBS from upstream.

Drop support for the obs-studio-portable project

Previously, the snap was built from the obs-studio-portable project, relying on its GitHub releases and ongoing maintenance. Unfortunately, the project is no longer being actively maintained, with its latest available release being OBS Studio 30.0.2. To ensure continuous access to the latest OBS Studio versions, the new snap is built directly from the official OBS Project PPA (ppa:obsproject/obs-studio). This ensures we’re pulling from an authoritative source, simplifies maintenance, and aligns the snap’s update process with the native PPA experience. Building from the official PPA package also means the snap can always be based on the latest version, at the time of writing 31.1.1.

The downside of dropping the obs-studio-portable project from the snap is losing many popular third-party plugins out-of-the-box. Users can still install plugins manually in ~/snap/obs-studio/current/.config/obs-studio/plugins. However, since OBS Studio plugins are shared libraries, they must be built with the same library versions as those present in the snap. To facilitate this, we recommend using an LXD container based on Ubuntu 24.04 for building custom plugins.

Intel hardware acceleration support

An additional improvement to the snap is better support for Intel GPU hardware acceleration, which previously presented issues, including support for recent generations of hardware thanks to the inclusion of packages from the intel-graphics PPA (ppa:kobuk-team/intel-graphics). We also plan to introduce AI plugins that are optimized for Intel hardware in an upcoming release, so stay tuned!

How to test

The core24 OBS Studio snap is currently available on the latest/candidate channel. We’re looking for community members to help us test this new version.

If you don’t have OBS Studio snap installed, use:

sudo snap install obs-studio --channel latest/candidate

If you already have the core22 snap installed and want to switch:

sudo snap refresh obs-studio --channel latest/candidate

Please report any issues you discover on GitHub · Where software is built.

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The official Flatpak build has 29 popular plugins easily available for optional installation through the same software manager the user installs OBS itself from. (You can see the list at https://flathub.org/apps/com.obsproject.Studio, click the “Add-ons” tab near the bottom in the information section.) I don’t know if Snap and the Snap Store support Add-ons like Flatpak/Gnome Software do, but this is IMHO the best solution to distributing these plugins to users.

I hope these are connected by default by the time this version hits main release. If the average user runs into their hardware not working, they are likely to A.) dismiss OBS on Linux as broken, B.) dismiss Snap is broken, or C.) blindly copy-pasta commands into the terminal without understanding what they do (defeating any intended security benefits, while encouraging general security anti-patterns).

Overall, I’m glad to see the OBS snap move closer to the upstream releases, and I hope this will solve some of the reported issues and concerns I’ve seen pop up in various places online.

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I don’t know if Snap and the Snap Store support Add-ons like Flatpak/Gnome Software do, but this is IMHO the best solution to distributing these plugins to users.

Snap Store also has mechanisms to deliver plugins: they can be delivered through content-producer snaps (another snap that the original one can take files from) or through snap components.
For now, the snap is just the base application and plugins can be added in the future in one of those ways, making them optional add-ons (previously plugins were bundled directly into the snap for everyone).

I hope these are connected by default by the time this version hits main release.

Indeed, that would make sense, we’re now exploring auto-connecting these interfaces.

(Btw, the auto-connections were already there, I didn’t realize at the time since my snap installation was always a local version :woman_facepalming:)

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