The first OBS Studio 33 beta arrived on September 25, with the final release expected in October.

NVIDIA changes

• Support for the latest NVIDIA Broadcast SDKs, which power the audio and video effects filters: noise removal, room echo removal, background removal, and so on
• NVENC on AArch64, so ARM64 Linux machines with NVIDIA GPUs get hardware encoding

Linux-specific changes

PipeWire screen capture improvements. On Wayland, OBS captures screens and windows through the XDG desktop portal and a PipeWire stream, because Wayland does not let apps read other apps’ windows directly. Refinements here help reliability across compositors. Our PipeWire vs PulseAudio guide covers how PipeWire ended up handling video as well as audio.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is no longer supported by the official OBS packages. OBS moves quickly on its dependencies, and 24.04’s are now too old. If you are on 24.04, the options are the Flathub build, which carries its own runtime, or upgrading to 26.04 LTS, which our guide to updating Linux safely covers.

Everything else

• A complete overhaul of plugin loading
• Better full-screen game detection
• Improved source snapping visuals and numeric spinbox behaviour
• OBS now checks for missing encoders when loading a profile, instead of failing when you press record
• Studio Mode group fixes and AMF B-frame offset fixes
• An updated framework for browser sources and docks
• Better file splitting for Hybrid MP4 and MOV recordings

Should you try it?

It is a beta, and OBS is usually doing something that matters when it runs. If you stream or record for work, wait for the October release. If you want to test, the Flathub beta remote keeps it separate from your stable install:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta com.obsproject.Studio