With a community, he could build something amazing. But not just his.Īs Bailey tells it, “I made it open source because it would need to be a community effort to make it the most optimal technology.” Solo, he could build something cool. He had the opportunity to be first, so he quickly built a prototype over the next few months - “a very basic shell of a program” - mentioned it on Reddit, and it took over his life.
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He could have used something like the proprietary XSplit software to record and stream games, but says he was bored and there were no free tools. That initial capture program was just a few hundred lines of code, incorporating things he’d learned about graphics, video capture, and more. “I made this program that would capture the minimap and make it really big on my left screen, because I wanted to be able to spot if there was anybody incoming, making the game a little bit easier.” “When I was playing StarCraft, I dabbled with capture technology because - and this is going to sound stupid - in StarCraft you have this little thing called a minimap, and it shows you where your enemies are,” he explains. He says that back then people were streaming their gameplay - specifically StarCraft - on the internet. He also happened to be an excellent developer who built game engines for fun, with a particular need to “cheat” at StarCraft. Of his pre-OBS life, Bailey describes himself as a complete bum who was living with his dad. And he’s had at least one seven-figure offer for OBS, which he declined because he felt it wouldn’t have been good for OBS users. “The fact that I had never worked with anyone before showed, and I failed that interview really bad,” he says. Not that he hasn’t had interest, including from Twitch. “I never really had a real job in my life,” he says. Blame It on StarCraftĪ coder from the age of eight, Bailey has no formal training in software development - no college and, except for one brief stint at the age of 18 (1999), no work experience. His experience can tell us a great deal about how the most successful open source projects function. In a recent interview, Bailey claims the impetus to all this was that he was bored and there were no free tool options, but he’s being humble.
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A few hundred lines of code and a post to the StarCraft subreddit later, and “it just kind of spiraled into this crazy, super popular program,” Bailey says. Instead, he had the simple need to capture part of his gaming screen on StarCraft so as to gain a bigger view of the minimap that displays enemy activity. Although he loves playing video games, his inspiration for creating OBS wasn’t fame. But in Bailey’s case, he has no ambition to be a YouTube star. In this you wouldn’t be too different from Hugh “Jim” Bailey, the creator of OBS. You can follow him on Twitter you have aspirations to be the next YouTube or Twitch star? If so, odds are pretty good you’re going to want Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for capturing video and live streaming your Counter-Strike talents. Matt is a principal at AWS and has been involved in open source and all that it enables (cloud, machine learning, data infrastructure, mobile, etc.) for nearly two decades, working for a variety of open source companies and writing regularly for InfoWorld and TechRepublic.