OBS Studio 29.1 is currently in testing!

Hi there everyone, it's almost time for another OBS release! 29.1 is currently in testing. This is one of my favorite OBS releases yet personally; it has so many nice improvements.

You can check out the latest betas, releases, and patch notes here!

If you have any issues with our betas, please report them on the forum post for 29.1 or in the #beta-testing channel of our Discord server.

Support for newer codecs (such as AV1) over RTMP

Our efforts to push AV1 continue. Although we'll hopefully implement newer, more efficient protocols in the future, we'd rather not be waiting for those protocols when we could be streaming AV1 and other newer codecs right now. Because of that, OBS has updated its RTMP implementation to a newer enhanced RTMP specification which adds support for newer codecs.

YouTube is the first service to implement beta support for the updated RTMP revision. Please test it out and let us know if there are any issues!

With any luck, perhaps other services will take note and decide to implement support for it as well! It may not be right away, but we have hopefully given them all the tools they need to add support sooner rather than later if they so choose.

Audio encoder selection and multi-track audio in simple output mode

This update adds support for more audio encoders when recording. If you want to record, say, Opus, FLAC, or even raw PCM, you can now do so. Currently PCM/FLAC are just in advanced output mode, but we might consider adding them to simple output mode as well before release.

In addition to this, multi-track audio support has now been added to simple output mode. This makes it so users are not forced to use advanced output mode if they simply wish to use multiple audio tracks in their recordings.

Stingers can now be fully decoded to RAM before any playback

One problem with stingers that we kept hearing about is how they were subject to live decoding, which could sometimes make them lag or play back improperly. This particularly affected track matte stingers because they're twice the size of normal stingers, thus required twice the decoding.

To solve this, we added a "Preload video to RAM" option to stingers which allows you fully decode the stinger video and audio to RAM upon creation, which eliminates all decoding when using those stingers.

Note however that this may take up quite a lot of RAM, so make sure you have a lot of RAM available if you plan to use this feature; especially with longer duration stinger video files, and especially with track matte stingers.

Also note that there's still more room for improvement for stinger performance in the future.

Super sweet performance improvements all over

Thanks to Rodney, we've added a whole bunch of minor quality of life performance improvements. The settings window now should open up much more quickly even if you have a whole bunch of scenes and sources. Switching scene collections is much faster. The auto-updater is much faster than it used to be. Just a whole bunch of minor random performance improvements all over the program, it's quite nice.

Hopefully everyone enjoys the performance improvements! It's long overdue.

Thank you very much Rodney!

And much more!

As usual these are only just a couple of the new things for 29.1. Check out the full patch notes and downloads on our Github Releases page! There were hundreds of pull requests merged between 29.0 and 29.1. We've been working hard to make sure that streamers, YouTubers, and all content creators have the best tools available to them.

As usual, thank you very much for the support! Hopefully you'll all enjoy this new release once it's finally out. Please let us know if there are any issues!