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I am a long time user of OBS Studio. It’s a video and audio management tool that works great for virtual meetings and video interviews. It intercepts your camera and audio inputs and allows you to combine multiple inputs into one single output. Your virtual meeting software will see OBS Studio as a single camera, giving you a great deal more control about your virtual, visual presentation. But recently my virtual meeting apps, both Microsoft Teams and Zoom’s Workspace, have been randomly dropping the camera. This isn’t a huge issue except that the placeholder image for OBS Studio is not the best professional image to provide.
I am not at all sure why the OBS Studio camera is getting dropped. It’s as if the apps are toggling over to a default Windows camera. In some cases, the apps lose the camera entirely. In the worst cases, they appear to crash after being unable to take total control of the camera. In a sense, this is something you can anticipate. Normally, only one application can manage the camera. If you open a camera in a Zoom call and then try to open a Teams call and use the same camera, you will get an error message that the camera is unavailable or in use by another application.
This leads, I think, to a lot of the virtual meeting problems that people experience. Since we do not standardize on a single virtual meeting app, you may have one open that has taken control of the camera. Zoom or Teams squatting quietly down on the task bar, out of sight and out of mind. When you start up a competing application, it can’t use a camera but you may have forgotten that the previous app has taken control.
It has been over 6 years since we went into lockdown for the COVID 19 pandemic. Despite this, the virtual meeting apps continue to act in unexpected ways. It probably doesn’t help that most of us have to use more than one (I’m currently supporting Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet). I have tried to mostly avoid the dedicated apps and use the meeting software that is web browser-based. Even this isn’t always reliable: almost 100% of the time, when I open a Microsoft Teams meeting in my Microsoft Edge browser, it also automatically opens the Teams app (even if I have clicked the button that says to meet in the browser and not in the app). In this way, the camera can be captured by the wrong device, and you may not realize it until the Teams app has fully opened and can then be closed.
Windows has introduced an advanced camera option that allows you to have multiple apps to use the same camera. If you are NOT using OBS Studio, I would turn this on. This would mean that both Zoom and Teams could access the same camera, even if you didn’t remember that one already had it open.
I ended up turning this off because, even if the app had found the correct camera, it might flip away from OBS Studio to the direct camera feed. It’s not clear to me why but it was frustrating to go from a curated presentation to the default visual behind me, which is usually a basement wall and a green screen.
If, for some reason, the OBS Studio feed was dropped or crashed, it was common for OBS to show the default placeholder image. And … it’s not great. I thought it was a bit unprofessional looking. At least one person said that meeting participants found it offensive. It’s the sort of thing that you might as well proactively change to something innocuous.
The way it works is this: OBS Studio defaults to the placeholder image if you have an app that is trying to use its video. Until you click the Start Virtual Camera, the image will remain visible. This is one reason I keep the preview option on in all virtual meeting apps. If I join, it will show me the preview with the placeholder graphic if I have turned on the camera in the app. I can then switch to OBS Studio to start the virtual camera.
The first objective was to find out where it was stored. A few web searches and I found it was PNG file in Windows Program Files:
C:Program Filesobs-studiodataobs-pluginswin-dshow
The file is called placeholder.png. The original is this:
So, a little weird. I hadn’t really thought about how it looked until I started to have an unstable video connection within the virtual meeting apps. The nice thing is that it is incredibly easy to replace. Find another image and copy over or replace the placeholder.png file. That’s it.
As a starting point, I thought I’d try something that would visually explain what it was: the old TV test pattern.
In the picture above, the video has been activated for Zoom but the virtual camera in OBS Studio is still turned off. That’s why the test pattern shows. Once the OBS camera is live, the actual video will appear here.
I thought this was a bit garish and there is really no reason not to make better use of this space. I thought about doing something with branding but I don’t use these virtual apps solely for work, so I didn’t want to have a work logo in this space. I ended up using a more visually appealing image and put some text over it.
Here it is in the Teams app start up screen.
In fact, my first attempt was far more audacious. I found a short animated video in MP4 format and converted it to an animated PNG, a bit like an animated GIF. However, it was a huge file and, as far as I can tell, OBS Studio just can’t manage large or perhaps animated files. Until I replaced it with a single frame—shown above, the tree and snowflakes and text, created in Microsoft PowerPoint—OBS would just crash out.
If I worked in a corporate environment, I’d make a standard image and make sure that everyone with OBS Studio was using it. The nice thing about OBS Studio is that you can create a green-screened backdrop that is entirely fake. Then, when you go into Zoom or Teams, you can still use the blur function there (the app doesn’t know that the OBS Studio background is fake) so you can still have the professional looking “blur” without disclosing anything about the actual space in which you are situated.
I have gotten through many years without having to worry about this problem. Given that OBS Studio is so often used for work, though, fixing it seems like a no-brainer first step when installing it anew (OBS Studio is available in the Microsoft Store if you want to keep it updated simply and, possibly, bypass your organization’s application installation restrictions since the Store is often open). The thing I hadn’t anticipated was that the camera switching functionality in Windows would start to adapt too. If you have to suddenly toggle off your video or OBS Studio crashes out, having something professional hold your video placement until you can disable the camera and restart is one less thing to worry about in a virtual meeting or interview.
