OBS Studio's 33.0 major update reaches release candidate status
The streaming and recording app's biggest update in years adds a plugin rework, a two-year CEF upgrade, and NVENC on ARM64, with a hard cutoff for legacy plugins coming in 34.0.
OBS Studio 33.0.0-rc1 is out, and it tagged the build today after a lengthy beta cycle. This first release candidate of the major update is feature-complete and just has to prove itself stable. Streamers, educators, and plugin authors can stress-test it now before the general public upgrades.
A release candidate is essentially a frozen build. It differs from a final release only in that it hasn't yet been tested in the real world. Any critical bugs found during this phase get fixed in later candidates or the stable drop, and if nothing major breaks, the RC becomes the final version. For a tool millions of people rely on for live broadcasting, this is a real go/no-go checkpoint.
OBS's own repo is one of the largest open-source media projects on GitHub, sitting at roughly 77,000 stars and over 10,000 forks. This bump from 32.x to 33.0 counts as a major version, which usually means structural change rather than a fresh pile of minor features. And 33.0 delivers on that expectation.
The backend first, then the stuff you'll feel
The biggest behind-the-scenes change is a swap of CEF, the headless Chromium engine that powers OBS's browser sources and docks. Those are the HTML overlays, alerts, and widget panels modern streamers lean on. 33.0 jumps CEF from version 127 to 150, folding in roughly two years of browser evolution in one update.
The project wants the swap to stay invisible. As maintainer WizardCM wrote in the release notes, "This is a massive update to the underlying framework used for browser sources and docks from the July 2024 release to September 2026. All of this work is on the backend and should be invisible to users. Please be sure to report any new weirdness or problems you run into with browser sources!"
That final line is doing heavy lifting. A swap this size can bring subtle rendering regressions, so the RC phase matters most for anyone running a browser-source-heavy scene. Pushing the engine update to the backend first is a sensible call. The plugin rework below is arguably the change more people will discuss.
Here's that change. 33.0 completely reworks how OBS loads plugins. First-party official plugins now live in a folder called core. Third-party plugins get a new install location and folder structure. Legacy plugins keep loading from their old paths, but only until OBS Studio 34.0, when that backward compatibility ends.
The plugin team put it plainly in PR #13594: "First-party plugins are now in a new folder named core. Third-party plugins have an updated installation location and folder structure. Existing third-party plugins will continue to load from the legacy locations until OBS Studio 34.0."
On Windows the new supported path is C:\ProgramData\obs-studio\plugins\example-plugin\example-plugin.dll. Older locations still load but get flagged "Legacy." The common mis-installation path under Program Files stops working in 34.0. OBS checks the new spot first and skips a plugin if it later shows up in a legacy folder, which prevents duplicate loads.
Keep in mind that existing plugins keep working through the 33.x line, so nothing breaks overnight. This is still the biggest shake-up for the third-party ecosystem since the modern plugin system arrived, and authors have been told to update their installers ahead of a firm 34.0 cutoff.
The RC's own timeline is worth a laugh. OBS ran a methodical beta cycle, and Beta 2, Beta 3, and Beta 4 shipped with literally no application changes from Beta 1. They were CI tweaks, versioning fixes, and packaging cleanups. Then Beta 5 and Beta 6 suddenly reintroduced real bug fixes before the RC landed. For a couple of weeks it looked like the project compressed its entire stabilization window into a single sprint.
Community interest stayed steady but modest. Beta 5 and Beta 6 each drew 29 GitHub reactions, versus the 87 that the shipped 32.0 release pulled in.
Deprecations, a few smaller wins, and where to grab it
There are also some workflow fixes here. Source snapping now catches from further away, aligns along the whole axis, and stops snapping to hidden sources. Number spinboxes no longer block typing or cut values off mid-entry, and pressing Enter updates the number without closing the window. And the tersest entry of the bunch: maintainer RytoEX enabled NVIDIA NVENC hardware encoding on ARM64 Windows builds, letting ARM machines with NVIDIA GPUs use efficient hardware video encoding.
33.0 also cuts a pile of older support. Ubuntu 24.04 is out (packages now target 26.04), FFmpeg 6.x and 7.x are gone, Qt 6.4 through 6.9 is dropped, older Visual Studio and Windows SDK builds are no longer tested, and MbedTLS 4 and up is out. For most people installing from the official installer, none of this requires action. Only self-builders and plugin developers need to migrate. Ubuntu 24.04 is the one removal that could bite end users, since the .deb packages now point at 26.04.
Builds are rolling out across Windows (x64 and ARM64), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Linux (Ubuntu 26.04). Every build ships with SHA-256 checksums. Given how deeply OBS plugs into live broadcasts, verify those hashes instead of blindly installing, and there are PDB symbol archives too for anyone chasing crashes.
Head here for the release: OBS Studio 33.0.0-rc1 on GitHub.
Expect more candidates down the line. Following the pattern set by earlier major releases, OBS may ship rc2 or rc3 to patch anything rc1 uncovers before the stable 33.0 drops, which has no date yet. There's also a dedicated Knowledge Base guide on the legacy plugin locations for the ecosystem to work through as it migrates.
