OBS Studio

A little bit of history.

Back in 2003, if you wanted a program to create and record video tutorials or presentations you basically had two options: Camtasia and CamStudio. Camtasia was a paid product made by a company while CamStudio was free and open source. Anyway, around 2013 and for several years after that, CamStudio started using those "famous" third-party software bundles - you know, the toxic installers that sneaked adware onto your machine along with the free product.

I was one of the quiet fighters against that garbage and I am proud I managed to convince a few wonderful developers back between 2012 and 2015 to stop this bad practice.

Unfortunately, although I tried, I could not convince the CamStudio guys to drop it.

But years passed (some other newer, paid alternatives didn't convince me such as Bandicam) and the downfall of those older tools allowed proper projects like OBS to appear and take over - apologies for my rant, I tried to keep it short.

I am going to be honest with you. I am not a streamer. I have never said "what's up chat" into a microphone and I have no plans to start. But I have been using OBS Studio for years to capture footage off old machines for posterity, do screen recordings for tutorials I send to my friend when he calls me asking how to fix his PC for the eleventh time. So I am writing this as the recording user, not the broadcast user, but the broadcast stuff matters too because OBS is the same software either way.

Let me tell you why I care about OBS specifically and not some paid software like Bandicam or Camtasia. Back in roughly 2010 or 2011 I wanted to record some gameplay footage. The options were FRAPS (which produced files the size of small countries), Camtasia (which cost actual money) or this thing called XSplit which demanded a subscription. A monthly fee to record video on my own physical hard drive. I hated the idea mostly because I knew there had to be a free alternative out there.

Jim Bailey got annoyed with the exact same paywall nonsense in 2012 and just wrote his own free open-source tool. I admit I initially missed the exact launch moment unfortunately for two reasons - I was building FossHub and I kept thinking about CamStudio. To be honest, I was obsessed with it mainly because we didn't have many free alternatives - at least none that I was aware of.

Anyway, by 2016 they had rewritten the whole thing to make it cross-platform and called it OBS Studio. It basically destroyed XSplit overnight. One guy getting annoyed about a subscription fee ended up building the foundation of the entire modern video internet. I find that hilarious.

I see people comparing this to basic screen recorders. Please stop. OBS is a proper graphical compositor.

It does not just grab your screen. The libobs backend runs three separate threads - one for graphics, one for audio and one for encoding. It treats your game, your webcam and your text overlays as individual textures. The GPU composites all those textures together on a hidden framebuffer before sending it to the encoder. You are basically running a thirty thousand dollar television broadcast mixer on your desktop for free.

Mac users suffered for years with a terrible OpenGL backend.

I was not using Apple Silicon much but I know a contributor named Patrick Heyer rebuilt the entire macOS rendering engine on Apple's Metal API in OBS 32. They had to transpile legacy HLSL shaders in real time to make it work. Finally Mac users get performance that does not feel like a punishment. I mentioned this because I personally know a lot of projects that could not find someone to maintain a macOS version - it was a huge problem and even now, there are popular projects with outdated macOS versions or lagging behind Windows or Linux versions but this is another discussion.

Pick your silicon carefully.

If you try to encode video using x264 on your CPU, your game will stutter and freeze. Use your graphics card instead. NVIDIA NVENC on anything RTX 20-series or newer costs your CPU absolutely nothing.

I do not want to get overly technical here but AV1 encoding is the real game changer. OBS supports hardware AV1 encoding natively on RTX 40-series and RX 7000-series cards. AV1 is about 40% more efficient than H.264. You can push 4K video to YouTube on a 10 Mbps connection. Ten. That is insane bandwidth efficiency and the usual blocky artifacts in fast games just disappear.

TCP is reliable but terrible for live video.

RTMP ran on TCP for two decades and caused massive stream delays. OBS 30 finally dropped WHIP output which runs on UDP. UDP just drops lost packets and keeps moving instead of waiting to verify them. You get sub-100 millisecond latency. Twitch usually lags by ten seconds on the old protocol so this is a massive upgrade.

Audio routing used to be a complete nightmare.

