OBS Studio

Raised as a usability problem by 24 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 14 threads.

People raised many different problems with OBS Studio, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 25 complaints

No undo button, so mistakes can't be reversed and it's annoying2026-10-24
Must pick, trust and figure out how to install a third-party audio plugin2026-01-15
Overwhelming UI; hard to find needed features and set up workflows2024-10-10
Interface feels slow and laggy to interact with on Mac2024-03-09
Screen recording on Wayland is harder than on X11, with an unwanted indicator icon appearing in recordings2024-02-29
Configuring output dimensions and cropping is difficult and unintuitive, with no drag-to-select rectangle2022-12-16
Settings window flashes bright white before dark theme renders, causing sudden glare2022-12-12
Adding mic and desktop audio together did not produce satisfying recording results2022-06-22
Positioning webcam overlays manually is fiddly; can't align shapes or snap to corners easily2022-06-22
Making a simple scene with webcam over desktop needs a hard-to-find command2022-06-22
Hard to design a UI for routing mixed audio into plugins without confusing users2022-06-22
Confusing hassle to use; interface described as laughably bad2022-06-22
Desktop Audio mixer is hidden, so user can't find volume control and mistakenly adjusts the wrong source2022-06-22
Getting the current version installed on Ubuntu is an extra hassle and daunting without command-line experience2022-04-04
Setting up a webcam source in OBS seems too complicated to attempt2021-06-05
Custom browser docks don't work, so streamers must keep a separate browser open2021-03-10
Spent a long time getting the virtual camera to work, with many fiddly steps and dependency problems2020-04-07
Preview resolution mismatch under OS scaling needs repeated trips to settings2020-04-02
Lining up and sizing sources requires lots of clicking around2020-04-01
Audio sources stay unmuted by default in new scenes, and there is no master indicator of live audio2020-04-01
Tab key cycles past push buttons in dialogs, so keyboard-only users can't reach them2020-04-01
Bad settings crash the app on every restart, with no error shown and no way to recover2020-04-01
Setting the screen share area requires fiddling with sliders instead of drawing it2020-04-01
Interface is unintuitive; can't find option to resize output to match input2020-04-01
Clicking stop did not end the stream, which kept broadcasting2017-07-07