Plugin Tutorial \ Building Your First First Plugin

You should now have your build environment set up. If you don't, take a look at the previous tutorial to figure out how.

The plugin interface is actually quite simple. The bare minimum that you really need to do in order to make a plugin is to define a few functions and export them. These functions are LoadPlugin, UnloadPlugin, GetPluginName, and GetPluginDescription. Create a header file (TutorialPlugin.h) and prototype them with the following:

#pragma once
#include "OBSApi.h"
extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) bool LoadPlugin();
extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) void UnloadPlugin();
extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) CTSTR GetPluginName();
extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) CTSTR GetPluginDescription();

You can then define them with some stub code in TutorialPlugin.cpp

#include "TutorialPlugin.h"

bool LoadPlugin()
{
    return true;
}

void UnloadPlugin()
{
}

CTSTR GetPluginName()
{
    return TEXT("Tutorial plugin");
}

CTSTR GetPluginDescription()
{
    return TEXT("This plugin is designed to help teach people how to write plugins for OBS.");
}

If that compiles fine, you should now have a plugin DLL in rundir/plugins/. If you start OBS and look at your plugins, you should see your brand new tutorial plugin! Now let's do something more interesting with this plugin.

Previous Tutorial: Setting Up Your Environment

Next Tutorial: Create A New Video Source