OBS plugins

Utilities

• Move: lets you animate all the things, from transitions to sources in a scene, to filters and effects. IMO, this is the GOAT of plugins, but is closely followed by…
• Advanced Scene Switcher: Does so much more than switching scenes, giving you an entire macro system for automating your stream reacting to everything from scene switches to Twitch events.
• Source Clone: Lets you clone any source (with almost no overhead) so that you can apply different filters/effects. Once you need it, you really need it. I dont think I have a single scene that doesn’t have at least 1 or 2 source clones.
• Downstream Keyer: Lets you specify something to go over the top of your final output. A great place to put follow/sub/etc.. animations and ensure they are shown regardless of the scene you are currently showing.
• jrDockie: If you use a lot of docks, jrDockie lets you create sets of docks (much like scene collections) to turn off/on. So you can have one set of docks active for editing OBS, and another for when you’re live.
• QAU (Quick Access Utility): Gives you some very convenient docs, giving you quick access to sources that might be buried in your setup. Also provides a quick-search popup to find sources by name, type, file paths, URLs, and filters used. Its still in pre-release, but a v1.0 release will be on the OBS forums soon. Link goes to the github latest version download page. (DISCLOSURE-I wrote this plugin, and it is under active development)
• Aitum Vertical: Lets you create a vertical scene/output that is rendered in parallel to your normal output. Makes creating tiktok and youtube vertical vids a piece of cake.
• Aitum Multistream: Very new plugin that makes multi-streaming to multiple services a breeze.
• Teleport. It allow you to use OBS on a separate computer to encode/record/upload. Both computers must be running OBS and have the plug-in installed, and be on the same network. A wired connection for both computers is recommended
• Tuna is what I use for my Spotify integration. I dig that you can have multiple types of song info outputs on your stream, so on my starting soon / brb screens I can have one that is bigger and more detailed, while during stream I can have a lower third with just enough information to credit the artists.Closed Captioning via Google Speech Recognition for when I need captioning. It’s just quite good at it’s job really.Advanced Scene Switcher is what I use mainly for having my streams start right on time. I have a macro that starts 5 minutes ahead of my usual go time. It puts it on my starting soon scene that has a timer, mutes my microphone and any discord audio, then starts the stream. It then waits 4.5 minutes and then hits record so I only have to remove the first 30 seconds in editing. I could have it turn on the mic and discord audio once the timer is up, but if I learned anything when I did TV/Radio back in the day it’s that that’s best left to a human to enable.
• Source Record. To record each of my sources individually while streaming.
• Scene Tree Folder for organizing my scenes. It may not be needed for everyone, but as someone who does not just a variety of streams but a variety of streams in different categories, I like to keep things somewhat organized without having to change settings on the same scene or two. This lets me have my chaos and keep it tidy too. It was a great help before I got Touch Portal for an older tablet that I use to switch scenes and such, but even now it helps just keep things organized looking when I decide to do a new type of stream. Speaking of Touch Portal though.
• Finally, any sort of web/app gui that works alongside OBS Websockets. I use Touch Portal because it doubles as shortcuts for a lot of other things on my computer, but I hear OBS Blade is good too for Android and Apple. I use this to do everything from volume adjustments for my music to switching scenes to mic control. I may not have a physical sound board but it’s the next best thing so I don’t have to drag my mouse to another window or monitor if you have dual monitors. If you have a smart phone / tablet and don’t have a second monitor, I’d look into this to help your streaming process. I hear OBS Blade is totally free but I also saw it has in app purchases so I can’t speak to that. Touch Portal itself is free for a lite sort of version which is pretty well done, but if you want more buttons you need pro which in my case was worth the one time purchase of $14, but then again I use it for way more than OBS. Because it’s not free though, I won’t be linking to any of those apps and if anyone has pure free alternatives or can confirm OBS Blade is totally free, please drop some info below.As a final note, to your comment of “… but in the long run OBS is the best way to go due to it being free + plugins (i think??? hopefully i dont sound dumb).” I would definitely agree with that initial statement, and in no way is it dumb sounding. There’s a reason why the Open Source movement is pretty strong.
  • Instant Replay ****

Visual and Audio FX and Filters

• ShaderFilter: Comes with a huge library of shaders to apply all sorts of crazy effects to your sources. Everything from rainbow effects, to drunk/distortion shaders, to scanlines. Also lets you build your own shaders if you learn HLSL (the shader language OBS uses). Super powerful.
• Advanced Masks: Lets you mask sources in all sorts of powerful ways. You can mask a source using various shapes, gradients, and even using another source. Brings many of the powerful Matte/masking features from existing video editing software to OBS. You can also apply color correction masks for doing things like changing the saturation or brightness of areas of the source. (DISCLOSURE- This is one of the plugins I built)
• Stroke, Glow, Shadow: Does exactly what it says- allows you to create strokes/borders, glows, and drop shadows around sources with alpha transparency. Allows for both inner and outer effects. (DISCLOSURE- This is also a plugin I built)
• Gradient Source: Lets you create complex gradients in OBS. Something that really should be built-in, but for some reason isn’t.
• Composite Blur: Allows the blurring and pixelization of sources. Provides tools to do area, zoom, directional, and even tilt-shift blurring, using a few different blurring algorithms. Also gives the option to pixelate your source with different shapes including square pixels (think 8-bit games), hexagon pixels, triangles, and circles. (DISCLOSURE- This is also one of my plugins).
• Scene as Transition: Lets you build stinger transitions but using a dynamic/active OBS scene rather than a pre-baked video.
• Retro Effects: Send your stream back to the 80s or 90s. Gives a bunch of effect filters that do everything from simulating an old CRT TV, to the Matrix Rain effect, to Posterizing. Lots of fun visual effects you can apply to the sources in your stream. (DISCLOSURE- This is also one of my plugins).
• Noise: Generate random dynamic fractal noise sources fields using several different algorithms. Can be used for backgrounds, with advanced masks to generate unique/evolving masks, or with the plugins Noise Displace filter, which applies the noise as a displacement mask for a source. Definitely a complicated filter, but you can get some amazing effects with it. (DISCLOSURE- This is also one of my plugins).
• Waveform for showing waveforms of audio sources
• Scrab  It basically lets you activate a snipping tool with OBS, and anything you snip on your desktop will instantly appear as an image source on your OBS canvas. It’s a bit finicky though and you have to click on the OBS with your mouse before using it or else it bugs out a little, but once you get used to doing it that it’s a lifesaver. Just makes it so easy to show shit on stream without sharing the entire thing as a source
• Sound Alerts: you can use it to have different sounds/gif/vidro for various events like raids, bits, new subs/follows. It’s really easy to use too.