You finish a three-hour recording and open it in your editor. Somewhere inside is the boss fight worth clipping, the joke worth quoting, and the second your build finally worked. Now you get to find all three by dragging a playhead across the timeline.
OBS can mark those moments while you record. The feature is real, it’s free, and most people never bind it to a key. It also gives you exactly one kind of marker.
Here are three ways to add chapters to an OBS recording, ordered from free and tedious to mark-and-forget.
Full disclosure before we start: we built AnyMarker. We’ll tell you where the free options win, because sometimes they do.
Option 1: OBS’s built-in chapter marker
OBS Studio ships with a single marker type. You assign it a hotkey in OBS’s Hotkeys settings, searching for “chapter marker”. Press the key while you record, and OBS writes a timestamp into the file when the recording finishes.
One type. No name. No categories.
That gap matters more than it sounds. Tap the key twenty times across a long session and you get twenty identical blips. Back in your editor, nothing tells the boss fight apart from the death that came ten minutes earlier. A marker you can’t name is a marker you have to hunt for all over again.
When it’s the right tool: one-off recordings, a single highlight, anything you’ll cut the same day. Zero setup, zero cost.
Option 2: A free OBS marker plugin
The best-known free option is StreamUp Chapter Marker Manager. It gives you custom marker names, hotkeys, automatic markers on scene changes, and full WebSocket support. It exports FCPXML, Premiere XML, and EDL for editors who want the cut list on a timeline.
The catch is where it lives. It runs inside OBS as a dock, installed as a plugin build. When OBS updates, a plugin can stop loading until its author ships a new build, and changing a marker means a walk through plugin settings.
Free is a price, not a feature. If you record on Linux, this is the most capable option available, and the setup is worth it. You can see how it stacks up against a built-in marker and a standalone app in the feature-by-feature comparison.
Option 3: A standalone OBS chapter marker tool
AnyMarker is a small desktop app that talks to OBS over the WebSocket server OBS already runs. Nothing gets installed inside OBS, so an OBS update has nothing to break.
The difference shows up in the marking. Presets are named sets of buttons, so Elden Ring, your podcast, and your tutorials each get their own layout and you switch between them in a click. Every button carries an emoji and a label you choose, which keeps Boss, Death, and Sponsor Read separate. Tap one while recording and the timestamp lands in a plain .txt file next to your video. When OBS finishes writing the file, chapters embed straight into the MP4, MOV, or M4V.
That last step is the one that saves the scrubbing. Not a sidecar file your editor ignores - real chapter metadata inside the video. QuickTime Player, VLC, Plex, and Infuse all read it, and so does any editor that respects the container.
Embedding touches metadata only, never the video stream. It finishes in under a second whether the file is 100 MB or 20 GB, and it needs no extra disk space.
Two limits are worth naming up front. AnyMarker runs on macOS and Windows, not Linux. And MKV can’t carry these chapters at all, so record in Hybrid MP4 (OBS 30.2 or later) if chapters matter to you.
The setup guide walks through the wizard, building presets, and the embedding engine options.
Turning OBS chapter markers into YouTube chapters
YouTube builds chapters from your video description, so a marker file is only half the job. The description needs a timestamp list, and YouTube is strict about the format:
- The first timestamp must be 00:00.
- You need at least three of them.
- Each chapter has to run at least ten seconds.
- One timestamp per line, each followed by its title.
Miss the 00:00 start and YouTube ignores the whole list, leaving your video with no chapters at all.
This is where the .txt marker file earns its keep. It opens at 00:00:00 - Recording Start and continues in that shape: 00:08:12 - Artefacts, 00:30:30 - Cutscene, 01:21:21 - Resonance Point. Paste those lines into the description, retitle any of them, and YouTube builds the chapter bar. Because the file already starts at zero, it clears the first-timestamp rule untouched. The same list is what you hand to an editor or drop onto a timeline as markers.
If you’d rather not maintain the description, embedded chapters travel with the file to desktop players and to apps that read chapter metadata directly.
Which option fits
Reach for OBS’s built-in marker when you record occasionally and want a single flag.
Reach for the free plugin when you’re on Linux or don’t mind keeping a dock open.
Reach for AnyMarker when you record often, want named markers you reuse per game or show, and would rather never scrub a finished file again.
If you want the whole picture in one table, the three-way comparison covers built-in, plugin, and app.
AnyMarker is free for seven days - full app, no credit card. If it doesn’t save you the scrubbing, the 14-day refund is there.