OBS Browser/CEF Plans, Progress & Timeline #3853
Replies: 14 comments 36 replies
-
|
Status Update: As of OBS 26.1.2:
As of OBS 27.0:
And then there's Windows..Let me be up front: we absolutely want to update CEF as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we were unable to get it updated in time for OBS 27.0 due to complications with the shared texture API provided in the unmerged CEF PR. The original PR for CEF was designed for Chrome 79, and was adapted to work with Chrome 85. There are builds made for Chrome 87, but they don't seem to work, and we were unable to get it to work with Chrome 89 either. Likely something changed on the Chrome side. We plan to revisit the CEF update after 27.0 is out, to try and get it working for 27.1. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Of course I stumbled across all of this after trying to do a local build with a new CEF drop to see if it fixed obsproject/obs-browser#237 and having it explode spectacularly 💀 As I mentioned in that issue, I believe the audio popping/stuttering/crackling that sometimes occurs when using "Control audio via OBS" on browser sources may have been due to a browser bug that was fixed recently (see Chromium bug 1130375). I wanted to make sure this particular commit was on the radar of whoever ends up doing the work to get a new CEF drop working in Windows, so that hopefully a version that contains that fix gets pulled in. I'm no expert in how Chromium branches and versioning work, but from the tags it seems like that was merged into 89 (4389) and 90 (4430), so if this issue also affects Mac and Linux (unsure, don't have the ability to test those atm), then they would also benefit from bumping up again to a version with this change, if it actually fixes the issue in the browser source. My apologies if this is potentially making more work for someone, but it would be disappointing to see work get put in to update CEF in the next release but to a version just old enough to miss this fix I really want. Thanks for your time. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks for reaching out and documenting your findings. We will certainly keep this issue in mind when updating CEF on Windows. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
It would generally be amazing if the CEF version could be updated more frequently than once every 2 years or so. There is a bunch of JS language features missing due to the large gap in between update. One of the bigger features missing in 75 is the "?." operator, also known as Optional Chaining which was added in Chromium 80, this creates dependency on using babel.js to create larger, more unoptimized JS files if one wants their site to work in OBS. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I don't think anyone objects to the desire to update more frequently. The point, here, is that the reason CEF hasn't been updated isn't due to laziness or a lax update schedule, but because the newer versions of CEF literally lack features that OBS absolutely requires to run effectively. Do you really want to sacrifice hardware acceleration in order to get option chaining? I think most people would say no. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Please update at least to version 88 of Chromium. The latest version is 95, by the way. The planned Version 85 still does not support clip-path path() which makes SVG animations nearly impossible in OBS. https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_clip-path_path See this example, which is not supported in obs: |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
The answers to all of these questions are in the thread, I suggest taking the time at this point to actually read the discussion to avoid asking the same questions that have already been answered. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Actually if I could hijack this thread for a second. There is no link to the actual discussions on the side of CEF and I have lost it after looking it up in my original comment above this one. It would be amazing if you could provide those links or regular updates to this topic on how the project is going. What ever is easiest for you and the team. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks, my mistake I had thought the links to the CEF PR (where a lot of the discussion took place) were linked here. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
This is why you shall never rely on PRs. Simple developer rule. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
The maintainer of CEF has already stated that they do not plan on merging the PR without the Chromium team implementing and maintaining some portion of the changes necessary to support the PR. That is more or less where the conversation ended quite some time ago. To my recollection, we have already expressed interest in working with other groups to maintain the PR so that we can all benefit from the performance benefits of the feature.
