27.2 is out! (For real this time)

27.2 is finally out (or more accurately, 27.2.1). What a crazy week. It was quite the adventure, involving likely driver bugs causing full system freezes, which we had to work around ourselves. With 27.2.1, those issues are now solved.

Within the next day or so I'm going to make a blog post on exactly what happened with 27.2, why we had to pull the release, and what we had to do to get 27.2.1 out today. In either case, it's now out for real this time! I hope you all enjoy it and are able to make good use of it.

We highly recommend Twitch users updating due to Twitch removing support for their v5 API: the "Connect Account" feature will no longer work for Twitch in versions prior to 27.2. If you need to stay on an older version for whatever reason, you'll need to disconnect your account and manually enter your stream key directly. If you have any issues with your account connection in 27.2, please disconnect and reconnect your account in your stream settings.

Read the list of changes and download it here:
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/27.2.1 

Some particularly notable changes are as follows:

Updated the Windows Chromium version used for browser sources

On Windows, until 27.2, browser sources were stuck on a very old version of Chromium, Chromium 75. This meant that newer browser web features released since 2019 were not available to people utilizing the browser source for their streams or productions. With 27.2, we've updated it to version 95. That's 20 versions ahead, and quite a recent release!

The reason why it's so difficult to update Chromium versions on Windows for the browser source is because we rely on custom Chromium patches both to ensure browser performance, and to ensure that we can run Chromium in hardware accelerated mode, giving full access to WebGL and similar technologies. However, Chromium is tens of millions of lines big, is very complex, and making those sort of patches is very difficult.

Users who utilize browser sources as a key component for their streams or productions will now be able to utilize newer web features to further improve their productions in 27.2.

This was a huge effort by Isaac Richards at NVIDIA for the initial patch, OBS contributors Dillon, Pat, pkv, Matt, and myself, as well as many contributors to the Chromium Embedded Framework project. Without them, this would not have been possible.

Added experimental AV1 encoding support

With 27.2, one of the things we want to do is start pushing the world towards newer encoding technology. In particular, we want to encourage the industry to move towards royalty-free codecs, so we've implemented experimental support for AV1 encoding inside of OBS as a proof-of-concept and get OBS ready for newer codecs.

We've added some software AV1 encoders: the AOM AV1 encoder (which is the reference implementation) as well as the SVT-AV1 encoder. Currently, these software encoders are a proof-of-concept, only work for recording in advanced output mode, and require pretty powerful machines with high core counts to encode with reasonable performance. However, if meet those conditions, they do seem to work surprisingly well. SVT-AV1 in particular encodes very well so far. I'm really looking forward to hardware encoders, because that's were the real fun begins.

The intent and hope of this change is to get OBS ready for newer codecs, and when AV1 hardware encoders become more readily available, we will be able to implement them right away, paving the way to one day enable streaming via AV1 and similar technologies. In either case, although this probably doesn't affect many users, it's an important change for OBS to make to move towards future encoding technology.

More encoder technology other than AV1 will likely be coming out soon, so stay tuned!

Updated all dependencies on Windows

We already talked about how we updated Chromium, but all of our other dependencies were updated on Windows as well. This means x264 for better H.264 software encoding performance, FFmpeg for better decoding performance, and many more.

Added support for AJA video capture and output devices

AJA, a manufacturer that makes many video capture and output devices, submitted custom high performance plugins for use with their devices. That means if you use AJA devices in your streams or productions, it will have first party support within OBS, similar to Decklink.

Thanks to AJA and DDRBoxman for making these plugins and making the effort to get their devices working so well within OBS! This is the sort of collaboration we love to see.

Added the ability to hide OBS from display captures on Windows

This feature allows you to exclude OBS from being capturable when capturing a display on Windows. Particularly useful for people running with a single monitor setup, it makes capturing a monitor with OBS on it a little bit less awkward.

Important caveats:

• When using ShadowPlay in conjunction with OBS, ShadowPlay will not work while this feature is active. Please turn this feature off before attempting to use OBS in conjunction with ShadowPlay.
• Menus and Tooltips will still pop up on capture.
• This feature hides OBS from other programs that capture too, not just OBS.

And much more!

Please check out our list of changes here to see everything that we changed:
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/27.2.1

Thank you to all my fellow contributors for their momentous work, and to all the users who helped debug issues to make this release finally happen! And thank you to all of you who continue to support to this project so we can continue to make updates. Without everyone, this project would not be possible. Thank you all so much!