New OBS feature lets you stream better video for less bandwidth

If you ever use OBS to record footage or stream to Twitch, odds are you’re using H.264, a video codec that’s been in use for most of the last two decades. H.264 is everywhere. If you’re streaming a show from Netflix or another service, it’s probably H.264, too. It’s basically the JPEG of video: there are now far more efficient and better quality compression methods available, but it’s hard to dislodge a format that’s so entrenched. Streaming video is starting to do just that, though, with an open source codec called AV1. Netflix has been dabbling with it for a couple years, and now OBS Studio version 29.0 has jumped in with native support for AV1 encoding on AMD and Intel GPUs.

It’s an exciting step, though not one that we’re all going to be able to take advantage of right away. There are two basic types of video encoding: software (which fully relies on your CPU, and is very CPU intensive) and hardware, which uses your GPU to accelerate the encoding process. Hardware encoding is way faster and more efficient and won’t spike your CPU to 100% usage, and is how most of us record footage or stream to platforms like Twitch today. But it’s also typically lower quality.