Release of OBS Studio 31.1: Enhanced Features and Improvements in Streaming Technology

On July 8, 2025, the release of the open-source streaming, compositing, and video recording software, OBS Studio 31.1, occurred. The project’s source code, developed in C and C++, is available on GitHub under the GPLv2 license. The software can be downloaded for Linux (via flatpak), Windows, and macOS.

In December 2024, OBS Studio 31.0 was released, introducing a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH semantic versioning scheme, where the first digit denotes breaking changes, the second is for functional changes that maintain backward compatibility, and the third is for bug fix updates.

The development aim of OBS Studio is to create a portable version of Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Classic) that is not limited to the Windows platform, supports OpenGL, and is extensible through plugins. A notable aspect of this project is its modular architecture, which separates the interface from the core functionality. It supports live stream transcoding, video capture during gaming, and streaming to platforms like PeerTube, Twitch, Facebook Gaming, YouTube, DailyMotion, and others. To enhance performance, hardware acceleration mechanisms such as NVENC, Intel QSV, and VAAPI can be utilized.

OBS Studio allows for compositing scenes using a variety of video sources, including streams, webcams, capture cards, images, text, application window content, or full-screen displays. During broadcasts, users can switch among various predefined scene options, such as focusing on screen content or webcam feeds. The software also includes features for audio mixing, VST plugin filtering, volume leveling, and noise suppression.

Key updates and improvements in OBS Studio 31.1 include:

— Fixing 37 previously identified bugs and errors.
— Added support for explicit sync in the Linux screen capture option using PipeWire, reducing latency and eliminating artifacts.
— Implementation of multi-track video support on both Linux and macOS, allowing simultaneous management of multiple audio and video tracks to enhance streaming options, such as broadcasting at various quality levels (e.g., 720p and 480p in addition to 1080p).
— Introduction of network optimizations and TCP Pacing for multi-track video, aimed at reducing packet loss in memory-constrained transit routers.
— Added support for streaming delay in multi-track videos.
— QVBR (Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate) control integrated for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux.
— Initial Windows support for ARM architecture.
— User interface customization settings enhanced with options to modify font size, character spacing, and text padding.
— New buttons have been added to adjust the scaling level of the preview area.
— GPU resources can now be employed for color format, color space, and color range conversions.
— Support for B-frames (bidirectional frames that can reference previous and subsequent frames) added in the AV1 encoder based on the AMF framework.
— Virtual camera support for V4L2 has been introduced on non-Linux systems, such as BSD operating systems.