If you haven’t got two monitor when your streaming, OBS hotkeys are the most important tool that you can have. Either you are using OBS Studio, or Streamlabs OBS. But there’s a time when OBS hotkeys not working. Something happened through out the stream, or basically after installation they don’t work. Let’s see how we can solve this situation.
With OBS hotkeys you can bind different tasks to the keys. For example to switch to another scene you can put it on num 1, while disable microphone can be CTRL + F12. There’s many options that you can pick, also you can use them with OBS plugins. The hotkeys are placed under the Settings in OBS Studio. This is the place where you can determine which hotkey should active which action. If you weren’t setup these already, then you should check out our OBS Studio setup guide.
Let’s see what are the most recurring problems, when the hotkeys not working.
1. Run OBS as Administrator
The first and foremost option is to simply run OBS as an administrator. We wrote about it in our other helping guides, like when encoder error happens in OBS. Just search for OBS, or If It’s on your screen, then do a right click.
After that select “Run as administrator”. Maybe a prompt will popup after that, in that, select Yes. This step is important, because If your user doesn’t have the correct permission to run OBS, then It can’t perceive when a hotkey was used.
2. Update OBS Studio – Streamlabs OBS
Another bottleneck can be If you’re software is not the latest version. Every software, every OS, Windows or Mac, getting every day a new version, a feature, a bug fix. If you don’t update OBS regularly, than the problem may caused by some conflict of the OS, or the game that you playing. You can see what happened in the latest update in the history, when you installing the newest version.
So in this step, there’s a simple action. Update!
3. Never disable hotkeys
However, the following option should be a default setting in your OBS. There are some cases when it can be enabled. As in the Run Administrator solution, in this step also the problem is the focus, when OBS can not receive the hotkey information. This is because it’s not an OS built-in software, therefore it needs to be granted those type of permission. But there’s also an option to disable that in the settings of the software.
Let’s go ahead to the OBS Studio settings, and select Advanced tab. Scroll down to the Hotkeys options and select “Never disable hotkeys”, If it’s not the case.
4. Do not use OS hotkeys, and Modifier keys
Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu, all of them have built-in, default combinations which you can not use, or overwrite them (only If you changed the settings). In this case, the problem should be that you are using, such a combination which is used by the OS, or other softwares, like the game.
These are like CTRL + C, CTRL + V or other combinations. Check out your OS guide for that purpose. Also prevent some misbehaviour, by not using the modifier keys only for hotkey. Like CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT.
5. Did you used lock keys?
Keep in mind, that If you registered a key in OBS, when num lock or caps lock was enabled, then It will be the required combination to activate the task. Go back to the OBS Studio settings and check, what is the key that you need to use.
Are we solved your problem or you still can’t use the hotkeys? Let us know in the comments.
