OBS Latest News

Right around 8 months ago, Palakis and I were approached by the members here at the OBS Project with an idea: Make WebSocket functionality a core feature of OBS Studio. On July 3rd, I was pleased to announce the standalone release of obs-websocket version 5. This version is a complete rewrite of the popular plugin obs-websocket. With over a year of development finally behind us, this version brings a new protocol, many great features, and greatly improved reliability. You can see the notable changes here.

While the release is a standalone plugin meant to be run with OBS Studio 27.2, we will be including version 5 with all downloads of OBS Studio starting with version 28.0.0. Including obs-websocket v5 by default will help drive adoption of the new protocol, and we expect it to benefit the third-party scripts and tools ecosystem long-term by bringing official support to the API that many of them depend on.

To install 5.0.1, check out the release available on GitHub. Please bear in mind that obs-websocket v5 uses a new protocol that not all tools support, so you may need to additionally install the 4.9.1-compat version to continue using those tools. For a list of software tools that already support the new protocol, see here.

Many existing tools will require the previous version of obs-websocket, 4.9.1-compat, in order to continue working until such time as those tools are updated. This version can be installed alongside v5 and will not conflict, and can safely be removed at a later date once any tools you may be using are updated to the new version. That version can be found alongside the download links for 5.0.1 on the release page.

We do have a Discord Server dedicated to obs-websocket where you can participate in discussions and get help for the plugin. If you'd like to contribute towards furthering obs-websocket development, we have a dedicated Open Collective page. Thank you to those who have faithfully contributed via Open Collective thus far!