OBS can now stream high-quality AV1 video to YouTube

High-quality video won't make or break a livestream, but it certainly helps — and now it's considerably easier to provide. OBS Studio 29.1 is now available with support for AV1 stream encoding when broadcasting to YouTube. While YouTube treats the feature as a beta, it enables higher-quality footage than H.264 at similar bitrates, and higher resolutions if you have the headroom. As creator EposVox demonstrates, you can effectively eliminate visual artifacts with 1080p 60FPS video or jump to 4K at the same frame rate without consuming significantly more bandwidth than a 1080p H.264 feed.