OBS Studio 28.1 Released with Updated NVENC Presets, Virtual Camera Improvements

OBS Studio 28.1

The OBS Studio project released today OBS Studio 28.1 as the first major update to the latest 28.x series of this powerful, widely-used, free, open-source, and cross-platform live streaming and screen recording software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

OBS Studio 28.1 is here two months after OBS Studio 28.0 and introduces updated NVENC presets by splitting them into three different settings, namely Preset, Tuning, and Multipass mode. The Multipass mode comes with three settings itself, namely Disabled, Quarter Resolution, and Full Resolution, and it’s used to determine if a second pass is used in encoding.

On the other hand, the Tuning mode is used to determine if latency or quality will be prioritized during encoding, and it also comes with three settings, namely High Quality, Low Latency, and Ultra Low Latency. In addition, NVENC presets are now marked as P1 to P7 from the lowest to highest quality.

“Note that higher presets may incur higher GPU usage which could impact the performance of games running simultaneously with OBS. The number of simultaneous NVENC encoding sessions may be lower when using the highest presets. OBS will automatically map your current NVENC settings to the closest preset when upgrading,” explained the devs in the release notes.

OBS Studio 28.1 also makes it possible to select a specific source for the Virtual Camera, moves the “Always on Top” option to the View menu, and fixes various bugs affecting the Blend Method in Studio Mode, the appearance of the Stats widget, as well as Direct3D 9 games and Windows Virtual Camera.

It also addresses a case where video capture is darkened when both luma wipe and scale filtering are set enabled at the same time. For Windows users, this release adds an NVENC AV1 hardware encoder that currently only works with the NV12 (OBS default) and P010 color formats and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs.

OBS Studio 28.1 is available for download right now as a Flatpak app from Flathub. If you have version 28.0 installed on your GNU/Linux distributions, all you need to do to update to version 28.1 is to run the flatpak update command in a terminal emulator.

Last updated 1 year ago

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