Thanks for putting this together. I liked how you separated the user from the app settings. Makes total sense. Only issue is that I was not able to build DistroAV with the LIBOBS_API_MAJOR_VER >= 31, so I was not able to test it. I was able to build and test with the < 31 condition and verified settings are preserved. So the code still works with old OBS includes and I still got the deprecated messages in the log when running with 31 dlls.
I feel the DEPRECATED message dumped by OBS when calling the obs_frontend_get_global_config in a 31.0.0 dll is a mistake on OBS side. I prefer the deprecated messages be only shown during builds and as warnings, as it is really only something the developer can resolve. This keeps the user out of it, as many here have thought these messages are the source of their woes, when it is irrelevant.

Thanks.

For what it's worth, I was building and testing this on Fedora 41, where the version of OBS available is currently obs-studio-31.0.0~beta1-4.fc41.x86_64
There, the LIBOBS_API_MAJOR_VER is correctly pulled, so the deprecation message goes away and settings are separated as defined in the code for global.ini and user.ini for new profiles.

For preexisting profiles the settings in global.ini remain intact but they are no longer read from or stored to there (and basically remain as cruft). Currently this leads to the DistroAV settings not being migrated from a global.ini to the user.ini. I will have to revisit that.

Took a first stab at a migration functionality. Works fine in my testing here, but I'd certainly appreciate some more testing.
It should:

• migrate the settings that are now user settings from the global scope to the user scope
• delete migrated settings from the global scope

If everything worked your original settings from global.ini should now be in user.ini and only app scope settings should remain in global.ini.

Thank you for this change proposal.
Note for testers : This should be tested on OBS 31 RC1 or more recent for pre-validating the changes.

Merging things from the updated OBS Plugin Template for OBS 31 "base".

Due to limited feedback from PR submitter, will try to continue from this to a workable solution.

Update to some concerns in this PR :

PARAM_SKIP_UPDATE_VERSION
Can be set & influenced by the user, the decision is to make it a "User" config

The other elements are not influenced / presented to the User and will be in the App Config:
PARAM_LAST_UPDATE_CHECK
PARAM_MIN_AUTO_UPDATE_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS
PARAM_AUTO_CHECK_FOR_UPDATES

This is based on the commit infos :obsproject/obs-studio@2635cf3

The app config instance contains system-wide settings that mainly
concern the working of the app itself, whereas the user config instance
contains settings actually exposed to the user for the configuration.

obsproject/obs-studio#11055

While digging to update the plugin i foudn out that the check with LIBOBS_API_MAJOR_VER will only check at compile time and not Runtime.

if we want to make the plugin backward compatible we will need to either expand on obs_get_version or simply drop this complexity and make OBS 31 a requirement.

As we made OBS 31 a full requirement for DistroAV 6.1 this can be revisited and simplified.