OBS Studio 26.1 Release Candidate

Disclaimer: This is a test build, not a full release. This build may contain bugs or broken functionality. For production usage, we still recommend using the latest stable build of OBS. If you are willing to test this build, please let us know if you run into any issues.

We have another Release Candidate build available for testing, OBS Studio 26.1! This is a minor release, but still has a number of important features and fixes:

• Native virtual camera for macOS and Linux
  • Virtual camera output became available on Windows in OBS Studio 26.0, and now that functionality is available on macOS and Linux!
  • On Mac, the first time you click the "Start Virtual Camera" button, OBS will prompt you for an Admin login so it can install the Virtual Camera plugin components on your system. This will only happen the first time you activate the virtual camera, and this must be done before OBS is selectable as a camera by other applications on your system.
    • NOTE: If you previously installed the external "obs-mac-virtualcam" plugin, you may need to delete the old plugin first by deleting /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/obs-mac-virtualcam.plugin
  • On Linux, the virtual camera requires that you have v4l2loopback-dkms installed. Check your package manager for instructions on how to do this.
• Better support for Twitch VOD-only audio tracks
  • Twitch recently released a feature that allows you to stream two different audio feeds at the same time -- one that gets streamed live, and one that gets saved to the stream of your VOD, in case you wish for your saved VOD audio to be different from your livestreamed audio.
  • OBS Studio 26.0 supported this feature, but only through the use of the Twitch Soundtrack plugin, and it would automatically assign the contents of your "Track 6" in OBS to the VOD output.
  • Now, when you have Twitch selected as your streaming service, a new "Twitch VOD Track" option is added to the Streaming tab under Output settings in Advanced mode. This setting lets you enable the VOD-only audio track feature, and select which audio track to use for it.
  • You can control which audio sources go to which tracks from the Advanced Audio Properties window.
• Updated several underlying dependencies including Qt, ffmpeg, and x264. This should fix a wide variety of small bugs and odd behavior. In particular, the upgrade to Qt should resolve a number of DPI scaling issues and accessibility issues.

Download and full patch notes for OBS Studio 26.1 Release Candidate 2:

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0-rc2

Ubuntu users: You can try the unstable branch with the following commands:
And if you want to remove it:


Please give the release a try and let us know here or in the #beta-testing channel on Discord if you have any issues. Thanks for your help!

Posted about it in the Discord but will post it here as well just in case.

The Twitch VOD-Only Audio Track seems to only work in Simple mode. After doing a test with Simple mode, the VOD uses Track 2 like it should. After changing to Advanced mode, and enabling the VOD-Only Track option with Track 2 (just to have parity between both modes), the VOD on Twitch still uses the default track (which is 1). The only settings changed between the two tests is changing from Simple mode to Advanced mode and enabling the VOD-Only Track setting.

Log is attached where I did two tests, first test is in Advanced mode (where VOD ended up using track 1) and second test is in Simple mode (where VOD used track 2)

Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/26.1.0-rc2

OBS Studio 26.1 has been released. Thank you for all your testing!