The best OBS settings for recording in 2026

OBS has two output modes. Simple mode picks most settings for you; Advanced mode lets you set the recording on its own, apart from the stream. For the best OBS recording settings, use Advanced:

1. Open Settings, Output and set Output Mode to Advanced. Go to the Recording tab and leave Type on Standard.
2. Set Recording Path to a drive with plenty of free space, and Recording Format to Hybrid MP4 (Hybrid MOV on a Mac).
3. Tick the Audio Track boxes for each track you've set up (more on tracks below).
4. Set Video Encoder to your hardware encoder, its Rate Control to a quality mode (CQP, ICQ or CRF) and the value to 18 to 20.
5. Open Settings, Video. Set the Base (Canvas) and Output (Scaled) Resolution to the same size, and Common FPS Values to 60 for games or 30 for talking.

In Simple mode, the same choices come down to Recording Quality. “High Quality, Medium File Size” and “Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size” are both quality-based: at 1080p, OBS sets them to 23 and 16 on the encoder's scale (50 and 70 for Apple VT, whose scale runs the other way). Avoid “Lossless” for anything long: OBS warns it can take upward of 7 GB a minute.

Where to start, by what you're recording:

These are starting points: record a test minute, then move the number down for a sharper picture or up for a smaller file.

The format decides what happens when something goes wrong. A regular MP4 or MOV is only finished when the recording stops, and OBS warns that a recording saved to MP4 or MOV “will be unrecoverable” if it can't be finished, after a crash or a power cut. So OBS doesn't recommend recording to plain MP4.

• Hybrid MP4 (Hybrid MOV on a Mac) is written in fragments while you record and turned into a normal MP4 when you stop, so OBS says it “remains recoverable” after a crash, and it opens in editors like any MP4. Hybrid MP4 arrived in OBS 30.2 and Hybrid MOV in 32.0 (September 2025), the release that took both out of beta and made them the default for new profiles. A profile made before that may still be set to MKV, so check.
• MKV survives a crash too and holds every codec OBS can record, but OBS's own guide calls its support in editing software poor. Convert it before you edit.
• Fragmented MP4 and MOV are crash-safe as well, but OBS notes some editors need them remuxed when the sound is lossless or uncompressed.

Converting MKV to MP4 is a remux: the picture and sound are copied into a new file, not re-encoded, so nothing is lost and it's quick. In OBS, choose File, Remux Recordings, pick the recording with the “…” button and click Remux. To have it done every time, tick Automatically remux to mp4 in Settings, Advanced: OBS remuxes each recording as soon as it stops. For MKV recordings from an older setup, or MOV and WebM files, the free MP4 converter makes MP4s in your browser, several at once, without uploading, and keeps every audio track. Picture and sound MP4 already holds (H.264 or HEVC, AAC or MP3) are copied as they are. Other sound, like the PCM a Hybrid MOV can hold, is re-encoded to AAC while the picture is copied. Other video the browser can read, like AV1, is re-encoded to H.264, up to 60 minutes at a time, so for a long AV1 recording OBS's own remux is the better route.

OBS's hardware encoding guide is plain about it: hardware encoders, “as opposed to the included x264 software encoder, are generally recommended for best performance.” They use a dedicated part of the graphics chip, leaving your processor for the game. Pick the one that matches your hardware:

• NVIDIA NVENC: a GeForce 750 Ti or 900-series card or newer, with the best results from Turing (6th-generation NVENC) and later. Since OBS 32.2, NVENC needs NVIDIA driver 570 or newer, so update your driver if NVENC misbehaves.
• AMD: on Windows and Linux, on the cards AMD's encoder supports.
• Intel QSV (Quick Sync): on Intel processors with built-in graphics. If you have an NVIDIA or AMD card, OBS recommends using its encoder instead.
• Apple VT: on Apple Silicon, it records H.264, HEVC and ProRes. On an Intel Mac, it records H.264 only, set up in Advanced output mode.
• x264: the software encoder, for when there's no hardware encoder or your processor has room to spare.

Then the codec. H.264 plays and edits everywhere. HEVC looks better at the same file size and is available only through the hardware encoders. AV1 is smaller still but needs a recent card (OBS names AMD's RX 7000, NVIDIA's RTX 40-series and Intel Arc), and OBS rates its support in editors as not yet good. For footage you'll edit, H.264 or HEVC is the safe choice. OBS's baseline settings for each encoder:

OBS's guide also sets the Profile to High and the Keyframe Interval to 2 seconds for every encoder.

Rate control decides how much data each second gets. The bitrate modes (CBR and VBR) aim at a number of kilobits a second: right for streaming, where viewers' connections set the limit, and wrong for recording, where a fixed bitrate starves fast scenes and wastes space on still ones. For recording, use a mode that holds the quality and lets the file size follow:

• CQP (Constant QP): every frame is compressed at the level you set. NVENC, AMD and Intel offer it; AMD labels the number CQ Level.
• CRF (Constant Rate Factor): x264's quality mode, and the name Apple VT's quality mode uses in OBS.
• CQ, in Variable Bitrate with Target Quality: an NVENC mode added in OBS 31.0. OBS describes it as working like CQP with the option of a maximum bitrate, so you can cap the file size.
• ICQ: Intel's quality mode, set with ICQ Quality.

