OBS Studio 29 is out!

It's time again for a new update, OBS Studio version 29! Here's what we've been up to:

AMD and Intel AV1 Support

In version 28.1, we added AV1 support for the new 40 series NVIDIA cards. With version 29, we've added AV1 support for the new AMD RX7000 series and Intel Arc video cards as well. This completes OBS Studio's support for hardware AV1 encoding support, at least on Windows.

The Big Question About AV1

I realize that the big question that's on everyone's mind is "now that you've added AV1 support all around, when can we stream with AV1?" Although that's a question only the streaming services can answer, the reason why we've been spending so much time on AV1 support is specifically to make sure that the industry knows that we're ready to go at any time. It may take a bit before the rest of the industry takes advantage of it, but by getting AV1 support in OBS, we're telling the industry that users are ready, and thus putting the ball directly in their court. Users have the hardware, they have the software, and now it's up to the rest of the industry to take advantage of that.

As I said, it may take some time, but they won't have to wait on us. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Two Much-Needed Basic Audio Filters

We merged pkv's upward compressor filter. In comparison to a normal compressor filter, which can be used to reduing audio louder than a certain level, the upward compressor filter can instead be used to automatically increase the volume of audio if it's quieter than a certain level. This is useful if for example you have a tendency to get a bit quiet at times, and just want to make sure everyone can still hear you speak.

We also added a basic 3-band equalizer, which allows you to adjust the low, middle, and high range frequencies of your audio individually. Useful for fine-tuning how your audio sounds, particularly vocal audio.

Some Love for macOS

On macOS, we've added support for native ProRes encoding along with HDR support for it. We've also added macOS Desk View, which is useful tool when using your iPhone as a camera.

Auto-Update Beta Access

For those that like to live on the bleeding edge and graciously help us test new versions, we've added a new feature for auto-updating to betas when available, which you can access in the General settings when we start our beta process, typically a month before releases come out.

Improved Dynamic Bitrate (Seeking Testers)

Dynamic bitrate is a feature in the advanced settings section which allows OBS to automatically reduce bitrate when congestion is detected as an alternative to dropping frames. I tweaked how our dynamic bitrate feature works, and I'm currently seeking more testing for it; it should adjust back up quite a bit more quickly than it did before, making it much more usable than it used to be. If you're someone who has congestion issues occur, please try it out and let us know how well it's working for you. If you're happy with it, please let us know. If you're unhappy with it, please let us know that as well!

And More

There are plenty of other features, tweaks, improvements, and bug fixes in version 29 as well, please check out our patch notes for version 29.0 to find out more. As usual, please let us know if you have any issues any time.

And us usual, thank you so much for being here! We're very grateful for all the support.