OBS Studio 29.1, the open source, cross-platform, free live streaming and screen recording application was officially released today, the first major update since OBS Studio 29.0, adding more new features and improving existing ones.
OBS Studio 29.1 highlights include support for streaming AV1/HEVC for YouTube via RTMP, support for AJA capture card surround sound, new lossless audio recording options for FLAC, ALAC and PCM (including 32-bit float), and support for multiple tracks in simple output recordings.
Developer Alert Enhanced RTMP V1 extends the RTMP protocol to support newer video codecs and HDR that have not yet been implemented; in addition, AV1 / HEVC streaming over RTMP is currently only supported and enabled as a Beta feature for YouTube.
For Linux users, OBS Studio 29.1 significantly improves screen capture performance on devices with dedicated Intel GPUs, updates the JACK input to show “OBS Studio” in its name to clarify its origin, and improves virtual camera support and V4L2 sources.
OBS Studio 29.1 also brings new settings for recording in segmented MP4 and MOV video formats, new settings for selecting audio encoders for streaming and recording, and new options for preloading media sources used in Stingers into memory.
In addition, OBS Studio 29.1 adds indicators to see when an audio source is unmuted and not assigned to any track, as well as the ability to zoom in and out of browser docks using Ctrl – and + or right-click context menus.
This release expands support for subtitle tracks in VLC sources to up to 1000, adds HEVC and HDR support for VA-API encoders, adds HDR capture support for DeckLink sources, improves YouTube thumbnail previews, and introduces QVBR support for AMF encoders.
The list of improvements also includes symbolic linking support for VST paths, twoloop as the default FFmpeg AAC encoder, CUDA support for hardware decoding of media sources, better DeckLink performance, Python 3.11 support for scripts, and FDK AAC support on Flatpak.
