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

1. Close all instances of OBS Studio and ensure that they are actually closed with Task Manager (look for obs##.exe).
2. Locate the installation directory of OBS Studio, which by default is C:\Program Files\obs-studio, and navigate into the bin directory, then the 64bit directory.
3. Find the matching version of FFmpeg by looking at the DLL files:
   • avcodec-58.dll is FFmpeg 4.4 and 4.3.
   • avcodec-59.dll is FFmpeg 4.5, 5.0, 5.1 so far.
4. Download matching shared binaries from gyan.dev or BtbN.
5. Extract and replace the DLL binaries in the directory you opened in step 2.
6. Launch OBS Studio. If you did everything right, FFmpeg should now be updated.

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.