For high-quality screen recording and streaming from the desktop nothing comes close to matching the power and versatility of cross-platform and open-source OBS Studio – this weekend a new version went live.
What’s new in OBS Studio 31.0? A slate of new features and capabilities, plus a bunch of bug fixes, performance tune-ups.
Among them, the long-required addition of preview scrollbars. These make it easier to move items around the preview needing to hold the space bar and click, while new preview zoom/scale info lets users see if/when the viewpoint is zoomed in.
Elsewhere, OBS Studio 31.0 adds a new background blur filter – but it only works on systems equipped with a compatible NVIDIA RTX GPU and a recent NIVIDA graphics driver version.
This blur does pretty much what you’d expect: detects the subject in a video source, applies a mask, and uses a general blur to it using NVIDIA video effects.
I’m not sure if it works on Linux as OBS don’t explicitly say it does, and I don’t have a system with a NVIDIA RTX (which AIUI is what’s needed for the AI-based subject detection) to check — if you own a monster rig —I’m jealous—let me know in the comments if it works.
Elsewhere, OBS Studio 31.0 follows the recent Handbrake release in adding QSV AV1 SCC support on newer Intel platforms. This is said to be bring a pronounced quality boost of up to 40% – those able to take advantage of this should be happy at that!
Also, OBS Studio 31.0 brings first-party YouTube Chat features to the fore. While the app had already supported many YouTube Chat features for those streaming to the service, this change uncorks the entire lot, including.
- Create/manage polls
- Manage Q&A sessions
- Rich emoji input
- Emoji foundations
- Moderation tools
And more – the features will be available to users who log-in to YouTube Chat and/or the YouTube Control panel. As a result of this change the old YouTube Chat experience has been dropped.
Other notable changes in OBS Studio 31.0:
- Browser source/docks underlying Chromium updated to v127
- Scene items now use relative coordinates (existing scenes migrate)
- NVIDIA Audio Effects split out from Noise Suppression
- Display/Window capture won’t captures first display/window found (Windows)
- Screensaver inhibit functions improved in the OBS Flatpak (Linux)
- Better virtual camera failure messaging (macOS)
- NVENC implementation refactored, now supports split encoding & CQVBR
- Legacy QSV code removals for old devices/OSes
- Certificate update which may affect capture of games with anti-cheat
- Support for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs (600 and 700 series) removed from NVENC
- PipeWire plugin memory leak plugged
- Ubuntu 22.04 support removed
Ouch at the last one – but it only refers to the official build system. The OBS Studio snap package will likely continue to work on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as it can, in theory, ship with newer dependencies bundled inside than the host Ubuntu version supports.
To make Linux users feel better, OBS Studio 31.0 includes a number of Linux-specific bug and packaging fixes, including crashes involving the QSV encoder, window capture, or importing a scene collection originally created in a Windows version of the app.
Download OBS Studio 31.0
You can, as ever, download OBS Studio for Windows, macOS, and Linux using the links available on the official project website.
Alternatively, 64-bit DEB installers of OBS Studio 31.0 are available for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 24.10 on the GitHub releases page, and there’s also an official build of OBS on Flathub, and an unofficial OBS Snap package too.
As Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support is dropped with this release the official OBS Studio PPA will no longer build new packages for it. Users on 22.04 who rely on OBS may wish to try the snap or Flatpak versions instead.