How to uninstall OBS Studio on Windows

Back up your scene collections, profiles and any recordings you want to keep before removing OBS Studio. This guide covers OBS Studio installed through the OBSProject.OBSStudio winget package; the official disk-style installer from obsproject.com is a different, larger install and was not the one tested here.

Quit OBS Studio first

Stop any active recording or stream and let OBS finish writing the file, then close every OBS window. Check Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) for obs64.exe or obs32.exe before you uninstall.

Remove the app with its own uninstaller

Go to Settings › Apps › Installed apps, find OBS Studio, and choose Uninstall, or run:

winget uninstall --id OBSProject.OBSStudio

Export scene collections and profiles first

OBS keeps your scenes, sources and stream or recording settings as scene collections and profiles inside the app, and its Scene Collection and Profile menus each have an Export item that saves a copy you can re-import later. Export only writes the configuration, not the media files a scene references, so keep those files in place too.

Where the data lives

OBS Studio stores its settings, scene collections and profiles under %APPDATA%\obs-studio once you have opened it and changed anything; the winget package tested here was removed before being opened, so this folder was not present to check in this run. Back it up before you uninstall if you have used OBS and want the same setup after reinstalling.

Recordings and screenshots go wherever you set the Recording Path in Settings › Output, and are not part of OBS's own settings folder; check that location separately.

Check the result

Run these read-only commands after the uninstall finishes:

Get-Process obs64, obs32 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
winget list --id OBSProject.OBSStudio
Test-Path "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\WinGet\Packages\OBSProject.OBSStudio_Microsoft.Winget.Source_8wekyb3d8bbwe"
Test-Path "$env:APPDATA\obs-studio"

No output from Get-Process only means this query observed no matching process; a suppressed error leaves the running state unknown.
A completed winget list query with no match means the package record is gone; a matching row means the uninstall did not finish.
The third Test-Path returning True means that package folder for OBS is still there; in this test it was gone after winget uninstall. Your own package folder name may differ; winget list above is the reliable check.
Test-Path "$env:APPDATA\obs-studio" returning True means your settings, scene collections and profiles are still there, which is expected unless you removed them yourself.

Streaming and recording accounts

Removing OBS does not sign you out of Twitch, YouTube or any other platform, and does not cancel anything there: your stream key and channel live on that platform's servers, not in OBS's local files.

What Mole lists

For OBS Studio installed through winget in this test, winget uninstall removed the whole package in one step and the review that followed found nothing more to add. %APPDATA%\obs-studio, where settings, scene collections and profiles live once you have used the app, was not present in this test and so was not part of what Mole reviewed.

What this test covered

Tested with OBS Studio 32.2.2 installed and removed through winget on an ARM64 machine. OBS was not opened during the test, so no settings, scene collections or recordings existed to check. The official installer from obsproject.com, which is a full NSIS-based install rather than the self-contained package winget used here, was not tested.