If we did not utilize the PR in question, the browser source would simply not be nearly as performant as it is. Asking us to simply do away with that would be unnecessarily inflicting performance penalties on every browser source instance which, in some cases, would be so detrimental it would become impossible to utilize them in a stable fashion. If you have the time or resources to assist us in our efforts to get the PR working for a newer version of CEF, that would be welcome. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Is Update to Chromium 85 / CEF 4183 on Windows still slated for ballpark of OBS 27.2? Just curious if this got pushed back further at this point as assuming with 27.1 just coming out and didn't seem to include this update that perhaps it's on the very near horizon? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Unfortunately there was not a lot of time to revisit this - however it's not looking promising. I will post an update as soon as I have something more concrete. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Got it - thanks so much for all y'all do! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Status Update: As some noticed, we did not manage to squeeze a CEF update into OBS 27.1. However, I come bearing really, really great news: We've successfully built & tested CEF 4638 (Chromium 95) with all the bells & whistles we require. 🎉🎉As mentioned before, Windows was a very big challenge. Thanks to the amazing efforts of @pkviet, @VodBox, @PatTheMav and the original author of the CEF PR that we use for shared textures, things are looking up. As it stands, there are a couple of smaller blockers we still need to work on, but I am hopeful that this will ship in OBS 27.2 (on all platforms). 🚀 PRs to keep an eye on:
Changes that still need to be made/tested:
Other issues may come up as we test, and I will post this as we go. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
That is awesome - talk about brand spanking new version of Chromium. Looking forward - great work y'all! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
This is promising! Thanks for the continued hard work on this! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I've made some minor updates to the above status update, mainly the addition of #5518 and that I've done some testing of |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Status Update: The CEF 95 update has been merged for OBS 27.2. 🎉🎉All our tests on Windows, macOS and Linux have passed with flying colours. The code has now been merged, and we're all set to ship CEF 95. We did run into small quicks that needed to be fixed along the way, but everything was easily solvable. CI successfully built with existing versions so if we do have to revert for any reason (which we likely won't have to), then those parts are safe too. Next steps:
I will post an update on this comment when the two above tasks are done. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
The pull request with CEF 95 on CI is now up! Artifacts for Windows and macOS will be available automatically. Heads up: there are 2 known crashes on shutdown on Linux that we hope to track down & fix before full OBS 27.2 release. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Smaller update: we've solved at least 2 crashes on shutdown related to CEF on Linux. There does seem to be one more Linux crash that we've had less luck fixing, but it has relatively strict reproduction steps so we're hoping it won't hit too many users during beta. We hope to revisit the issue either during beta or very soon after release. Linux crash (on shutdown) reproduction steps for anyone who'd like to try their hand at debugging:
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Is there any plans for browser source on arm linux? I'm actually trying to make it work using Spotify pre built CEF binary, this is my first time digging in a project, i hope i can make it work. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Since aarch64(arm64) is planned for macOS and Windows, Linux could join it too. But for arm (32bit) I don't know. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I just successfully built it for linux arm64, working good so far. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
The cef binaried are uploaded to Fastly, but the source code is at: https://github.com/obsproject/cef. Is there an instruction to let people know how to build the binaries from source code? I'm trying to build one for linux arm64. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks! I didn't find it in the docs. I will use it for my arm64 obs. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
what are the commands to compile? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Hi All, how do i install OBS-studio on Armbian jammy desktop ? thanks |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I packaged obs v29 in my ppa: https://launchpad.net/~liujianfeng1994/+archive/ubuntu/rockchip-multimedia |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
This discussion post is not an appropriate place to ask for support. Please use the Forums or Discord instead. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as off-topic.
This comment was marked as off-topic.
