OBS Studio 33.0.0 shipped on 23 October. On the outside it is the same capture studio. Inside it is a new frame for browser sources and a plugin layout that is easy to miss until a scene falls apart after the upgrade.
What changed for the user
The CEF engine for browser sources and docks moved from the July 2024 branch (127/6533) to September 2026 (150/7871). The team says it should be invisible to the viewer and asks for bugs if a source suddenly “walks”. Source snapping in the preview now runs the full axis, hidden objects no longer attract, and there is an indicator. Spinboxes stop eating input: the number applies on Enter, the window does not close itself, Shift plus an arrow steps larger.
NVENC is on for Windows Arm64. Fresh NVIDIA Broadcast SDKs landed for audio and video. Source monitoring got hotkeys. Safe Mode no longer starts the WebSocket server. Groups in Studio Mode are fixed: a move inside a group should not glitch in Program and should not go live at once.
Plugins and what was cut
First-party plugins moved into a core folder. Third-party installs follow a new layout, but old paths still load until OBS 34.0. Ubuntu 24.04 is gone; the build is for 26.04. For developers the bar rose to Visual Studio 2026, and support for FFmpeg 6.x/7.x and Qt 6.4–6.9 was dropped.
How to look at it
Upgrade for CEF and the fixes if browser widgets were already flaky on 32. Wait if the scene hangs on a pile of third-party plugins: they still live until 34, but the path has already changed. Watch the module-load log after the first launch, not the number in the window title.
