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It’s amazing to think that the first version of OBS was publicly released over six years ago. What started out as a small side project by Lain Bailey to make a free and open source program to stream StarCraft 2 has grown into a powerful force in the streaming and video production industry. Hundreds of thousands of people use OBS Studio every day not just for video gaming, but also for broadcasting everything from conferences to sports competitions to school announcements. It’s a tool that can be used freely by anyone, from large studios with big budget productions to individuals who just want to engage with a community online.

From the beginning, OBS has been a labor of love created by Lain and a group of volunteers dedicated to the ideal of free and open access to streaming and recording software. We’ve seen great growth in our developer and support volunteer community over the last several years, and it’s inspiring to see people spend their free time improving OBS and helping others use the program.

Welcome to the first OBS Studio Progress Report. My name is Lain, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!