OBS Latest News

OBS has been around for over ten years now, and in that time, it has grown significantly in terms of functionality, code complexity, and community size. With this growth came challenges, both in development and organization. While it’s a great problem to have, figuring out how to manage these growing pains hasn’t always been easy.

One of the areas that needed attention was our release process and versioning methods. Up until recently, we lacked a clear, consistent approach to how we numbered our releases. But with version 30, we’ve started to more closely follow proper Semantic Versioning (SemVer).

In OBS 30.2 I introduced the new "Hybrid MP4" output format which solves a number of complaints our users have had for pretty much all of OBS's existence; It's resilient against data loss like MKV, but widely compatible like regular MP4.

Getting here was quite a journey, and involved fixing several other bugs in OBS that were only apparent once diving this deep into how the audio and video data is stored.

In this post I'll try to explain how MP4 works, what the drawbacks were to regular/fragmented MP4, and how I tried to solve them with a hybrid approach.

OBS Studio 30.2 is out!

This release brings some visual updates to the UI, a new Hybrid MP4 recording format, a wide array of fixes and improvements, as well as multitrack video output.

OBS Studio 30.1 is out!

A rewritten image slideshow source, Game Capture audio capture on Windows, HDR for HEVC over RTMP to YouTube, PipeWire video capture device source, GPU rescaling for outputs, AV1 support for WHIP, and more!

OBS Studio 29.1 is out!

This release adds AV1/HEVC streaming to YouTube (feature in beta), multiple audio tracks in Simple Output Mode, preloading stinger transitions, new audio encoder settings, faster loads/updates, and various other fixes.

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.

That was a crazy week. Let’s talk about what happened with 27.2 and what we had to do this past week.

With the Windows version of 27.2, we updated all of our dependencies. A dependency is a library made from external source code; something which is not OBS source code, but that OBS depends upon for major functionality and features. Sometimes this can be a feature such as software H.264 encoding, which relies on the x264 encoder library, or a feature such as the browser source, which relies on a much bigger dependency: Chromium (the browser engine that powers Google Chrome). More specifically, the browser source utilizes the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) to render a webpage as a source, or to render a webpage as a panel inside of OBS.

First and foremost, we want to thank you all again for your incredible outpouring of love and support for OBS. Everyone on the team is incredibly thankful and humbled by your enthusiasm for what we do.

Second, we wanted to share some positive news: In the past few weeks, Lain and the team have been in discussion with Streamlabs, and together, we now have a plan moving forward

When we first announced that the OBS Project would begin accepting sponsorships over two years ago, our primary goal was to promote the sustainability of OBS development for its contributors. Through your generosity, we’ve grown to be able to support two full-time developers, as well as give back to several contributors from the community in appreciation of their work. And for that, we are extremely grateful!

However, for some time now, we’ve wanted to make our sponsorship funds go even farther. That’s why, today, we’re announcing the OBS Project Bounty Program. This new program allows us to share our highest priorities with the developer community and provide compensation for the developers who offer their time and expertise to meet those needs.