New OBS feature lets you stream better video for less bandwidth

If you’ve ever used OBS to record footage or streamed it to Twitch, chances are you’re using H.264, the video codec used for most of the last 20 years. H.264 is everywhere. If you’re streaming shows from Netflix or another service, H.264 is probably the same. This is basically his JPEG of the video. Much more efficient and higher quality compression methods are now available, but it’s hard to get rid of a very entrenched format. But streaming video is starting to do just that, using an open source codec called AV1. Netflix so far get your hands on it years and now OBS Studio version 29.0 We jumped on the native support for AV1 encoding on AMD and Intel GPUs.

This is an exciting step, but not something we all can take advantage of right away.There are two basic types of video encoding. Software (fully CPU dependent and CPU intensive) and hardware that uses GPUs to speed up the encoding process. Hardware encoding is much faster and more efficient, never hitting 100% CPU utilization. This is how most of us now record footage or stream it to platforms like Twitch. But usually the quality is also lower.