OBS 32.0 Just Quietly Became the Best Free Software in Streaming

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

Top of the list: AV1 hardware encoding now ships out of the box for any GPU that supports it (RTX 40+, Arc, RX 7000+). The new multi-output feature — 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 plug-in marketplace inside the OBS UI itself. Verified plugins can be installed and updated without touching the filesystem. That is the single biggest UX improvement OBS has ever shipped.

For Streamlabs and Lightstream users, the case for paying gets harder. OBS still does not include a built-in alert layer or a service-billing UI, but for the actual encoding-and-broadcast surface, the gap has closed significantly.