Telestrator

Draw on your live output in OBS Studio,
and mark up instant replays without leaving your scene.

Install • Quick start • Tools • Replay markup • Docks • Hotkeys & controllers • Build

What it is

A native C++ plugin for OBS Studio: a Telestrator overlay source plus a set of docks in OBS's own theme. Circle a player, draw the play, cone the vision, then clear it and call the next one. Ink composites into your program feed in real time, so your stream and recording see exactly what you draw.

Install

1. Download telestrator-x.y.z-windows-x64.zip from Releases (needs OBS Studio 31 or newer).
2. Close OBS and extract the zip into C:\ProgramData\obs-studio\plugins\ (create the plugins folder if it doesn't exist). You should end up with ...\plugins\telestrator\bin\64bit\telestrator.dll.
3. Start OBS. The Telestrator docks and the Draw pad appear automatically.

On macOS or Linux, build from source.

Quick start

1. Add to Current Scene (Replay dock) drops the overlay on the current scene.
2. Arm Drawing.
3. Pick a tool and a color, then draw in the Telestrator Draw pad, a live view of your program that maps ink pixel-exact onto the canvas.

Undo, redo, and clear are one click or one hotkey away.

Tools

Icon	Tool	Notes
	Pen	Freehand
	Line	Straight line
	Arrow
	Double arrow
	Curved arrow	Follows your drag, bows either way
	Rectangle
	Ellipse
	Cone	Translucent vision wedge
	Spotlight	Dims everything but a region
	Horizontal line	Full-width guide
	Vertical line	Full-height guide
	Eraser

Styles: dashed, filled, highlighter, opacity, and an auto-fading laser. Colors come from OBS's Select Color grid plus a full picker.

Replay markup

The plugin drives OBS's Replay Buffer, so you can do the "let's look at that again" segment live:

1. Turn the replay buffer on once in OBS (Settings → Output → Replay Buffer), then Start Replay Buffer in OBS's Controls dock.
2. Hit Markup Replay: the buffer saves and the clip fills your scene with the telestrator on top.
3. Draw on it. Replay Again restarts the clip.
4. Resume Live and you are back on the live feed. No scene switch.

The docks

Four docks in OBS's theme, all state-synced (change a tool with a hotkey or a Stream Deck and the docks follow):

• Tools — tool palette, style toggles, brush size, undo/redo/clear.
• Color — the Select Color swatch grid; the active ink is ringed.
• Replay — scene add/remove, arm, the replay flow, and settings.
• Draw — the drawing pad. Right-click for Fit or Fill; drag it out to float on its own monitor.

Prefer a projector? Enable the legacy projector input in settings (the gear in the Replay dock).

Hotkeys and controllers

Every command is an OBS hotkey (Settings → Hotkeys) under the stable telestrator.* names, and those same names drive a Stream Deck over obs-websocket, so a dock click, a hotkey, and a key press are interchangeable. A dedicated Ulanzi-dial plugin is planned. The full command list is in docs/STREAMDECK-SPEC.md.

Settings

The gear in the Replay dock: auto-fade after N seconds, armed indicator dot, default ink opacity, and the legacy projector/preview input (off by default).

Build from source

Based on the official obs-plugintemplate. Windows needs Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (C++) and CMake:

cmake --preset windows-x64        # fetches libobs + Qt via buildspec.json
cmake --build --preset windows-x64

Output: build_x64/rundir/RelWithDebInfo/telestrator.dll, drop it into OBS's obs-plugins/64bit/. macOS and Linux presets exist but are untested; the input path is pure Qt, so porting help is welcome.

Documentation

• CHANGELOG.md — release history
• CONTRIBUTING.md — building, style, the compat contract
• docs/STREAMDECK-SPEC.md — the command list
• docs/CONTROLLERS.md — controllers
• docs/ROADMAP.md — what's next

Lineage and attribution

obs-whiteboard by mwelsh is the original. katarai ported it to Lua as obs-whiteboard-lua. Brendan built the telestrator on that (obs-telestrator-lua), and this is the native C++/libobs port. The attribution rides along in LICENSE and the source headers. MIT licensed; bundled GPLv2 components are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.