OBS 28.0 is now in beta!

OBS 28.0 is now in beta and available for testing! A huge number of things have happened since our previous version:

HDR and 10bit support

Thanks to a monumental collaboration between contributor rcdrone, YouTube, and Luxoft, OBS now supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) and 10bit capturing and encoding! HDR and 10bit support required a fair amount of work to our rendering backend and updates to our encoders which were no small feat.

The recommended settings to use if you want to enable HDR output are Color Format P010 and Color Space Rec. 2100 PQ, which can be changed in advanced settings. Additionally, AV1 or HEVC encoding is required in order to encode HDR and 10bit. If streaming rather than recording, currently the only streaming service that supports HDR is YouTube HLS via HEVC.

There are however a number of other caveats with it, such as limited support for effect filters, limited macOS/Linux support, and limited device support. Please read our patch notes for more information.

This change will also improve support for capturing and converting HDR games/content even if you don't want to output HDR with OBS.

Big update for Apple users

OBS 28 has quite a few new improvements for macOS users:

• OBS now has native Apple Silicon support! This means that you no longer have to run OBS through x86 emulation on Apple Silicon macs. Note that many third-party plugins will probably not yet be available for Apple Silicon, so that may take some time on part of third-party plugin developers.
• OBS has implemented a new, more optimal capture method for capturing the desktop or individual windows. This new capture is available for users running macOS 12.5 or later.
• OBS can now supports capture of audio in macOS 13+! At long last, Apple users who have had much frustration trying to capture their audio will no longer need to install third-party software just to be able to capture audio. This also allows capturing audio from the desktop or from individual applications. (I am so happy that Apple has finally answered our prayers with this)
• Users on Apple Silicon systems now have updated hardware encoder support which is now safe for use with streaming services. Due to this update, Apple hardware encoding is now also available even in simple output mode as well!
• We've added a permissions dialog to make it easier for users to provide OBS with important permissions to enable features it requires to capture video and audio.

Big thanks to Apple themselves for providing these new capabilities for us to utilize. (And especially audio capture support. I had almost given up hope)

Notable features for Windows users

For Windows, we've added some new features as well:

• AMD video card users rejoice! A new version of the AMD hardware encoder has been added, which is more optimal and more up-to-date.
• OBS now has an application-specific audio capture source. This allows you to capture and separate audio from specific applications on Windows rather than force you to capture audio from the entire desktop.
• NVIDIA RTX background removal filter, which allows removal of your background via an NVIDIA RTX video card.
• A "Room Echo Removal" feature has been added to the RTX noise suppression filter.

Websockets is now a core OBS plugin

Because of its usefulness and importance, the OBS Websockets plugin is now a part of the core OBS plugin library, and now ships with OBS. This provides developers a much easier way to interact with and change anything inside of OBS via websockets.

Important note: OBS is updating to Qt version 6

OBS uses a toolkit for its user interface: Qt. Up until this point, we have been using version 5 since it originally came out. However, since 2020, development of Qt version 5 by the Qt developers has mostly ceased, and because of this, we need to migrate to Qt version 6 to provide better support for newer operating systems, architectures, and window managers, such as Windows 11, macOS 13+, Apple Silicon, and Wayland.

The unfortunate side-effect of this is that certain plugins that utilized Qt 5 may need to be updated to support Qt 6. If you see a message on startup stating that certain plugins failed to load, it's likely due to this migration. Updates may not be available yet during the beta, but we will be working with plugin developers to try to help them add support for Qt 6 before the final release.

For more information please see our discussion post: Plan to Upgrade OBS Studio to Qt 6.

And many more features, improvements, and fixes

These are just some of the most notable things that have happened with OBS 28.0. There are quite a number of few other notable features in addition to this, such as:

• A new accessibility section in settings
• Spacing guides in the preview
• Rotation handles on sources
• Automatic file splitting

If you'd like to help us test this release or would like to view the latest change logs, check it out here!

For those of you willing to test this beta, please report any bugs, issues, or comments on our #beta-testing channel of our Discord, or let us know on our 28.0 forum post.

Thank you all so much for supporting the project! Without all of you these big changes and improvements probably wouldn't be possible.