The numbers mean the same thing everywhere: the scale runs to 51 for H.264 and HEVC (to 63 for AV1 in OBS), and lower means higher quality and larger files. OBS's guide gives 16 to 23 for NVENC, AMD, Intel and x264. 23 is what Simple mode's High Quality preset uses at 1080p, and 16 its Indistinguishable preset. 18 to 20 keeps detail for editing and cropping without huge files. Apple VT runs the other way: its Quality slider goes from 0 to 100 and higher is better.

With a quality mode, the file size depends on what's on screen: a still desktop makes a small file, fast gameplay a big one. Check a test minute's size and multiply by how long you'll record.

In Settings, Video, the Base (Canvas) Resolution is the space your sources sit in, usually your monitor's or your game's resolution. The Output (Scaled) Resolution is what OBS saves. For recording, keep the two the same, so no detail is thrown away. If you stream at a lower resolution, Advanced mode's Recording tab can rescale the recording apart from the stream.

Frame rate: OBS's guide says to set Common FPS Values to the output you want, 30 or 60. Record games at 60, so fast motion stays smooth. Record people talking at 30, or at your camera's own rate: a 30 fps webcam in a 60 fps recording just shows each frame twice, which adds nothing. Tutorials are fine at 30 unless they're full of scrolling.

Recording for vertical clips? A full-height 9:16 frame cut from a 1920 × 1080 recording is only 608 pixels wide, so it's scaled up to fill a 1080 × 1920 clip. From 2560 × 1440 it's 810 wide, and from 3840 × 2160, 1,215, more than the clip needs. If your computer keeps up, a 1440p canvas gives sharper vertical crops. Clyper keeps your recording's frame rate, up to 60 fps.

To record a vertical version of the same scenes as you go, plugins such as Aitum Vertical add a second, vertical canvas to OBS with its own recording settings and path. It's made by Aitum, not by OBS.

OBS can record up to 6 audio tracks in one file. With your mic, the game and a voice chat on separate tracks, you can turn the game down under your voice or cut a cough without touching the rest. To set it up:

1. Open Advanced Audio Properties: the gear icon in the Audio Mixer dock, or the Edit menu.
2. In the Tracks columns, tick the tracks each source goes to. Put every source on track 1, then each on a track of its own: the mic on 2, the game on 3, and so on.
3. In Settings, Output, Recording, tick the tracks to record. In Simple mode, “Same as stream” records a single track, so choose another Recording Quality to get the boxes.

Keep track 1 as the full mix. OBS points out that standard video players play only one audio track at a time, and an app you upload to may use only one too: Clyper, for one, transcribes and cuts from a file's first audio track.

Streaming to Twitch? Its Twitch VOD Track option sends track 2 to the VOD, so you can leave music out of the replay while viewers still hear it live. If you use it, keep track 2 for that, and start your editing tracks at 3. For a podcast, give every mic its own track: how to start a video podcast covers the rest of the setup.

A local recording is the best copy of a stream you'll have. Twitch deletes past broadcasts after 7 to 60 days (see how to download Twitch VODs), and keeps them at the stream's quality. To record every stream without thinking about it, tick Automatically record when streaming in Settings, General, and Keep recording when stream stops if you want the recording to run on.

Then decide whether the recording shares the stream's encoder:

• Same as stream (in Advanced mode, “Use stream encoder”) costs nothing extra, because the recording is the stream's own video. But it's only as good as the stream, at a bitrate set for viewers' connections (OBS's default is 6,000 kbps). In Simple mode it also records a single audio track, and OBS notes it can't be paused.
• Its own encoder at a quality setting runs a second encode, and gives you a much better file to cut from. On a hardware encoder that's usually fine; OBS warns that doing it with the x264 software encoder takes extra processor time while you stream.

For a stream you'll clip, the second option is worth it: cropping and enlarging for a phone shows a soft picture at its worst. Picking the moments is covered in how to clip streams.

OBS saves to the Recording Path in Settings, Output. Unless you've changed it, that's your Videos folder on Windows, Movies on a Mac and your home folder on Linux. File, Show Recordings opens it, and the status bar says “Recording saved to” with the file's path each time you stop. Files are named by date and time; change the pattern under Filename Formatting in Settings, Advanced.

In Advanced mode, Automatic File Splitting on the Recording tab starts a new file by time (in minutes) or by size (in MB), so long sessions stay in files you can upload and edit.

A long recording is where clips come from: an hour of gameplay or a two-hour podcast has a handful of moments worth posting on TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Finding them by hand means watching it all again, then cropping and captioning each. Clyper does that part. Upload the recording straight from OBS (MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, up to 4 GB and 4 hours long), and it reads the transcript, picks the best moments, cuts each on whole sentences, frames it vertically on whoever's talking (with the webcam stacked over the game in a stream) and captions every word. You check each clip in the editor and download 1080 × 1920 MP4s with no watermark. More in OBS recordings to clips and stream clips with Clyper.

• Over 4 GB? Split it with Automatic File Splitting at about 4,000 MB next time; split an existing file with the free video splitter, which copies the parts without re-encoding when you keep the shape; or upload it to YouTube as unlisted and paste the link (YouTube takes videos over 15 minutes from verified accounts).
• Sending a part to someone? Shrink it with the video compressor. How to compress a video explains what you trade for a smaller file.