M1 Mac Mini - Not useable with OBS 26.1.0

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Captain3D

New Member
Hi All

I normally use OBS on a PC but just got an M1 Mac mini (16GB) and started to reconstruct my OBS Live stream setup on the Mac side. At first everything was behaving normally but as I have added more scenes and complexity things have become stranger. Now that I have 11 Scenes all gathered into one master scene with a combination of camera, web, media etc things have become very slow. EG it takes about 3 mins for OBS to launch. First it bounces in the doc for about a minute then nothing for a few more until the interface finally appears. After being open for a while I got the beach ball that would never go away.

Not sure how much of this is Big Sur vs M1

Happy to be a tester...phil
 
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Captain3D

New Member
I added more elements to my Scene and everything was working fine while OBS was open. I then closed OBS. When I tried to relaunch it crashed (repeatedly). The only way I could open OBS was to remove the 'obs-studio' folder from the Library Application Support to reset the preferences.

I then reimported my scene and it immediately crashed again. I then spent an hour editing the json file to remove sources to see if I could find the problem. After removing 60% of the sources I could import the scene again but of course most of it was missing.

Surprisingly at that point the original, complete scene could be imported and displayed. But if I close OBS in that state it will not launch. If I close OBS in the default blank state or with the cut down 'half' scene I can relaunch. Once launched I can reload my full scene only after first displaying the half scene. I can not go from the untitled blank scene to the full scene in one step. Blank > half scene > full scene works.

I will continue troubleshooting to see if it is a specific element causing the problem or if it is just too many things trying to load at once when it starts up.

phil
 
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Captain3D

New Member
I seem to have fixed the problem.

My Main 'Live' scene is a composite of many other scenes. On the PC I had set it up by importing the camera multiple times across different scenes. This works on my PC via an Elgato 4k PCI card.

On the Mac Mini I am using the CamLink 4k. These multiple/duplicate inputs seem to be causing the launch crashes. I changed the structure of my project by first creating a 'Master Camera input Scene' which has nothing but the camera picture input. I did the same for audio 'Master Microphone Input Scene' which has nothing but the USB microphone. I then replaced all camera inputs in the other scenes with these Master scene files instead of 'live' inputs and it seems to be behaving now.

I hope

phil
 
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Captain3D

New Member
Thanks. I think that might be a different issue (maybe). Mine seems to be related to the amount of elements active in the file at the point of opening. It does not seem to be any particular element of source. But if there are too many it chokes. If I delete half it will launch and then I can switch over to the 'full' project. I have to remember to switch back to the 'half' project before closing otherwise I am stuck crashing again.
 
thmsdj

thmsdj

New Member
Captain3D said:
Thanks. I think that might be a different issue (maybe). Mine seems to be related to the amount of elements active in the file at the point of opening. It does not seem to be any particular element of source. But if there are too many it chokes. If I delete half it will launch and then I can switch over to the 'full' project. I have to remember to switch back to the 'half' project before closing otherwise I am stuck crashing again.
Click to expand...

At least some people have had problems with the browser sources on M1 macs. So try to move the scenes to your desktop and try to start it again. At least I don't have any problems of opening the software on my MacBook Air M1 . Still waiting for the M1 optimised version (hopefully that will come soon and support the hardware encoders of M1, h264 and h265).
 
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voceradio

New Member
On my Mc Mini M1 all work fine, also with 2.6.1 version.
OBS crash, for me, in this situation:
- can't find a webcam source if I have imported scenes from another OBS windows.
- add a Browser in a scene

I have had recreate all my old scene imported from windows and now work fine.
 
bluefurry

bluefurry

New Member
Just curious, how much memory on that mac mini? I've just started using an air and wonder if this is in my future.
 
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Captain3D

New Member
16GB on my mini so I do not see that as an issue. I do have a google spreadsheet loaded as a browser. Let me go test...
I deleted the google sheet and a youtube chat link and it launched fine! I got excited and tried it again with the camera on and it crashed as before.

