Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to Create OBS Plugins for Your Live Streaming Sessions

How to use web technologies to build new experiences for your live streaming sessions.

April 10, 2020 · 3 min read

A few days ago, I decided to give a try to live coding on Twitch. I developed a bot for one of the forums I visit regularly and it was a great experience, a lot of people visited the streaming and the big majority stayed for a while.

Because of that, I have been looking for ways to improve the experience of my live coding sessions and then I thought that one of these ways could be creating my own plugins for OBS (Open Broadcaster Software).

I found out that OBS plugins can be written in C++, but that's overkill! Then I thought that maybe there's another way using web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JS), that's when I discovered the Browser source.

This type of source allows you to use an internal browser that supports modern web capabilities, just point it to an URL or a local HTML file and start building a dynamic experience for your viewers!

Once I got to know about this, I decided to use Preact with HTM and plain CSS as the stack to build my plugins. I believe that this stack rocks for this use case because it doesn't require a build step, just go ahead and use the platform!

Here's a GIF of my first OBS plugin, which loads the latest posts of my dev.to profile in case someone wants to read one of my publications after the stream finishes:

After building my first plugin and seeing that this stack rocks, I have created a repository that you can use as a template to develop obs plugins with this stack: HorusGoul/preact-obs-plugin.