Can OBS be used for meeting capture?

What is OBS?

OBS Studio is an open-source application for recording and streaming audio and video from your computer.

Although it is best known as a tool for livestreaming, OBS can also be used as a local meeting recorder. You can capture an entire display or individual application window, record your microphone, capture audio from the meeting application, and save the resulting recording locally.

OBS organizes recordings around Scenes and Sources. Sources can include a display, individual application window, microphone, webcam, and different types of audio capture.

For a basic meeting recording, you typically need three things:

The meeting window or your display
Your microphone
The audio coming from the meeting application

Once those sources are configured, you can start recording before the meeting begins and stop it when the meeting is finished.

The limitations of using OBS for meeting recording

OBS is a powerful recording tool, but it is not built for programmatic meeting capture. If you only want to manually record your own calls, that may not matter. If you are building a product that needs to capture meetings reliably across many users and devices, however, there are several limitations to consider.

If you're using OBS as the recording layer, each end user who needs to record meetings would generally need OBS installed and configured on their own computer – even if you use the OBS API.

That usually means each user would need to:

install OBS
grant screen/microphone permissions
configure the right meeting window and audio sources
keep OBS available during meetings
start/stop recording, unless you build your own automation around it
upload or otherwise pass the finished recording into your product

That's one of the biggest drawbacks for a product use case. OBS works well as a tool an individual intentionally uses, but it creates a lot of onboarding and configuration overhead if you're trying to support many customers.

A desktop recording SDK is different because you can embed the recording capability into your own desktop app, so users install your app, not a separate OBS application and workflow.

Here are a few more of the limitations around OBS:

1. OBS does not automatically know when a meeting starts

OBS records whatever sources you configure, but it does not inherently understand that a Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meeting has started.

In a typical workflow, the user has to open OBS and click Start Recording manually.

For an individual recording, this is manageable. For an AI notetaker, recruiting platform, sales intelligence product, or other application, it creates a reliability problem: if the user forgets to start OBS, the meeting is not recorded.

You can build additional automation around OBS, but meeting detection and lifecycle management are not built into the core recording workflow. Meanwhile, a desktop recording SDK can automatically detect when a meeting begins and ends and start recording accordingly.

2. You have to configure the correct sources

OBS gives you granular control over what you capture, but that also means you need to configure it correctly.

A meeting recording may require separate sources for:

the meeting window
the user's microphone
the meeting application's audio
the webcam or other video sources

If you capture the wrong window or audio device, part of the meeting may be missing.

OBS itself recommends running a test recording before relying on a new configuration, specifically to make sure the expected video and audio sources are working. That is reasonable for a user-controlled recording workflow, but harder to rely on across thousands of end users with different device configurations.

Users may also switch headsets or audio input devices during a meeting. For example, they may disconnect Bluetooth headphones or unplug a USB microphone.

For a manual OBS workflow, the user can monitor the Audio Mixer and fix the configuration if something changes. For an application that is expected to record meetings automatically, you would need additional logic to detect device changes, determine which device the meeting application is using, and ensure recording continues correctly.

3. OBS does not provide transcription

OBS records audio and video, but it is not a meeting transcription API.

If your product needs transcripts, you need to build an additional workflow that sends the meeting audio to a speech-to-text provider.

That creates another pipeline to maintain:

Meeting → OBS recording → audio extraction or upload → transcription provider → transcript → your application

If you need transcription in real time, the architecture becomes more complicated because you need access to the audio while the meeting is still taking place rather than simply processing the finished recording.

4. Speaker attribution requires additional work

Capturing meeting audio does not automatically tell you who said what.

Since OBS mixes multiple participants into the same application audio stream, you will need to implement a separate speaker diarization workflow to distinguish speakers. As machine diarization relies on AI to separate speakers from each other, this would result in imperfect speaker attribution. The only way to get 100% accurate speaker diarization is to use a solution that can capture separate audio streams per participant, like Recall.ai's Desktop Recording SDK.

Moreover, if your product needs a transcript that associates speech with participant names, you need additional meeting metadata that OBS does not natively provide. OBS has no way of knowing any of the information about the meeting, and does not capture the names of the speakers. This means that even if you implement a diarization workflow, transcripts would have labels such as Speaker A and Speaker B instead of actual names.

5. Recordings are stored locally by default

OBS writes recordings to a path on the user's computer.

If you're building a cloud product, you still need to build the infrastructure for:

Detecting when the recording has finished
Finding the resulting file
Uploading it
Retrying failed uploads
Associating the recording with the correct meeting and user
Processing it
Cleaning up local storage when appropriate

That is very different from a meeting recording API where the recording pipeline is already integrated with your application's backend.

6. OBS does not provide a complete meeting recording API

Most importantly, OBS is an application for recording and streaming media, not a managed API for meeting data.

It provides many of the low-level building blocks you need to capture audio and video, but a meeting product still has to build the surrounding infrastructure:

meeting detection → recording lifecycle → source selection → device handling → metadata → upload → transcription → diarization → storage → downstream processing

That can make OBS a useful prototyping tool, but a much larger engineering commitment if it becomes the recording layer behind a production meeting product.

OBS vs a Desktop Recording SDK

If you only need to record your own meetings, OBS may be all you need. But there is an important difference between using OBS to record a meeting and building meeting recording into a product.

If you're building a product that needs to capture meetings across many users and devices, however, you would have to build substantial infrastructure around OBS.

That includes detecting meetings, knowing when to start and stop recording, selecting the correct audio devices, handling device changes, associating recordings with meetings, uploading files, generating transcripts, and exposing the resulting meeting data to your application.

Meanwhile, Recall.ai's Desktop Recording SDK is designed to let an application capture meetings programmatically.

Instead of treating the meeting as an arbitrary screen and audio source, the Desktop Recording SDK gives your application a programmable meeting recording layer for supported meeting applications on macOS and Windows.

Your application can use the Desktop Recording SDK to detect meetings, capture audio and video, access transcripts and meeting events, and process the resulting conversation data without adding a bot participant to the call.

This lets you focus on what your product does with the meeting rather than maintaining the underlying desktop recording stack, as you would have to do with OBS.