OBS Studio is one of the most popular ways to broadcast a livestream or record your screen, and a new major update is rolling out. OBS Studio 32 is now available with a new default video recording option, improvements for RTX graphics cards, better plugin management, and more.
First, the new version of OBS Studio introduces a basic plugin manager. Even though plugins for OBS have been around for years, adding or removing them usually required deleting folders or a trip to the Apps list in the Windows Settings. Now, you can just go to Tools > Plugin Manager to see your installed plugins, with checkboxes to enable or disable individual plugins. There are also ‘Browse’ and ‘Updates’ tabs, but they don’t seem to do anything right now.
On PCs with supported NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, two new features are available. There’s Voice Activity Detection (VAD), which is supposed to improve noise suppression for speech, as well as chair removal for video sources, which attempts to detect and remove the chair you’re sitting in along with the background. That could be useful if you want a cleaner backdrop for your webcam, without your chair’s headset and other parts visible.
There’s also a new Metal-based graphical rendering option for macOS, arriving as an experimental option that replaces OpenGL code. A few people have reported performance improvements after enabling it, but the implementation isn’t fully polished yet, so you might run into bugs.
OBS Studio 32 also adds a new ‘Hybrid MOV’ option as the new default for local video recording. It’s a more widely-supported way to save videos with the H.264 or HEVC video codecs, with a PCM extension for the latter option. It can also use the Apple ProRes video codec on macOS, so you can move your recordings to Final Cut Pro for editing without losing video quality.
Besides the new features, there are some important changes. OBS Studio will no longer load plugins built for a newer release of OBS, and the default bitrate is now 6000 kbps instead of 2500 kbps. Also, audio should no longer be duplicated when using nested scenes, groups, and multiple canvases. Along with a few other small changes, there’s an extensive list of bug fixes as seen below.
- Potentially fixed a rare crash on macOS when moving or resizing the OBS window [PatTheMav]
- Fixed a crash with SRT when using an invalid URL [pkviet]
- Fixed a crash when setting non-default pkt_size with SRT [pkviet]
- Fixed a crash in Media Source when playback starts with certain video files [howellrl]
- Fixed a UI deadlock when opening source properties from the Sources list when the Windows setting ‘Snap mouse to default button in dialog boxes’ was enabled by adding a 200ms delay before creating the properties window [Warchamp7]
- Fixed a memory leak when trying to output Hybrid MP4 to a non-writeable location [norihiro]
- Fixed rare occurrence of multiview becoming blank [norihiro]
- Fixed SRT reconnection failures [pkviet]
- Fixed overflow texture rendering sRGB-awareness [PatTheMav]
- Fixed incorrect color range property setting for AMD AV1 encoder [rhutsAMD]
- Fixed Hybrid MP4 file splitting not working correctly in some cases [derrod]
- Fixed not being able to capture higher than 60fps with macOS Screen Capture [jcm93]
- Fixed focus not displaying properly in hotkey settings on macOS [gxalpha]
- Fixed the scrollbar appearing invisible in Light and Rachni themes [shiina424]
- Fixed HEVC frame priority not being set correctly in some cases, potentially causing playback errors when dropping frames [dsaedtler]
- Fixed an issue that could result in increases to output latency after temporary encoder stalls [dsaedtler]
- Fixed an issue where Multitrack Video could still be enabled after switching from a service that supports it to one that does not [Penwy]
- Fixed an issue where GetGroupList with obs-websocket would return nothing [gxalpha]
- Removed a workaround for older Qt versions that prevented docks from loading correctly while OBS is maximized [RytoEX]
You can download OBS Studio 32 from the GitHub releases page, or the automatic updater inside OBS. The main downloads page on the OBS website hasn’t been updated yet.
Source: OBS Studio (GitHub)
