- How cool is that?
My friend recently got a 3D printer
and just sent me a 3D-printed Gaming Careers logo keyring.
It's been almost seven months now
since the last major release of OBS.
If you remember, that was the big overhaul that they did
of the nvenc endocer bringing some massive improvements
to how your stream impacts your computer performance.
This one doesn't have any major implications like that,
but it does have a lot of user-requested features
that have been implemented
and things that are going to make managing
your livestream whilst you are live much easier.
There are some new features in how OBS handles recordings,
something called Dynamic Bitrate,
as well as Custom Browser Docks, and a whole lot more.
So we'll dive into it after a quick message
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So let's dive straight in with one of the most important
features I think, which is called Dynamic Bitrate.
This is especially useful for those of you
that have ever experienced any kind of network congestion
or drop frames in your stream.
OBS can now automatically lower your bitrate
whilst you are streaming if it notices any kind of
network congestion.
Typically, what would happen
before this feature was implemented
is if you were, say, streaming at 6,000 kilobits per second
and you started to have some kind of network problem
that caused OBS to have to drop frames,
your Twitch viewers would start
to see choppy or laggy video playback
because Twitch wouldn't actually be getting all of
the video data that it required
for a smooth playback function.
With this feature enabled now, though,
OBS can then drop this 6,000 kilobits per second
to 4,000 or 2,500, or whatever it requires
to give a smooth playback
and ensure that no frames are dropped.
This is a much better experience for your viewers
because it will still be smooth playback,
although at a lower quality,
but, then OBS will of course bring your bitrate
back up once the network congestion is gone.
This is kind of similar to things that
on-demand streaming services like Netflix
have been doing for a while.
If you're watching a show on Netflix at 4k,
and your download rate starts to suffer,
Netflix automatically swaps out the 4k resolution
for maybe 1080p dynamically, whilst it's still playing back.
So you actually don't notice any stuttering playback,
although the quality and the bitrate
have changed behind the scenes.
The second feature that we're going to be talking about
that's new in OBS Studio version 24
are called Custom Browser Docks.
Now, over the past year,
we've seen the rise of alternative streaming applications.
Things like Streamlabs OBS and StreamElements OBS Live.
And one of the features that really attracts people
to these pieces of software
is the ability to have your stream chat,
as well as things like your recent events
inside of the streaming window.
Now, in the last version of OBS, OBS version 23,
they introduced the ability to link your account
with Twitch or with YouTube
and bring things in like your YouTube or Twitch chat,
as well as things like your stream information
that you could then update from within OBS.
In this version, however, you can now add any webpage
as a dockable panel within OBS.
So, you could add things
like your Streamlabs or StreamElements recent events
so that you make sure that you don't miss
anybody subscribing or donating to your stream.
You could add something like
your Twitter's compose tweet panel.
I'm trying to think of ideas now,
but I'm pretty sure the community's
going to come up with some incredible ideas
of what you can dock within OBS now as a webpage.
This now truly allows you to customize OBS
to look exactly as you want it
as you can dock any kind of functionality,
that's available on a webpage, within OBS.
Next, we have the ability to pause recordings.
Now, apparently, this was one of the
most-requested features from the community,
people wanting the ability to use OBS for recordings,
which you can obviously do,
but actually be able to pause that recording
whilst they take a break, or rewrite their script,
or do whatever they need to do,
and then click resume to then resume recording.
Personally, I think that if you want to grow
as a content creator and a streamer,
learning to edit your clips is going to be
a really useful skill to know.
Because you're going to need to be able
to grow on multiple, different platforms
to actually grow your stream.
So, personally, I don't think this is the biggest feature.
It's really not that hard to record the whole of your stream
and then bring that clip into some editing software
and then cut out the dead silences,
or the boring bits, or whatever you want to cut out.
But, apparently, there was a lot of people
that wanted to be able to pause the recording
and then not have to deal with any editing software.
So, I guess, if you are one of those people,
this is probably a huge feature for you.
An important thing to note here,
is that if you are streaming whilst recording,
you need to ensure that you are not sharing the encoder.
So, if you are streaming whilst recording,
go into your settings and make sure
you aren't recording with the Same as Stream option
if you are using the same encoder.
The final thing to do with recording
that they've implemented
is they have now changed the default
recording format to MKV.
Something that I harped on about
in pretty much every single video to do with recording
is saying to make sure they're using MKV.
Because it's, firstly, more reliable in case of any crashes
or maybe a blue screen,
but secondly, because it supports multiple audio tracks.
They've also made some improvements
to how you actually deal with the preview window,
and arraigning your sources within that window.
In the previous version, version 23,
they did add some improvements to this UI
so that you could see when you were
positioning sources outside of the preview.
And in this release,
they've added the ability to be able to drag
and highlight multiple, different sources
to move them all at once.
Also, whilst we're on the topic of the preview,
if you disable the preview whilst you are streaming
to save on some system resources,
which I definitely recommend you do,
you'll no longer need to right-click
to reenable the preview.
There's a new button there, instead,
which I imagine is due to the number of new users
that didn't know how to get their preview back.
The last couple of things that I will mention
is that browser-source audio
now have dedicated audio controls in your mixer.
So, you can control volumes, filters, effects,
you can disable monitoring,
and you can save it to a separate audio track in recordings.
Finally, OBS have updated some of the software
that they use internally.
Things like x264, FFmpeg, and CEF.
All of those dependencies have been updated.
So, if you are using the x264 encoder for your streams,
you should actually see some performance improvements
I haven't been able to test it out, yet.
So, we'll see how much of a performance improvement
that actually is,
but any improvement is good, right?
It's always a good day when OBS
releases a new major version.
I'm definitely going to be playing around with OBS version 24,
testing it out for my stream
and reporting any bugs that I get to the OBS team.
It's worth noting, there's probably going to be
some hot fixes over the next couple of days.
So, make sure you're always updating to the latest version.
If you're new to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel,
this is the kind of video that we do quite often.
Looking at streaming software, streaming hardware,
all things streaming, basically.
So, if that interests you,
definitely worth checking out some of the other videos
and subscribing, if you haven't already.
Finally, a massive thanks, as always, to the patrons
who supported this month, helping support
the Gaming Careers channel.
I'll be probably releasing a video next week
talking about TwitchCon,
because I obviously will be heading there.
So, keep your eyes out for that in your sub boxes
and I'll see you in the next video.
Peace.
(relaxed electronic music)