Dropping Support for Ubuntu 24.04, Qt 6.4, and FFmpeg 6.1

[RytoEX]

Overview

OBS Studio 33 will no longer support Ubuntu 24.04, Qt versions older than 6.4.2, and FFmpeg versions older than 6.1.1.

Why Drop Ubuntu 24.04 and Qt 6.4?

As we continue to make changes to the UI code of OBS, it has become increasingly burdensome to support Qt 6.4. Currently, the only first-party distribution of OBS using Qt 6.4 is on Ubuntu 24.04.

Additionally, having to support older dependency versions such as FFmpeg 6.1 on Ubuntu 24.04 has created similar difficulties in maintaining our code.

This announcement amends our previous communication in #11170.

When Will Things Happen?

Timetable

Timeframe	Action
Starting Now	Remove code for Qt < 6.10, FFmpeg < 8.0, other dependencies tied to Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 24.04 CI builds
Later	Stable release of next major OBS version

Starting Now

We will immediately begin work to:

1. Remove code in obs-studio that enables building against Qt < 6.10, FFmpeg < 8.0, and other dependencies tied to Ubuntu 24.04.
2. Remove the Ubuntu 24.04 CI builds on obs-studio

Later

At a future point in time, we will release the next major version of OBS that will only support Qt 6.10+ and FFmpeg 8.0+.

How Does This Affect Me?

Users

Users of the first-party OBS distributions on Windows, macOS, Flatpak, or Ubuntu 26.04 will not see any impact. Ubuntu 24.04 users who wish to continue receiving new major/minor releases of OBS are encouraged to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 or later, or switch to using the Flatpak version of OBS.

Package maintainers

We recognize that this change may impact third-party Linux distributions which currently use Qt 6.4-6.9. We encourage those to move to Qt 6.10+ along with us. If that is not possible, such as on LTS distributions, maintainers can stick to our latest release/* branch which will receive bug fixes at least until the release of the next major OBS version.

Future considerations

We currently intend to support Qt 6.10 and Ubuntu 26.04 at least until Ubuntu 28.04 is released. This is subject to change, but we will provide another announcement like this if our plans should change.

[Commaster]

What about the users of 24.04, who are still waiting for the clean upgrade path to be unlocked on 27-28th of August 2026?
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-schedule/35649

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/schedule/

And in general https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PointReleaseProcess ("Release +1 day: ... Send out update to people running previous LTS (after migration testing completed").

[Warchamp7]

Our release of OBS 33.0 is targeted for the end of August at the earliest.

[Commaster]

Thank you!

[RytoEX]

I do not expect OBS Studio 33 to be fully released before August 27-28.