Overflow

Send your OBS program output to the TVs in other rooms, several at once, over AirPlay.

Overflow is an OBS Studio plugin for overflow rooms, lobbies, meeting rooms, and any other place that needs to see and hear what's happening in the main room. It encodes the OBS program (video and audio) once and plays it on Apple TVs, Roku TVs and other AirPlay receivers, all at the same time. You need no capture cards, HDMI runs or second computer, and your live stream and recording are not affected.

Screenshots

The Overflow dock: displays grouped by room, a status light for each, and each live display's TV delay and audio health. (Sample rooms.)

Per-display settings, and the plugin's settings.

Features

• Many rooms at once. Check the displays you want and press Start. Group displays by location and switch a whole room on or off with one checkbox.
• Apple TV and Roku. AirPlay 2 with pairing (the on-screen code is asked for once and remembered), plus legacy AirPlay receivers.
• Lip sync per room. Each display has its own TV delay. In Auto mode the plugin raises the delay when late video, late audio or network loss repeats.
• Its own encoder. A dedicated H.264 encoder (NVENC, then AMD AMF, then Intel Quick Sync, then x264), separate from your stream and recording settings.
• Hands-off operation. Start automatically with OBS, with streaming or with recording. Reconnects on its own when a TV or the network drops out, and has a per-display restart for a TV woken from standby.
• Crash isolation. AirPlay runs in a separate helper process. If it fails, OBS keeps running and the plugin restarts the helper.
• Network friendly. Media is DSCP-marked (EF for audio, AF41 for video) so switches and Wi-Fi access points can prioritize it, and Wi-Fi-tolerant buffering can be turned on per display.

Supported receivers

Receiver	Status
Apple TV HD (AirPlay 2)	Tested
Apple TV 4K (3rd generation; AAC-ELD audio)	Tested (from macOS)
Roku TVs with AirPlay (tested: Hisense Roku TV)	Tested
UxPlay-based receivers, including interactive panels with an AirPlay receiver app	Tested
Other AirPlay 2 TVs (Samsung, LG, Vizio, Sony)	Untested; reports welcome

Some receivers accept only AAC-ELD audio; Overflow includes an AAC-ELD encoder for them. Report how your receiver behaves.

Requirements

• OBS Studio 32.x on one of:
  • Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
  • macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon or Intel.
  • Linux x86_64 (built on Ubuntu 24.04 against OBS from the OBS PPA; tests pass and it loads in OBS; one receiver session delivered picture and sound, on a low-power host with a reduced frame rate).
• The computer and the receivers on the same network, or receivers added by IP address.

The Windows build is in production use. The macOS and Linux builds are newer; plugin/README.md says what has been tested on each.

Install

Download the file for your system from Releases, close OBS, then:

• Windows: extract obs-overflow-<version>-windows-x64.zip into %ProgramData%\obs-studio\plugins\ (normally C:\ProgramData\obs-studio\plugins\), so that ...\plugins\obs-overflow\bin\64bit\obs-overflow.dll exists. Portable OBS uses a different folder; see plugin/README.md.
• macOS: open obs-overflow-<version>-macos-universal.pkg. It is not notarized, so macOS blocks it the first time: open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
• Linux: extract obs-overflow-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz into ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/ (for the OBS Flatpak, ~/.var/app/com.obsproject.Studio/config/obs-studio/plugins/).

Start OBS and open Docks > Overflow. Full instructions, upgrade steps and troubleshooting are in plugin/README.md.

How it works

OBS program ──► obs-overflow (OBS plugin) ──pipes──► overflow-helper ──AirPlay──► Apple TV
                 dock, settings, H.264 encoder         one session per display   ──► Roku TV
                                                                                  ──► ...

The plugin (C++) encodes the program and supervises overflow-helper (Go), which runs one AirPlay session per display. The two talk over the helper's stdin and stdout; see docs/protocol.md.

Repository layout

• plugin/: the OBS plugin, obs-overflow. Its logic lives in plugin/core/ and builds and tests without OBS.
• helper/: overflow-helper, built from a fork of omarroth/doubletake (LGPL-3.0), vendored as a git subtree. Pull upstream fixes with git subtree pull --prefix=helper https://github.com/omarroth/doubletake.git main --squash.
• eld-encoder/: the AAC-ELD audio encoder for receivers that need it.
• docs/protocol.md: the wire protocol between the plugin and the helper.

Contributing

Bug reports, receiver compatibility reports and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Report security issues privately, as described in SECURITY.md.

Use of AI tools

Most of Overflow's own code, tests and documentation were written with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, working from my requirements and design decisions. Automated tests cover the plugin logic and the helper, and the Windows builds in production use were tested on real receivers. The AirPlay sender it builds on, doubletake, is a separate upstream project and isn't covered by this note. Please judge the code on its merits, and report problems through the issue forms.

License and credits

GPLv3 (see LICENSE). Code under helper/ is LGPL-3.0 (see helper/LICENSE). eld-encoder links the Fraunhofer FDK AAC library and ships under its license (see eld-encoder/LICENSE-NOTICE.md).

The AirPlay sender is built on doubletake by Omar Roth.

AirPlay, Apple TV and Apple are trademarks of Apple Inc. Roku is a trademark of Roku, Inc. Overflow is not affiliated with or endorsed by either company.