Websocket settings reset on OBS start/exit

[scientastic]

Operating System Info

Windows 11

Other OS

No response

OBS Studio Version

31.0.0

OBS Studio Version (Other)

No response

OBS Studio Log URL

https://obsproject.com/logs/NFiVaRwFy9iHKYoL

OBS Studio Crash Log URL

No response

Expected Behavior

When I set WebSocket settings, I expect they will be preserved when OBS exits and restarts. This is the behavior we had in OBS 30.

Current Behavior

Background:

• After the most recent Windows Update to 24H2, a USB video capture device was renamed (by Windows?) so it was no longer visible to OBS.
• I changed the OBS source to point to the new capture device name, but it still would not show any captured video, even though Windows showed it.
• I thought an OBS upgrade would help. It did solve that issue, but introduced several others.

The particular issue in this bug report is that WebSocket settings are reset upon OBS exit AND start.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Turn on WebSocket, set the various settings. (We use it with Bitfocus Companion). Everything works.
2. Exit OBS.
3. Start OBS. WebSocket is turned off.

More detailed testing reveals the following:

• The OBS global.ini file is having ALL of the config lines under the [OBSWebSocket] section deleted.
• The deletion happens upon start-up, and again upon exit (of OBS)
• I confirmed this by making a backup copy of global.ini and watching it side by side with the backup copy, using Beyond Compare

Steps:

1. Make sure global.ini has the websocket settings present.
2. Start OBS.
3. Check Beyond Compare: a dialog pops up notifying that the file was changed. Upon viewing, the WebSocket settings are gone from global.ini. Only the [OBSWebSocket] header is present.
4. Use Beyond Compare to copy back the missing lines. Save global.ini.
5. Exit OBS.
6. Interestingly, this time no "file changed" notification pops up on Beyond Compare. Somehow it is not alerted of the file change. But reloading the files shows that once again, the WebSocket settings lines are missing!

Conclusion:

• OBS is overwriting global.ini both on startup and exit, removing WebSocket settings. All other lines seem unaffected.

Temporary (hackish) workaround:

• Make the global.ini file read-only. Then OBS does not overwrite it and seems to load the settings and apply them.
• Obviously this is not a good solution.

Screenshots:

1. Beyond Compare before OBS start:
   
2. Beyond Compare after OBS start:
   

Anything else we should know?

We have been using OBS 30 reliably on Windows 11 on the same hardware for over a year.

The update to Windows 11 24H2 followed by updating OBS to 31 caused this issue and others to appear. The other major issue is that encoding cannot seem to keep up with the stream, whereas before the update there was no problem.