Guide OBS Studio FFmpeg Upgrade

How to upgrade OBS Studio's FFmpeg

In order to support some of its features, OBS Studio opted to use an older FFmpeg version with some patches, built without many of the FFmpeg features. While this does mean a smaller installation size, it also means you are missing out on new features, fixes and improvements that come with newer versions and full builds of FFmpeg. But that doesn't restrict you from modifying your own OBS Studio towards the future!

Windows

FFmpeg 4.4

0. Ensure OBS Studio has been closed first.
1. Locate where OBS Studio is installed, which by default is C:\Program Files\obs-studio.
2. In the OBS Studio installation directory, now enter bin and then 64bit.
3. Verify that avcodec-58.dll exists in this directory, if so you can continue with step 4.
4. Download FFmpeg version 4.4 shared GPLv3 from gyan.dev or BtbN.
5. From the archive, only extract .dll files into the directory you opened in step 2, and replace all matching files.
6. Now launch OBS Studio and enjoy the updated FFmpeg with all the "optional" components and features!

Linux

While Linux is usually the complicated one, in this case its the easiest. OBS Studio links against the system-wide FFmpeg binaries, so simply update those to the latest version. Alternatively you can build FFmpeg with all its dependencies yourself and even enjoy some additional features that can't be distributed normally.