OBS Studio

About OBS Studio

OBS is a compositor that happens to output live. Everything is built from scenes, and a scene is a stack of sources: a display capture, a specific window, a camera, an image, a browser panel, a media file, a text block. Sources are positioned, cropped, scaled and filtered independently, and switching scenes swaps the whole composition instantly with an optional transition.

The filter chain on each source is what turns a rough setup into something watchable. Chroma key and colour key for a green screen, colour correction to fix a badly lit camera, scaling and sharpening on a downscaled capture, and on the audio side a noise gate, noise suppression, compressor and limiter that clean up a room microphone considerably.

Output is handled twice over. Streaming pushes to any service that accepts a standard ingest with a stream key, while recording writes locally at a far higher bitrate at the same time, so the archive copy is not limited by the upload line. Hardware encoders on modern GPUs keep the processor free for whatever is being captured.

For anything beyond a basic setup there is the audio mixer with per-source monitoring and routing, the studio mode preview that lets a scene be arranged before it goes live, hotkeys bound to every action, and a scene collection and profile system so one machine can carry completely separate setups for completely separate jobs.

What is included in this build

• Unlimited scenes built from display, window, camera, media, image, text and browser sources
• Per-source filter chain with chroma key, colour correction, cropping and scaling
• Audio filters including noise gate, noise suppression, compressor and limiter
• Simultaneous streaming and high bitrate local recording
• Hardware encoding on modern GPUs to keep the processor free
• Studio mode for arranging a scene before it goes live
• Audio mixer with per-source monitoring, routing and level control
• Scene collections, profiles and hotkeys for every action

Changed in version 32.2.1

• Additional hardware encoder paths on current generation GPUs
• Improved capture reliability on windows using newer rendering backends
• Lower latency on the browser source at high frame rates
• Fixed an audio drift issue on long recordings with multiple devices
• Faster startup with very large scene collections

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Update the graphics driver from the GPU vendor before installing, since capture depends on it.
2. Extract the archive and run setup as administrator.
3. Allow the virtual camera component to install if it will be used in calls.
4. Run the auto configuration wizard on first launch and let it pick a starting encoder and bitrate.
5. Set the recording folder and format before capturing anything of value.

System requirements and file details

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