Autodiscover and connect to OBS on local network

[radbobdad]

We have as situation where a number of rotating non-technical volunteers manage a stream (set up by someone knowledgeable), using their own laptops. It's a bit cumbersome training them to connect to OBS, particularly around the WebSocket URI to enter into the web interface.

It would be great if we could make it easier to connect from OBS-web client to OBS Studio on the local network. There are a few approaches which come to mind which could simplify this:

1. Easiest would be to simply save the last-known connection address (e.g. "192.168.1.1:4455") in a cookie, and provide a button to connect to the last-known OBS Studio address based on the cookie value (if the cookie has been previously set).
2. Even nicer would be to have some sort of "beacon" or "advertisement" from OBS periodically broadcast to the local network, e.g. every 10 seconds. OBS-web client could listen for the beacon and if found could offer a button to auto-connect. In this way, nobody would ever have to remember IP addresses, ports, or DNS hostnames configured on the local network (assuming there is only a single instance of OBS Studio running on the network, which presumably is the most common scenario - it might be nice to handle the more complex case however by offering multiple buttons corresponding to each discovered instance). For multi-homed hosts (i.e. hosts with multiple connected network interfaces e.g. WiFi and Ethernet) an advertisement would have to be sent on each network.

[Niek]

Good idea - I have pushed a change in 0276ecf that stores the OBS address to local storage upon successfully connecting. The beacon/advertisement is out of scope of this project, that would be more something for https://github.com/obsproject/obs-websocket, although I doubt it's technically feasible with a websocket server.