OBS Development Blog

Welcome to the first OBS Studio Progress Report. My name is Jim, the normally-silent author of OBS. Version 22.0 has finally come out, and I had a really great time writing it.

This is going to be a long post because I almost never normally speak, so get ready.

First, I want to say thank you

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the very first release of OBS back in August 2012. Back during those times I was able to answer every single post on the forum, interacted with almost every single person who came around the chat, and answered every email. Some time around 2014-2015, forum posts, emails, and chat became so active that it would take me 10 hours per day to answer everything. Eventually, I had to stop, delegate that task to others, and focus exclusively on working on the program.

As of today, 21.1.2, the previous release before 22.0, had nine million downloads in three months time.

This blows my mind.

The program has (along with its derivatives) arguably beco

This guide is written by the maintainer of the OBS Project, a relatively large open source project which receives about 30-50 pull requests per month. This is meant to be a very concise and to-the-point guide on how to contribute to this (or any) open source project based upon my experience over the years; how to maximize both your contribution efficiency, and how to maximize the efficiency of the maintainers and your fellow contributors.

The Bare Basics

To contribute to a project, you must first have skill using both Git and the programming languages the project uses.

Know how to and how not to use Git

If you are not experienced using Git when you contribute, you will reduce the project's contribution efficiency.

Examples of particularly vital Git skills:

• Knowing how to use interactive rebase (git rebase -i [commit])

• Knowing how to squash commits (See: "Knowing how to use interactive rebase" above)

• If you plan on making lar

Ever wanted to make suggestions to the developers for cool new features and updates that you want to see in OBS Studio? How about check if other people have had the same idea as you? Now's your chance! In addition to our newly launched Discord server, we're excited to announce a brand new community feedback portal - Fider.

Your feedback has always been heard, even if we haven't been able to respond to each individual request. Fider will allow us to be much more organized and transparent with our community. We can show the things we're working on, features that are commonly requested, and even ideas that we know you want, but are either not possible to include in OBS or have been low priority. Fider will allow a much more public way for us to respond, and let you know that your voice has been heard.

Finally, we hope this gives potential developers and contributors a great place to look for the

Preamble

So, you want to learn more about video encoding? How to set up your stream for the best quality given your computer's hardware and connection limitations? Let's start with this video by Tom Scott.

He does a great job of giving a quick primer on how video encoding works, and you will hopefully have a better understanding of the topics and terminology that we'll be going over. All done? Great! Let's get started.

Before we get into the details, let me explain what this guide is not. This is not intended to be a fully detailed technical explanation of how x264 works; there are far better guides out there than what I can provide here. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty, head over to the doom9 forums, [FFmpeg docs](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/E

OBS Studio version 20.0 has landed! A major release is always accompanied by new features, updates, bug fixes, and more. The full patch notes can be found here. In this post, I will be going over the major feature additions, source updates, general additions, and a few bug fixes. This will hopefully be the first of many more informative posts to come!

New Features

Modular UI

When you first launch OBS, it might not look that much different:

But if we take a peek at the View menu...

We see some interesting new options! To take advantage of this awesome new UI, first you need to unlock it by un-checking "Lock UI" from the View menu. Now, you can see that there are a few more icons that weren't there before on the different sections of the main OBS window.

![Scenes Un