-
|
Are there any plans for CEF updates (was hoping to see one with OBS 30)? I see the last update was from 2022, almost two years ago. OBS Browser is on CEF version based on Chromium 103, yet the latest version of CEF is now on Chromium 119. there are a lot of vulnerability fixes, performance improvements, and features added over the past two years. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
We cannot update, as the features we rely on are no longer available in newer releases. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I didn't read the earlier posts thoroughly enough. I see mention of hardware acceleration, but no clear-cut mention of what features were dropped in CEF that OBS relies on. Some googling, I'm seeing mentions about Offscreen rendering with hardware acceleration. Is this the dropped feature? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Texture sharing is not possible anymore. We used a patch which can't be applied for versions later than 103. We've tried but there are too many stuffs to revert in chromium. What we need is the feature to be ported to skia. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Effectively. The patches to support OSR are not compatible with the new renderer, and need to be re-developed from scratch. The tl;dr is that CEF as a project does not want to keep dragging patches along for the renderer, and Chromium doesn't have motivation to implement it themselves, so someone needs to do the work which is extremely complex and delicate. Anyone with the requisite skills/knowledge to do it is not available to work on it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Appreciate the info! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Status Update: I bring great news! Thanks to fantastic work by @reitowo and others, we're on track to upgrade CEF in OBS to a modern version once again! We've successfully built & tested CEF 6478 (Chromium 126) with all the bells & whistles we require.This does not mean we'll be shipping an OBS update with a new Chromium immediately, as we'd like to perform extensive testing across all platforms and architectures. Technical details for those curious can be found at the below obs-browser PR, and I'll provide a summary of the story so far (& the next steps). For many years, we've been using an unofficial patch to CEF and adapting it where we could for each new Chromium release. Chromium 103 & 104 made dramatic changes to their rendering backend, removing the paths that the patches depended on. We continued reaching out to various parties to find someone willing to rewrite the patches with modern technologies, without much luck. The reason the patch was unofficial in the first place is because Chromium itself didn't really handle the use case, and the CEF maintainers didn't want to have to maintain code that could fundamentally break every single major Chromium version, which is absolutely understandable. Earlier this year, @reitowo posted in the abandoned CEF PR to check if any progress had been made, and as there was no response, they got to work. Less than two weeks later, they posted an initial implementation, and since then we've coordinated as best we could to get all the necessary bits in place, eventually resulting in eight Chromium PRs which were successfully merged throughout February and March. As the Chromium maintainers coordinated to get the API fleshed out and the changes merged, we began work updating our own code in preparation. Eventually, in April, the changes to CEF were merged, meaning new official CEF builds going forward would provide what we needed. This meant it was time to start in-depth testing, and it's where we hit a minor snag. Crashes on shutdown when "Control audio via OBS" was enabled - which @pkviet promptly tracked down and fixed in May. With all known side effects taken care of, it was time to make our first non-Windows builds, as building CEF takes a while & there's no point repeatedly building something you can't yet use. CEF 126 builds were created last week for all 3 platforms, and I went ahead and performed the tests across Windows, macOS & Linux, verified everything works, and pushed the changes to the PR. So, next steps?
Thanks to everyone for your patience thus far. I'm very excited about being able to bump CEF more frequently going forward & providing improved tools for web overlay developers. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
As promised, the first follow-up update! We now have builds available for testing running Chromium 127! You can find the artifacts here (and Flatpak here). 🎉
You'll notice this build is 127, not 126 like previously tested. In the time it took us to get everything going, 127 went stable. That's good news - it means the Chromium and CEF changes we were waiting on continue to be functional and supported in subsequent CEF releases! If you're looking to test these builds, please be sure to provide your feedback on the PR - both good and bad. If you're a web developer, you can find the full list of changed web platform features here. Once this upgrade is released to users globally, I'll write a separate post about the challenges in upgrading to Chromium 128+ due to CEF exclusively providing the Chrome Runtime going forward. It's not impossible to upgrade, but contains breaking changes (and lack of user migration path) that we have to handle gracefully. