OBS remote control

The VISP plugin for OBS Studio 31 connects your VISP account directly to OBS. It lists publishing devices, adds relay feeds to scenes, can configure this OBS installation as a publishing device, and lets the web or phone app control the stream remotely. OBS never opens an inbound port and no port forwarding is needed.

Pairing is step 4 of Get started. This page covers install details, security, and recovery.

Install

Download the package for your platform from the project's GitHub Release — Windows, macOS (signed and notarized), and Ubuntu packages are attached to every stable release with a SHA256SUMS.txt. Install it like any OBS plugin and restart OBS. Building from source is only needed for development; see the apps/obs-plugin README.

Pair

1. In OBS, open Tools → VISP Remote Control.
2. Click Sign in with browser.
3. Sign in to VISP and approve the OBS code, then return to OBS.

The dialog lists every active publishing device. Add to scene creates or refreshes its Media Source in the selected scene. Create and use as OBS output creates a new VISP publishing device and, after confirmation, replaces the current OBS profile's stream destination with its SRT URL. Stop streaming before changing that destination.

The dashboard shows Connected within a few seconds, without restarting OBS. Existing manual pairing still works: generate a token in the dashboard, or place these values in the generated config.ini while OBS is closed:

[visp]
control_url=https://APP_DOMAIN/api/obs/control
token=the-token-shown-by-visp

Remote start/stop uses the active OBS profile. Configuring this OBS installation as a VISP publishing device replaces that profile's current service and key; VISP never receives the replaced provider key.

Security model

• Browser approval uses a short-lived device authorization. The temporary VISP session is revoked as soon as OBS exchanges it for a limited machine token.
• The machine token is random and 256-bit. VISP stores only its SHA-256 hash and compares in constant time.
• Rotating the token in the dashboard disconnects every previously paired OBS configuration at its next poll.
• Treat config.ini as a machine credential: anyone holding it can start and stop your stream. Rotate immediately if it is exposed.
• Transport is ordinary HTTPS with normal TLS certificate verification through OBS's bundled Qt network stack.
• The token can list and create publishing devices and obtain read URLs, but it cannot manage unrelated account or provider settings. Treat config.ini and OBS scene collections as machine credentials.

How commands flow

Every two seconds the plugin reports its state — streaming or not, the scene list, and the current scene — and receives at most one pending command in return. The dashboard marks the pairing Connected while polls are under ten seconds old, and shows a live snapshot tile for each publishing path so you can see what OBS would broadcast before pressing start.

Because commands ride on the next poll, a start or stop takes at most about two seconds to reach OBS.

Troubleshooting

• Never connects: verify control_url points at the public app origin and that the machine can reach it over HTTPS; the endpoint is authenticated by the token, not by network location.
• Was connected, stopped after a rotation: expected — re-pair with the new token.
• Start does nothing in OBS: configure a streaming service and key in OBS first; the plugin does not supply them.