Guide OBS Studio FFmpeg Upgrade

Manually upgrading FFmpeg in OBS Studio

This guide is for OBS Studio 27.0.x to 27.1.x, which ships with a very old (patched) version of FFmpeg. While this allows the application to work without affecting existing users, it is just a wall power users want to remove. So let's do just that, and get OBS Studio 27 up to date with the latest FFmpeg changes.

⚠ Warning! ⚠

This process is destructive and will void all warranty and support promises of OBS Studio, all plugins, and all related software. You are entirely on your own and will be ignored by support if you choose to go down this path. It is only necessary to access some functionality that OBS Studio does not build into FFmpeg by default.

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.