OBS 32.0 Quietly Becomes the Best Free Streaming Software

OBS 32.0 dropped without major fanfare last week — and contains the biggest feature set the project has shipped in three years.

AV1 hardware encoding now ships out of the box for any GPU that supports it. Multi-output — long the headline feature of paid alternatives — is now built in, supporting up to four simultaneous destinations with independent encoder settings per output.

The other consequential change is the new in-UI plug-in marketplace. Verified plugins install and update without filesystem access. That single addition is the biggest UX improvement OBS has ever shipped.