OBS Studio is a popular open-source video recording and live-streaming software. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. This blog post will focus on installing OBS Studio on Linux.
There are several ways to install OBS Studio on Linux. One of the easiest methods is through the official OBS Studio PPA (Personal Package Archive) for Ubuntu-based Linux distributions. Here are the general steps to install OBS Studio via the PPA:
- Open the terminal and add the OBS Studio PPA to your system by running the following command
- Update your system’s package list by running
- Finally, install OBS Studio
Those steps look like this within your terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:obsproject/obs-studio
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install obs-studio
Once the installation is complete, you can launch OBS Studio from the Applications menu or by running the following command in the terminal:
obs
That’s it! You now have OBS Studio installed on your Linux system.
Refer to the OBS Studio documentation or seek help from the OBS Studio community forums if you have any issues.
Why use a PPA?
You may have noticed that OBS Studio is available from the default software repositories for Ubuntu. So why go through the above effort of adding a PPA?
Adding a PPA (Personal Package Archive) is a way to get the latest package version that is not yet available in the official Ubuntu repository. Installing software from a PPA can be a good option for those who want the latest features and improvements before they are officially released.
You can use the apt-cache policy command to view the various software versions associated with different repositories. Here’s how to use to compare the OBS Studio version from the official Ubuntu repositories and the official OBS Studio PPA:
apt-cache policy obs-studio
The above command gives us information that looks like this:
★ Videos/obs % apt-cache policy obs-studio
obs-studio:
Installed: 29.0.2-0obsproject1~jammy
Candidate: 29.0.2-0obsproject1~jammy
Version table:
*** 29.0.2-0obsproject1~jammy 500
500 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/obsproject/obs-studio/ubuntu jammy/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
27.2.3+dfsg1-1 500
500 http://apt.pop-os.org/ubuntu jammy/universe amd64 Packages
Note that as of today (2023-03-26), the version of OBS Studio from the official PPA is two whole versions ahead of what comes from the central Ubuntu repositories (29.0.2 vs. 27.2.3)