Zoominator Smart Follow & Zoom for OBS Studio

Zoominator is an OBS Studio plugin that lets a capture source smoothly follow the mouse and optionally zoom in, while always keeping the visible area fully covered. It’s built for tutorials, presentations, live coding, and gameplay analysis where the viewer’s attention should naturally track what’s happening on screen.

Features

Smart Mouse Follow

The selected source pans to keep the cursor in view with adjustable smoothing.

Supported sources:

• Display Capture
• Window Capture
• Game Capture

Dynamic Zoom

Set a zoom factor to magnify the area around the cursor.

• Zoom = 1.0 or 0.0 enables follow-only mode (no magnification, just panning).
• Higher values zoom in while preserving full canvas coverage.

No Corner Leakage

The movement and scaling logic clamps the source so the canvas is always fully filled.
This works with cropped Window and Game Capture sources as well, preventing black borders from appearing during motion.

Vertical (Portrait) Canvas Support

When the base canvas is vertical (e.g. 1080×1920), Zoominator can automatically scale the source in “cover” mode so the top and bottom always fill the frame. This is ideal for Shorts, Reels, and other portrait formats.

Triggers

• Toggle or Hold behavior
• Keyboard or mouse button activation
• Single-key / single-button operation

Minimal Dock

The dock is intentionally simple:

• Target source selector
• Refresh button

All advanced options are available in Tools → Zoominator Settings.

Persistent Settings

All configuration is saved using OBS’s standard plugin configuration path:

%APPDATA%/obs-studio/plugin_config/zoominator/

(or the equivalent location on macOS/Linux and in portable mode)

The following are restored on restart:

• Selected source
• Zoom factor
• Follow behavior and speed
• Trigger mode and key/button
• Portrait cover option
• Clamping and movement rules

Platform Support

Windows

Full feature set:

• Global mouse tracking
• Keyboard and mouse hooks
• Accurate window and game capture mapping

macOS and Linux

The zooming and transform logic is cross‑platform, but global input capture is OS‑specific.

• macOS: Requires a Quartz event tap and Accessibility permission for global mouse tracking.
• Linux (X11): Can be implemented via XInput2.
• Wayland: Global cursor tracking is restricted by design; functionality would be limited.

A portable input layer is planned so Zoominator can gracefully adapt to each platform’s capabilities.

Typical Use Cases

• Software tutorials and live coding
• Product demos
• Strategy and replay analysis
• Esports observing
• Vertical short‑form video production

Project Notes

Zoominator is designed to behave like a native OBS camera system rather than a script. The core is built on libobs transforms, with a small, focused UI and a configuration system that follows OBS conventions for stability and portability.

Clang format fix

git add --chmod=+x build-aux/.run-format.zsh build-aux/run-clang-format build-aux/run-gersemi build-aux/run-swift-format build-aux/.functions/*
git add --renormalize .
git commit -m "Make build scripts executable and normalize line endings"

.gitattributes
*.sh text eol=lf
*.zsh text eol=lf
.github/scripts/** text eol=lf
.functions/* text eol=lf
run-clang-format text eol=lf
run-gersemi text eol=lf
run-swift-format text eol=lf
.run-format.zsh text eol=lf

git add --renormalize .
git commit -m "Normalize line endings for Unix scripts"
git push