I nearly threw my headphones at the wall back in 2021 trying to figure out the Monitor and Output settings. Cascading audio feedback loops everywhere. If I recall I had a similar issue with Discord. Thankfully Warchamp7 (the same person who designed OBS website) completely rebuilt the audio mixer in version 32.1 so monitoring and output buses are physically separated now. Routing errors are basically gone.

OBS also includes proper VST3 plugin support. You can drop studio-grade parametric EQs and limiters right onto your microphone input. If you have an RTX card the NVIDIA Broadcast integration uses Tensor cores for noise removal that destroys background fan noise with zero CPU hit.

A quick sanity check - if your microphone slowly drifts out of sync with your camera during a recording, your Windows sound settings are probably at 44100 Hz while OBS is set to 48000 Hz. Match them up everywhere and the problem disappears.

For years everyone said "never record to MP4".

If OBS crashed during an MP4 recording the file index never got written and the whole video was corrupted garbage. You had to record to MKV and remux it later. That is old news now. A contributor called Rodney fixed this with Hybrid MP4 in version 30.2. It writes data in fragments so it survives crashes but finalises as a normal MP4 when you hit stop cleanly. Just use Hybrid MP4.

Browser sources are total resource hogs.

If you enable hardware acceleration for them, the embedded Chromium engine steals GPU time from the compositor and your game drops frames. If you disable it, your CPU chokes. You just have to test your own machine to find the balance. Just make sure you tick the box that says "Shutdown source when not visible". Leaving five hidden browser alerts running in the background will eat your RAM indefinitely.

Studio Mode is brilliant but most people ignore it. It splits the screen into Preview and Program. You queue up your scene changes on the left without your viewers seeing anything, fix your typos, then transition it live. Standard TV station stuff.

I need to talk about Streamlabs.

They took the free libobs engine, wrapped it in an Electron interface which eats RAM for breakfast, bolted on their own monetisation and called it Streamlabs OBS. They ignored requests from the core team to drop the OBS name until popular streamers threatened a boycott in 2021. It is legally compliant with the GPL licence but I find it morally parasitic.

If your Streamlabs setup is dropping frames right now, install vanilla OBS Studio. You will instantly get 10 to 15% of your CPU back. Electron is a plague.

Corporate sponsors actually did something right for once. NVIDIA sent real engineers to help build the NVENC integration. YouTube engineers helped merge control room docks directly into the UI. Engineering hours instead of just writing cheques with strings attached. The project remains free of venture capital capture.

A few things about Plugins

DistroAV (used to be OBS-NDI) lets you run a two-PC setup without buying an expensive PCIe capture card. Advanced Scene Switcher lets you program logic gates to automate your entire broadcast based on window focus or audio levels.

Plugins crash. It happens all the time.

Because they load as DLL files directly into the OBS memory space, one bad community plugin brings the whole program down. If you get a crash, disable your third-party plugins first before complaining on the official forums.

Linux Wayland is still a bit of a mess because of its isolated security model. Global hotkeys fail and window tracking is dodgy. Stick to X11 if you want OBS to work properly.

HDR streaming is mostly a disaster but do not blame the software. OBS 28 added a 10-bit colour pipeline but Twitch still runs on SDR. If you capture HDR and send it to Twitch without a tonemapping filter, your colours will look washed out.

Again, I mentioned a few plugins and I repeat - before complaining - please disable them and try again. We also get a few complaints related to downloads and 99% of the time it is caused by a third-party browser add-on or plugin.

Another mistake I see every day - if your stream looks washed out on YouTube, check your advanced settings. You want Color Format NV12 and Color Range Limited. Setting it to Full crushes your blacks because web video players expect Limited 16-235. Fix it once and never touch it again.

If your stream stutters, stop following random YouTube guides and read your own log file. "Rendering lag" means your GPU is maxed out - cap your game framerate. "Encoding lag" means your encoder is choking - drop your resolution. "Dropped frames" means your internet connection to the server is failing. They are three completely different problems.

Finally

This software killed an entire monopoly. It runs a massive industry and does not charge a penny. No accounts, no watermarks, no forced cloud sync.

If you make money using this tool (and I've seen a dozen of traders and influencers using it) or even if you just record tutorials for your family, please go to their Open Collective page and send them some money. They have a small paid team and hundreds of volunteers fighting off venture capital nonsense so any donation will help!

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