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Status Update: As promised in August, OBS 31 shipped in December with Chromium 127, and while we've hit a couple snags around performance on Linux, stuttering animations, controller overlays no longer working, and some crashes we're still tracking down (please submit crash reports!), overall the upgrade has been a success. Our next focus, as mentioned previously, is working towards supporting the Chrome Runtime, which is required to allow us to upgrade past Chromium 128. It's a doozy. Long story short: we have to build multiple additional protections and a user migration path for browser profile data, and it'll take a while. We hope to have this fully done sometime this year, but due to many potential unknowns, I don't want to provide a concrete timeline just yet. I'll provide updates as we make progress. If you're curious about the work involved, here goes. Since its inception, CEF3 has used what's called the "Alloy" runtime. This is a custom layer on top of the Chromium core that has, over the years, grown to expose a variety of Chromium functions in a relatively stable, extensible way. However, this meant that those developing CEF had to manually implement everything - if Chromium added a new feature or API, it wouldn't be available to users of CEF until someone wrote an implementation, it was submitted, reviewed, and merged. This practically meant that the CEF developers were essentially attempting to re-implement most of the Chromium API with their own twist. Ultimately, this proved unsustainable. So, a couple of years ago, work began on providing a more direct path between Chromium and the users of CEF (ie. us) - the Chrome Runtime. This new system would run the Chromium frontend, where a lot of user-facing features of Chromium reside, so that the CEF developers would no longer have to rewrite certain Chromium frontend functionality into CEF. In CEF 128, the Chromium runtime was made default and the Alloy runtime was entirely removed. While this is great in theory, and ultimately fantastic for CEF's future, it puts us in a bit of a bind for the short term. A big upside of the Alloy runtime is in its limitations - functionality is only exposed to users if the application, OBS, chooses to provide an interface. With the Chrome Runtime, all of Chromium is now magically accessible. That means Chrome Extensions, the password manager, Cast.., popout picture-in-picture, Live Captions, Set as Default Browser, User Profiles, Incognito Mode, Printing, and most problematic of all, a method of opening a standard Chromium window owned by the OBS executable but not controlled by it. Lots of avenues for users to cause trouble, and more ways for Chromium to wreak havoc in the stability of OBS. Additionally, certain features we like/prefer in the Alloy runtime either aren't available in the Chrome Runtime, or don't work the same way. One of these is User Profiles. Browser sources and Custom Browser Docks share cookies, storage, and events, allowing a browser overlay to be controlled by a dock, and only requiring a single login. Service integration, like Twitch, YouTube, and Restream, use their own separate storage to avoid cross-contamination and to improve security. Unfortunately, both of these paths have changed dramatically in the Chrome runtime, to the extent that service integration (by default) uses incognito mode, so it loses its information on every OBS restart. That's problematic. To maintain a sane scope for the first iteration, we're planning on essentially recreating the Alloy runtime experience while using the Chrome Runtime. So, at a bare minimum, we're looking at
We'll also need to test more than ever before to ensure our users get the best experience. I'd rather we delay than release something partially functional. For all I know, there are additional things we may need to request CEF to change, or areas I haven't touched yet that might be completely broken. My current testing is being performed with Chromium 133, but that will continue to rise as time passes. Thanks again for everyone's patience while we continue our efforts to provide a stable, up-to-date browser experience within OBS. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
-
This page is designed to show current progress/plans when it comes to improvements, fixes, and feature parity when it comes to the Browser Source, Custom Browser Docks & Service Integration. Questions/discussion welcome below.
Previously I was posting status updates in the #development channel on Discord but felt they'd be very easily lost.
Note that actual implementation details, PR reviews & bugs should be posted on the respective Issues or PRs.
Edit February 20, 2025: OBS 31 was released with Chromium 127. Changes on hold for the moment due to Chrome Runtime, but shouldn't be near as painful to upgrade as last time as we're not waiting on outside parties. See here for details.
Edit June 9, 2024: Big update in regards to future CEF upgrades, including successful testing of Chromium 126 across Windows, macOS, Linux. See here for the full writeup.
Edit September 1, 2022: OBS 28.0 was released with Chromium 103. Changes are on hold due to changes in Chromium that make our existing patches for shared textures incompatible.
Edit November 28, 2021: See here regarding OBS 27.2.
Edit April 18, 2021: See here regarding 26.1.2 and 27.0.
Current capabilities (as of OBS 27.1)
Version
Feature parity
Major plans for the browser source
Note: For each of the features described below, every item has to be done for a feature to be ready. Estimates are hopeful, and will likely change. There is no actual, concrete timeline.
Browser Panels & Service integration on macOS macOS Browser Panel Support obs-browser#197
Estimated: OBS 26.2 / 27
Note: It's possible that these two capabilities will be added in separate versions
Browser Panels & Service integration on Linux Add Linux browser panel support [CEF 4280 / Chromium 87] obs-browser#254
Estimated: OBS 27
Note: It's possible that these two capabilities will be added in separate versions
Update to Chromium 95 / CEF 4638 on Windows, macOS and Linux
Individual steps
Update to Chromium 95 / CEF 4638
The main purpose here is to use a more recent version of Chromium.
Shared textures overhaul (& hardware acceleration) on Windows complex
Test disabling hardware acceleration and opening 5+ browser sources
Test downgrading from newer CEF to older build (when downgrading OBS itself) - mostly cookies
Upload new CEF builds to Fastly for both macOS and Windows
Have any questions? Post them below!
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions