NEW important features of OBS Studio V25 Know About it
OBS Studio version 25 is officially out.
It’s been about six months since they released version 24, so that means six months of new features, new functionality, and performance improvements.
we’ll be rattling through the 25 most new important features of OBS version 25. Some of these are big new changes, and some of them are little improvements, but I wanted to get through absolutely everything so that you could make the most of OBS version 25 for your live streams.
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Okay, so the first thing you need to do is make sure you’re re-running on OBS version 25. So go up to the Help menu, click Check For Updates and make sure you’re fully updated.
Sometimes there’s a couple of hotfixes straight after release, fixing some bugs that came with version 25. So make sure you’re the latest version.
support for Vulkan Game Capture
so the first thing we’re covering is the added support for Vulkan Game Capture. This means that you can now use OBS to capture games that use the Vulkan graphics rendering API.
Things like Doom Eternal, Rainbow Six Siege, No Man’s Sky, Dota 2, as well as so many upcoming titles. So what is Vulkan, you might be wondering? Effectively, it’s just a graphic rendering API.
The same as DirectX. But DirectX has been built by Microsoft, and only works on Windows machines. So game developers nowadays, because they want to be building for more than just the Windows platform, they’re going to be using things like Vulkan.
because API is available across Windows, Mac OS X, Android, Linux, consoles as well. So it’s much easier for them to port their games to different platforms.
Effectively, what this means for you is it’s just more support for games to be captured through the game capture method in OBS. Next, we have some improvements to the window capture options; they now allow capturing of browsers.
Browser-based windows and Microsoft Store, or UWP programs. Effectively, what this means is it now lets you capture things using window capture, that you weren’t able to do before?
The downside of this new method is that it can cause a little bit of cursor lag, and it will give you a highlighted border around the captured window, but the border itself won’t be captured, that’s just for you as the streamer to see.
How do I import scenes into OBS?
Next, we have a highly requested feature, which is to allow you to import scenes from different streaming programs.
So if you’ve ever used OSB Classic, XSplit, Streamlabs OBS, or maybe OBS on a different platform like OS X, you can now import your scenes using the menu bar, Scene Collection, and then Import, and then you can bring those scene collections that you’ve designed in other programs into OBS Studio.
I did realize that you could do now because you could technically use Streamlabs OBS and use their massive suite of free scene collections that they have available. Install them in StreamlabsOBS and then import them across to OBS Studio.
So I guess that’s a little tip for all of you that are starting streaming, and you want to make use of some of StreamlabsOBS themes and widgets.
Next, we can drag and drop browser sources straight into OBS. This effectively means you can drag and drop browser sources, and they will retain certain parameters that you need for that browser source in your streaming software.
Hopefully, we’ll get alert services like Streamlabs and StreamElements as well as some of the stream design companies like Nerd or Die, VBI, or OWN3D.tv, adding these buttons to their website, so we can drag and drop them into OBS, and they’ll already have all of the correct parameters.
OBS has added some source icons to make things much easier to see at a glance. These are just little icons next to your sources to help you differentiate which source is.
If you combine these icons with the grouping of sources and the coloring of sources, it’s going to make the organization for you and your streaming software much easier.
But if you would prefer to disable these, you go up to the View menu, and you can disable the icons there. OBShave added a Scene Grid mode from sources to scenes, all you have to do is right-click in the Scenes box, choose Grid Mode, and see it goes from sort of a list to a more button style interface.
For those of you that use Studio Mode in OBS, you can now have a T-bar, or a transition bar, which allows you to control the transition between your two different scenes. However, note that this doesn’t work with any stingers or basic cuts; it only works with things like Fade or Luma Wipes.
For those of you who have signed in to your Twitch account through OBS, they have added an option to enable or disable some of the chat extensions that you can use in the Twitch chat panels.
So those are the BetterTwitch TV and the FrankerFaceZ chat extensions, so you can use all of those custom emotes, and you can see them in the chat panel.
You can now quickly rename your sources, your filters, and your effects by highlighting it and pressing the F2 key. Talking of filters, they’ve also added the ability to add the CUBE LUT filter type in your webcam properties or any video source.
Previously, you had to use PNG files, but they’ve added support for the more commonly used. CUBE LUT files as well. This should be particularly useful for those of you that do some video editing, and maybe you have a lot filter that you use in your video editing software.
You can now match exactly in OBS as well. In the Mixer, they have added the option to lock your volume, so you don’t accidentally change things on the fly. All you have to do is right-click and choose to lock the volume.
They’ve also added an option to use percentages rather than decibel in the advanced Audio Properties, just by right-clicking the items in the window.
So, if you prefer to use a percentage rather than a decibel value, you can customize it. While we’re on audio, they’ve also added an option to show all the audio sources, to Advanced Audio Settings.
They’ve added a button to save the current replay buffer for those that are using replay buffer in OBS. If you make use of having the OBS projection on a separate screen, you can change the projection type by right-clicking on the Context menu.
For those of you that have got the Logitech StreamCam, Logitech’s new webcam, I did a video review of that; I’ll link it up in the top card; they have added support for that kind of devices that automatically rotate the camera output when you rotate the camera.
You can now copy and paste multiple selected sources into new scenes if you’d like to save you a bit of time when you assemble a new scene. A small quality of life improvement that they’ve done is that now in the system tray icon, it will show when you have a recording paused.
If you are making use of scrolling text or the Scroll filtering any of your sources, they’ve added an option to be able to toggle looping on that source. Another small quality of life improvement that they’ve made is the default source sizes now when you add a source to a scene; they’ve improved that. When you added a text source, it was usually super tiny up in the top corner, and they’ve improved the default sizes now.
They’ve also added a new transition to the quick transitions in Studio mode, which is Fade to Black. If like me, you use OBS Studio to record gameplay or tutorials or things like that, they’ve added some string specifiers to the filename formatting the Advanced Settings.
How do I fix resolution in OBS?
So you can now specify certain settings like resolution and FPS to your recording filenames. Another improvement for people that use OBS for recording is that they have now added a hotkey to reset the Stats window, or the stats panel while you are recording.
In the Video Settings tab, they have also added an aspect ratio to make sure that your canvas and output resolutions are at the right aspect ratio. Hopefully, this should solve a lot of people streaming with black bars because they’ve entered the wrong resolution.
Lastly, they have removed the older and now depreciated NVENC encoder from the advanced output mode to prevent some confusion. So previously you had both NVENC New and NVENC, which was the old one, now you’ll only see NVENC New, which eventually they’re going to rename back to NVENC, but you can still use the old NVENC if you want to do something like rescaling, it automatically falls back to the old implementation.
But like I said in my NVENC article, that I recommended using the new implementation because it’s a lot more efficient and should give you much better performance. A quick call to action, I did a full interview with the guy who started this whole OBS studio thing, the main guy behind it, Jim.