Vulkan-based game capture is among a raft of new features added to OBS Studio.
OBS Studio is a powerful open source video streaming and screen recording suite for Windows, macOS and Linux
OBS (which stands for ‘Open Broadcaster Software’) is a popular open source streaming and recording program for Windows, macOS and Linux and is built in Qt.
Many popular YouTubers and Twitch.tv streamers make use of the software for recording, live streaming, and sharing gameplay. The app even has a bunch of built-in presets that tailor footage for popular social networks and online services.
OBS Studio 25.0 is the latest stable release — but what’s new?
Well, aside from the aforementioned ability to directly capture Vulkan-based game playback — a big feature for many, though alas limited to Windows — the app also adds the following new features and improvements:
- New capture method added to ‘window capture’ to capture web browsers, browser-based apps, and UWP apps
- Advanced scene collection import
- Media source hotkeys allow control of playback
- Support for the SRT protocol
- Drag and drop URLs
- Ability to lock volume vales for audio sources in the mixer
- Support for cube LUT files
- System tray icon to show when recording is paused
- “Fade to Black” option for quick transitions in studio mode
There’s a bunch of there changes, full details of which can be found in the Github change-log.
OBS 25.0 is free, open source software. Install packages are available download from the OBS Project website and Github for Windows and macOS.
Linux users can grab the source to build by hand (lol) or check their distro’s repos for any pre-built packages.
OBS is also on the Snapcraft store, meaning you to install OBS on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and above you can run this command:
sudo snap install obs-studio
The app is also available via Flathub:
And there’s an official PPA providing build for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and above:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:obsproject/obs-studio
My own experience with OBS, trying to get usable screencast footage to edit for content on the the omg! ubuntu! YouTube channel has thus far met with so-so results.
Regardless of my capture quality settings I always seem to end up with poorly scaled footage that looks fuzzy and pixelated. I hear the situation is very different if you happen to have Nvidia or Intel graphics, though 😉 alas I have AMD! 😆 Any tips or alternatives would be appreciated!