How to Download and Install OBS Studio (2026 Guide)

Installing OBS Studio is the only part of using it where you can genuinely damage your machine, and it is the part almost every guide covers in two sentences. That is backwards.

OBS is free and open source. Anyone is allowed to redistribute it, so search results and app aggregator sites are full of repackaged installers that bundle a "driver updater," a browser extension, or worse alongside the real software. The application itself is completely safe. The delivery route is where people get caught.

This page covers acquisition and installation only: where the real files live, what each platform's installer actually does, the permissions OBS needs before it can capture anything, and what to do when the install itself fails. Once it is running, your first session in OBS picks up from there.

Where to Download OBS Studio

There are exactly two sources worth using, and they serve the same binaries:

• obsproject.com — the project's own site. The three platform buttons on the homepage point at the current stable release.
• github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases — the release page the site downloads from. Worth bookmarking instead, because it shows every build for a release (full installer, portable ZIP, per-architecture macOS packages) plus the changelog, and because a GitHub URL is much harder to imitate convincingly.

How to Tell a Repackaged Installer

You do not need to inspect anything technical. Four signals catch almost all of them:

• A tiny file. The real Windows installer is a large file — well over a hundred megabytes, because it ships the whole application. A 2 MB "OBS Studio Setup" is a downloader stub that fetches whatever its author wants.
• A publisher name that is not the OBS Project. On Windows, the UAC prompt names the signer before anything runs. Read it. Cancel if it says anything else.
• Any screen offering you extras. The genuine OBS installer offers you a destination folder and nothing else. No toolbars, no antivirus trials, no "recommended" bundles.
• A download that arrives as a ZIP containing an EXE named after a version you did not pick. Legitimate portable builds are ZIPs, but they contain a full folder structure, not a lone executable.

If a sponsored search result took you there, go back and reach the site by typing the address.

Check These Requirements First

The requirement that actually bites is not on this table: encoding is GPU work. A machine that meets the minimum will run OBS, but if it has no hardware encoder it will fall back to CPU encoding and your recordings will stutter under any real load. That is a configuration problem rather than an install problem, and OBS best settings for screen recording covers what to do about it.

Installing on Windows

Full Installer or Portable?

The download page offers both, and the choice is not cosmetic.

The full installer writes to C:\Program Files\obs-studio, registers the virtual camera driver, and stores your settings in your user profile at %APPDATA%\obs-studio. This is what you want unless you have a specific reason not to.

The portable ZIP runs entirely from the folder you extract it into, settings included. Use it when you cannot install software (a locked-down work machine), when you want OBS on a USB drive, or when you want a second completely isolated configuration alongside your main one. The trade-off: the virtual camera will not be available, because that requires a registered driver.

To convert a normal install into a portable one, drop an empty file named portable_mode.txt next to obs64.exe. OBS then reads and writes its config beside itself rather than in your profile.

Running the Installer

1. Double-click the downloaded .exe. Read the publisher on the UAC prompt before approving it.
2. Accept the GPL licence terms.
3. Leave the destination as the default. Specifically, do not install into a OneDrive-synced folder — sync clients lock files mid-write and OBS will behave strangely for reasons that look nothing like a sync problem.
4. Install, then leave "Launch OBS Studio" ticked.

Deploying across a fleet? The installer accepts /S for a silent install.

If Windows Blocks the Download

SmartScreen sometimes flags installers it has not seen often enough yet, which includes new OBS releases in their first days. That warning is about reputation, not about a detected threat. What the SmartScreen warning actually means walks through verifying a download before you override it.

The Missing DLL Error

If OBS installs cleanly and then refuses to start with a message about MSVCP140.dll or VCRUNTIME140_1.dll being missing, the Visual C++ Redistributable is absent or damaged. Install the current x64 Visual C++ Redistributable from Microsoft, reboot, and try again. This is by far the most common "OBS won't open on Windows" cause and it has nothing to do with OBS itself.

Installing on macOS

Pick the Right Build

macOS downloads are split by architecture. Apple menu → About This Mac tells you which you have: an Apple silicon chip (M-series) or an Intel processor. Take the matching build.

Running the Intel build under Rosetta on an Apple silicon Mac mostly works, and then quietly costs you performance and breaks any plugin compiled for the other architecture. It is worth getting right at install time rather than debugging later.

