Is it time to update OBS Studio?
This might be the first time I recommend taking your time updating OBS versions, despite it
being a SIGNIFICANT update to the software.
I’m EposVox the Stream Professor and OBS Studio version 28 just released.
This is a release that celebrates 10 years of open source streaming software and brings
significant upgrades to the program.
But it comes at a cost.
Well, not a monetary cost, let me be clear, it’s still 100% free.
First up, we get HDR and 10-bit color support.
This involved a COMPLETE re-work of the color pipeline for the software and it cannot be
understated just how big of an update this is.
This allows for a few things:
HDR recording in HLG or PQ if you have a HDR video source such as a next-gen game console
or high-end camera and appropriate capture gear, HDR streaming to YouTube via the HLS
protocol, 10-bit recording if you want to record your camera for better color grading
capabilities or less banding - though it’s worth noting that all web video platforms
clamp you back down to 8-bit so the advantage only lasts until you upload the video, so
just an editing boost.
This also allows you to tonemap HDR sources to SDR directly within OBS.
This is wonderful news for single PC content creators who want to play games in HDR, you
no longer need LUTs for your games to look correct to viewers.
For dual PC or console streamers, you can now leverage HDR capture on a decent amount
of capture cards and let OBS tonemap it for you, instead of the capture card, which in
my testing ends up looking significantly better.
All of this HDR setup is covered in a few videos on my channel already, linked below.
AMD’s AMF video encoder for those of you with AMD graphics cards has been updated and
b-frame support added, allowing a small performance and quality increase - though b-frames is
only supported on RX6000 series GPUs.
I covered this update in-depth already, video linked below.
There’s no sponsor for this video, but just lots of self-promos!
I have a few remaining stock of our awesome Stream Professor desk mats and pins at [eposvox.gg/merch](http://eposvox.gg/merch)
and I just launched a new education channel dedicated to art resources, linked below!
Mac users get BIG updates with native Apple Silicon support for M1 and M2 users at long
last, plus support for ScreenCaptureKit which allows for much better performance capturing
windows and the desktop on Mac OS.
And improvements to the Apple hardware video encoder support were also added.
As big as the 10-bit and HDR update was in general for the software, this update is absolutely
massive for Mac users in general.
Application-specific audio capture was added to the Windows version, allowing you to JUST
capture a specific game or program’s audio on its own, without the need for Voicemeter
or virtual audio cables.
This means you can capture just a game without music or Discord if you like, and so on.
The plugin for this still has some extra features not yet implemented in the official build
such as capturing everything “except” a specific audio program, but I think this
is fine for most people.
Nvidia RTX Broadcast background removal was also added for Windows users, allowing RTX
card streamers to not need the Nvidia Broadcast app to use this feature, and the RTX noise
suppression filter also got support for the “room echo removal” effect, too!
A new, cleaner default theme was added, called Yami.
You can now automatically split recordings based on time or filesize, which is awesome.
Plus, OBS Websocket 5.0 is now natively integrated, allowing for programs who control OBS - such
as Aitum, Streamer.Bot, and so on - to use the new features and such.
You’re also able to use newer installations of Python for Python scripts, which helps
alleviate a major pain point in ALL of my OBS Scripts round-up videos.
But as mentioned, this update came at a cost, as it also upgraded the UI framework to a
new version of “Qt” - the software used to build the UI.
It was previously on Qt5, and they’ve now updated to Qt6.
This will bring some overall minor benefits, but in the short term means that any 32-bit
operating system, Windows 7 and 8, MacOS 10.13 and 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.04 all will no longer
be supported.
At this point it’s very difficult to run a capable recording or streaming rig with
those older systems anyway, but those users will still be able to use OBS 27.
This change also breaks the UI for all current plugins.
Plugin devs have been notified and should be releasing updates either on the day of
release here, or very soon thereafter - but THIS is the reason I would recommend holding
off.
Check which plugins you’re using, go find them on the forums and see if they’ve been
updated to have compatibility with OBS 28.
If there’s any you rely heavily on that haven’t been updated yet, you should hold
off, as they will just be disabled upon launch once you update.
You can still download the zip build of OBS 28 and run it portably with the —portable
flag on the shortcut to experiment with it, but try to be patient and give plugin devs
a bit to update, it’s worth it.
Speaking of which, I happen to know that someone is taking over maintaining the OBS NDI plugin,
so we’ll soon (ish) have news to share on that front!
Also as a teaser, the wonderful PKV saw my video about upward compression for gaming
content to help your audio be more coherent to viewers and built an upward compression
plugin!
It looks like it’s slated to be added to the OBS 28.1 update, whenever that should
release.
I’m VERY excited for this.
What are you excited for with this update?
Comment down below.
Join us on Discord at Discord.GG/eposvox to discuss more in-depth, and check the videos
linked below for deeper dives on each of these.
I’m your Stream Professor and remember, be kind rewind.