OBS Studio

Overview

OBS is the tool that made live production on a single computer normal. The model is scenes and sources: a scene is a layout, a source is anything that can be drawn or heard, and you switch between scenes while the composited result goes to a file, to a stream, or to both at once. Once that model clicks, everything from a two camera podcast to a full multi scene broadcast is the same job at different scales.

Sources cover display capture, window capture, game capture with a low overhead hook, cameras and capture cards, media files, browser sources for overlays and alerts, text with live file reading, images, colour fills and audio inputs and outputs. Every source can be transformed, cropped, masked, filtered and animated, and a source used in several scenes stays a single instance rather than being duplicated.

The audio side is a full mixer rather than a volume slider. Every input has its own channel with a fader, monitoring routing and a filter chain carrying noise suppression, noise gate, compression, limiting, expansion, gain and delay for lip sync correction. Tracks can be separated so a recording writes microphone, game and music to distinct audio tracks that are still separable when it reaches an editor.

Output goes wherever it needs to. Streaming targets the common services and any custom endpoint, recording writes to container formats that survive a crash, hardware encoders on all three vendors are supported alongside software encoding, replay buffer keeps the last stretch in memory for saving a moment after it happened, and a virtual camera exposes the whole composited output to any other application as an ordinary webcam.

Key Features

• Scene and source model with unlimited scenes, sources and nesting
• Display, window, game, camera, capture card, media, browser and text sources
• Per source transforms, crops, masks and filters including chroma key and colour correction
• Full audio mixer with per channel filter chains and monitoring routing
• Separate audio tracks in recordings for later isolation in an editor
• Streaming to the common services or any custom endpoint
• Hardware encoding on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel alongside software encoding
• Replay buffer for saving the preceding moments after the fact
• Virtual camera exposing the composited output to other applications
• Studio mode with a preview and program pair for rehearsed transitions

What Changed in This Build

• Lower encoder overhead on current generation graphics hardware
• Improved capture reliability on applications using the newest graphics APIs
• Audio filter chain interface reorganised for clearer routing
• Faster startup with a large number of configured scenes and sources

System Requirements

Processor	Intel or AMD 64-bit, 6 cores or more for software encoding
Memory	8 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended
Graphics	DirectX 11 capable GPU, hardware encoder strongly recommended
Storage	500 MB for install plus space for recordings
Network	Upload capacity matching your intended stream bitrate

Release Details

Full title	OBS Studio
Version string	32.2.1
Publisher	OBS Project
Category	Video Editing
Licence	Free and open source
Platform	Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
Interface language	Multilingual, 50 plus interface languages
Archive size	148 MB
Mirrors	4 active, all reporting online
Listed	refreshed 1 month ago, checked again 40 minutes ago

Installation Notes

• Use the auto configuration wizard once on a new machine, it sets a sensible encoder and bitrate baseline you can then refine.
• Record to a container that tolerates an unexpected shutdown, a crash partway through a long session should not cost the whole file.
• Run the encoder in hardware unless quality at a low bitrate matters more than headroom, software encoding takes cores away from everything else.

Before You Start

Read the notes above before running setup. Most of the problems people write in about are covered there, and almost all of them come down to an older version of the same software still being installed, a graphics driver that predates the release, or a security suite quarantining part of the package mid install.

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