Question / Help Elgato Game Capture HD + Mac + OBS - Let's make it happen!

[Zaphod Zoidberg]

Do you own an Elgato and a Mac? Want to use it with OBS? Then it's time to act!

Unfortunately, Elgato does not provide proper drivers for Mac OS, which are needed to get it working with OBS.

So everyone: email them, tweet them, call them, send your carrier pigeons! If enough people ask for it, they might comply.
I've started with tweeting @ElgatoSupport. (https://twitter.com/ZaphodZoidberg/status/490120797064024064)
They've passed it on to the development team. Fingers are crossed.

To the developers: Should we ask for something specific? Like is there a correct technical term?

 

[paibox]

AVCapture drivers would definitely be preferable to the archaic 32-bit only QTKit interface the device currently has, which would require quite a bit of reworking to get a 32-bit interface working in a 64-bit application just so we can use a worse video capture interface.

 

[Lain]

This isn't as easy as it sounds for them. USB 2.0 devices are encoded, which requires that they be decoded. I can decode such signals so if there's a way for us to be able to access the encoded signal that would be fine, but don't expect them to implement AVCapture support because I'm not entirely sure if AVCapture can support encoded signals or not. If AVCapture can support it then it would be nice, but we'll probably have to implement QTKit support to get it working.

There isn't really anyone to blame, USB 2.0 devices just happen to be a particularly unlucky situation for everyone involved.

 

[PS Nation]

If someone can send me a ton of detail in terms of what needs to happen, please do. A very good friend of mine is at Elgato, and their engineers are very responsive. I'll do all I can to make this happen.

 

[Lain]

They are more responsive than most, but implementing this sort of stuff requires time and money for them so they most likely just are being cautious before implementing everything.

Couple that with the fact that most devices are still only supported through QTKit, and it makes it an especially bad situation. When a device manufacturer encounters an older API (QTKit) and a newer API (AVCapture), they almost always choose the older APIs because those APIs give more backward compatibility. Backward compatibility helps maximize the units sold, so they'll always choose the older APIs, which sucks for anyone else who wants to use the device with newer and better APIs. It leaves developers like us in a bad spot, but it's really a bad situation for everyone to be honest.

Again, we might have to implement some sort of QTKit thing at some point but if we do it won't be right away. There's so much to do right now on multiple platforms that I can't work on everything that people want me to work on. I really wish I had more good contributors around, but sadly good devs in free/open source in this particular field are quite difficult to find.

This is the same thing that happened with windows. Windows has a newer API but every single god forsaken device manufacturer still uses the older terrible API. It drives me insane.