Next I reverted back to the original file with browser pages active and launched OBS with the camera powered down. It worked!
Test again with the camera powered on before launch = Crash.

This does seem repeatable that if the camera (sony A6400 via Elgato Cam Link 4k) is on when I launch it will crash. If it is powered down (but still plugged into the Cam Link) it will launch ok. I use a second iphone camera via usb and the OBS Camera app. It also causes the crash on launch if connected.

But!
Once the file has crashed it will not open again even if the cameras are off. It is now corrupt? To reopen I need to replace the Library>Application Support>OBS_Studio folder with my back up folder (that I have now duplicated and backed up many times).

But!
I did just open my file with all the cameras and other sources hidden (not active). Great a solution!
But no...
I closed the same file without changing anything and tried to reopen = Crash

So although cameras and maybe browsers do seem partly guilty there is some more complex interaction going on that leads to theses crashes on launch. Probably due to the complexity of the scene.

My only consistent solution is to have a simple (cut down or empty) scene active when I launch and then switch over to the complex scene once open.

phil
 
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mfrazzz

New Member
Sorry to open a month old thread, but what is the current state of OBS on an M1 Mac Mini? We are looking to upgrade our current OBS set up and would like to go to Apple Silicon if possible.
 
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ricksteruk

New Member
I'm using a moderately simple OBS set up on my M1 Mac mini 16Gb. I've got about 8 scenes, some with logos and graphics that can overlay over the 4 different camera inputs I'm switching between. The only issue I am having is that the USB audio input device keeps losing signal - and I have to re-set the input for the sound to return. The USB input is still showing but just no sound comes into OBS.

It was annoying because it was running happily for about 3 hours whilst setting up and testing yesterday - and then about 5 minutes after the stream going live the sound dropped out and kept going off. I had to use a low quality camera audio for part of the stream. This might possibly have been a USB issue rather than an OBS issue.. I had the same problem using a different USB interface last month which was cured by using a different USB lead
 
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RustySly

New Member
mfrazzz said:
Sorry to open a month old thread, but what is the current state of OBS on an M1 Mac Mini? We are looking to upgrade our current OBS set up and would like to go to Apple Silicon if possible.
Click to expand...
i'm using 16gb ram with 512gb ssd version of macbook air m1 and in general happy with the performance. i have elgato hd60s+, two blue snowball mics, two arctis 5 headsets and a dslr connected via hdmi capture card and they work flawless. but the biggest -and maybe the most important issue is the encoding. i don't expect a performance level of a threadripper but in current state i'm unable to achieve 1080p 60fps at "very fast". i tried some x264 options such as threads etc. with no measurable gain in performance. i think m1 chip is capable beyond this. the thing i'm curious about is if the m1 native version will help with this? accessing the hardware to encode or boost in encoding performance is needed immensely.

tldr; obs works suprisingly well via rosetta 2 but a native m1 version is needed to unlock full potential. any eta on the m1 version would be much appreciated :)
 
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ricksteruk

New Member
Yes I agree that the OBS encoding isn't as spectacular as you might expect from the M1 given it's general improvement over intel in a lot of tasks - I am sure that a native version would make a big difference.
 
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BrixtonRifles

New Member
thpryrchn said:
It seems to have Browser support, but I can't get it to work on my macbook.
Click to expand...

You need to disable "Enable Browser Source Hardware Acceleration" in Settings > Advanced. Browser sources should work fine then, but naturally without hardware acceleration, they might run a bit slow. It works well enough for my Streamelements alerts on my Twitch streams though!

Also, I'm sure I read that it won't work with audio monitoring enabled either, but I don't use the audio monitoring function in OBS anyhow (I've got an Elgato Wave 3 mic, and the WaveLink software it comes with does the job well enough for this).
Screenshot 2021-07-02 at 23.24.20.png
 
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