Install It Properly

1. Open the .dmg. A window appears with the OBS icon and an Applications shortcut.
2. Drag the icon into Applications. Do not double-click and run it from the mounted disk image — it will appear to work, and then lose settings and fail to update, because the image is read-only and gets unmounted.
3. Eject the disk image and launch OBS from Applications.
4. On first launch, macOS asks whether you are sure you want to open an app downloaded from the internet. Confirm.

The Permissions Step People Skip

This is the single biggest difference between installing OBS on Windows and on a Mac, and skipping it produces a symptom that looks like a broken install: OBS opens, everything appears normal, and your Display Capture is a black rectangle.

macOS gates capture behind explicit per-app permissions. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and grant OBS:

• Screen & System Audio Recording — required. Without it, every capture source is black.
• Microphone — required for any mic input.
• Camera — only if you will use a webcam.
• Accessibility — only if you want global hotkeys to work while OBS is in the background.

macOS requires OBS to fully quit and relaunch after granting Screen Recording. If you granted it and the preview is still black, you did not actually restart the app. OBS black screen on a MacBook covers the cases where permissions are granted and it is still black.

One more macOS limitation to know before you plan a recording: macOS does not route system audio to applications on its own. OBS can record your microphone out of the box; capturing the sound your Mac is playing needs an extra step, covered in how to record system audio in OBS on Mac.

Installing on Linux

Linux is the platform where how you install OBS changes what it can do.

• Distribution packages and the official PPA (Ubuntu and derivatives) give you a normally installed application. Plugins go where plugins normally go, and hardware acceleration works the way your system is already configured.
• Flatpak is the most reliable way to get a current OBS on an older distribution, and it runs sandboxed. That sandbox is the catch: OBS reaches your screen through desktop portals rather than directly, and third-party plugins have to be installed into the Flatpak rather than into your system. If you follow a plugin guide written for a normal install, nothing will load.
• Snap works and sits somewhere between the two, with the same class of sandbox caveats.

Under Wayland, capture goes through the portal system and you will get a picker dialog the first time each source grabs a screen or window — that prompt is the compositor, not OBS misbehaving.

Confirm the Install Actually Worked

Four checks, thirty seconds:

1. OBS opens and stays open.
2. Help → About shows the version you downloaded.
3. Add a Display Capture source and the preview shows your screen, not black.
4. Speak — the Mic bar in the Audio Mixer moves.

If all four pass, the install is sound and anything that goes wrong from here is configuration.

When the Install Fails

Reinstalling Without Repeating the Problem

Uninstalling OBS does not remove your settings. Scenes, profiles and encoder configuration live in your user data — %APPDATA%\obs-studio on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio on macOS. That is deliberate and usually helpful, but it means a reinstall carries a broken configuration straight back in, which is why "I already reinstalled it" so often changes nothing.

If you are reinstalling to fix a problem:

1. Export what you want to keep first — Scene Collection → Export and Profile → Export in the menu bar.
2. Uninstall.
3. Rename the user data folder above rather than deleting it, so you can put it back if the reinstall was not the answer.
4. Install fresh, verify with the four checks above, then import only the scene collection — not the profile, since encoder settings are the usual culprit.

What Happens Next

You now have a working install and no configuration. Two useful directions from here:

• If you have never opened OBS before, how to use OBS for the first time explains what every panel does and walks you through one complete recording.
• If you know your way around and just want it configured for recording rather than streaming, go straight to how to set up OBS for screen recording.

If Installation Was Already More Than You Wanted

Everything above exists because OBS is a broadcast tool that trusts you to make its decisions — including which build to download and which permissions to wire up. That trust is the right call for a live production rig and a strange amount of work if you only wanted to record your screen.

Cubix Capture has one signed installer per platform, no architecture choice to get wrong, and a first-run flow that requests the permissions it needs instead of leaving you to find them. It records on Windows and macOS, and applies zoom and cursor smoothing while capturing rather than leaving you a raw file to edit. The free Starter plan is enough to see the output on your own screen before deciding anything.

Keep Reading

• How to Use OBS for the First Time for what to do the moment it opens.
• How to Set Up OBS for Screen Recording to configure it for recording rather than streaming.
• OBS Studio Setup Guide: Everything You Need to Know for the full map of every setup area.
• OBS Keeps Crashing: How to Fix It if it installs but will not stay open.