OBS on Apple Silicon

wingstar

wingstar

New Member
With Apple releasing their first Apple Silicon by the end of the year. What are the plans for OBS on those systems? Do you think it’ll be a pain in the butt or a smooth transition? I’m a recent user of OBS but I don’t know anything about programming or coding. Has this discussion have taken place in this subreddit before?

MOD EDIT: Apple Silicon support is coming after 27.2. Official statement here: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/obs-on-apple-silicon.133606/page-12#post-559019
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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ShowyYT

New Member
I am new to using OBS and I started using it on Windows but I want to buy a Macbook Pro with the M1 chip but I don´t now if it will work like it does on OBS
 
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dgatwood

Member
I'd be surprised if emulated performance were good enough, so it probably won't be usable until there's a native build. I also have no idea whether there have been any official discussions about that (and indeed, I was actually looking for the answer to that question when I stumbled onto this thread).

I'm going to give a gut feeling based on my limited knowledge of the code base and limited understanding of what Apple is shipping. Other folks can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Given that OBS runs on ARM hardware already (folks have run it on Windows for ARM64 and on RPi), I would not expect any huge technical hurdles. The main pain point will probably be getting official macos-arm64 builds of the libraries that OBS depends on, then convincing somebody who owns the hardware to do the work to build it and test it.

Thankfully, Apple did (reportedly) make native OpenGL library support available on ARM (at least for now), so there's one huge bullet dodged. And folks got Qt building on Mac ARM silicon way back in July, which is the one dependency that I was most worried about, given how much more tightly it integrates with the OS than low-level bits like ffmpeg, x264, etc. The other dependencies will probably "just work".

One other likely headache is that (unless NewTek has released a new drop of their SDK in the last couple of weeks) the NDI library and runtime that a large number of OBS users depend on isn't available for ARM-based macOS yet. I don't know if linking against the static iOS binary is feasible (with some linker path rewriting) or not; it depends on whether that library links against any symbols that aren't available on macOS. I'll drop NewTek a line and see if they have any news to share on that front.

But mainly, I suspect it's just a matter of somebody having the right hardware and spending whatever time it takes to fix whatever any of the random build issues that invariably come up when you port a large piece of software to a new architecture/platform combination, and maybe adding a build script to lipo the x86 and arm64 app bundles together so that they can ship a single app that runs on both architectures.
 
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pesmonde

New Member
I have a client who asked the same thing. idk how to upvote this thread or not. I'll check out discord and report back
 
BenMitchell

BenMitchell

New Member
dgatwood said:
I'd be surprised if emulated performance were good enough, so it probably won't be usable until there's a native build. I also have no idea whether there have been any official discussions about that (and indeed, I was actually looking for the answer to that question when I stumbled onto this thread).

I'm going to give a gut feeling based on my limited knowledge of the code base and limited understanding of what Apple is shipping. Other folks can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Given that OBS runs on ARM hardware already (folks have run it on Windows for ARM64 and on RPi), I would not expect any huge technical hurdles. The main pain point will probably be getting official macos-arm64 builds of the libraries that OBS depends on, then convincing somebody who owns the hardware to do the work to build it and test it.

Thankfully, Apple did (reportedly) make native OpenGL library support available on ARM (at least for now), so there's one huge bullet dodged. And folks got Qt building on Mac ARM silicon way back in July, which is the one dependency that I was most worried about, given how much more tightly it integrates with the OS than low-level bits like ffmpeg, x264, etc. The other dependencies will probably "just work".

One other likely headache is that (unless NewTek has released a new drop of their SDK in the last couple of weeks) the NDI library and runtime that a large number of OBS users depend on isn't available for ARM-based macOS yet. I don't know if linking against the static iOS binary is feasible (with some linker path rewriting) or not; it depends on whether that library links against any symbols that aren't available on macOS. I'll drop NewTek a line and see if they have any news to share on that front.

But mainly, I suspect it's just a matter of somebody having the right hardware and spending whatever time it takes to fix whatever any of the random build issues that invariably come up when you port a large piece of software to a new architecture/platform combination, and maybe adding a build script to lipo the x86 and arm64 app bundles together so that they can ship a single app that runs on both architectures.
Click to expand...

Well, you're wrong. Rosetta translates x86 applications into ARM64e at the first launch, after that, applications are NOT emulated. They run natively. I have yet to find any issues or bugs come from using rosetta, everything I've tried so far has worked perfectly and has out performed my MacBook Pro 2020 10th gen by magnitudes. I tested building my iOS app on my MacBook Pro vs my air with m1 and the air did it 53% faster.
 
seabass9

seabass9

New Member
I can also confirm this runs on MBA M1 and MUCH faster than on my 2018 MBP. Tested the Mac Virtual Camera plugin and that works well with Zoom. Connecting an iPhone via cable works fine, NDI does not run.
 
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mdg4486

New Member
NDI does not work for me either BUT for some reason I can get it to work with my other streaming software so I am wondering if the NDI-OBS plugin just needs to be updated or if the update needs to come from NewTek. Any ideas?
 
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mdg4486

New Member
EDIT to my Original Post: I am able to receive an NDI signal on the new Mac Mini but I still cannot broadcast the signal. I'd imagine that since the plugin for OBS does both of these things then it's causing it to not install correctly.
 
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mdg4486

New Member
I've done some more testing on my end and here are my initial findings... The majority of the Newtek NDI Tool programs do not run on the new M1 Macs with one exception NDI Virtual Input. Which means you can actually bring in an NDI input (from another source) to OBS by using this software and adding the device as a "Video Capture Device."

Now if only we can run more than one instance of NDI Virtual Input you could add a slew of NDI sources thru the "Video Capture Device" source. Right now it's limited to just one. I've found an article where someone was able to to change the Binary code of Newtek's Scan Converter to run two instances but i haven't been able to make it work with the Virtual Input application.

Article here: https://dev.to/xreyrobertibm/quick-...es-of-newtek-ndi-scan-converter-on-macos-10eb

ANOTHER thing I was able to do was pull in multiple NDI devices using NDISyphon and add those in OBS using the Syphon Input. This works well 95% of the time but I've found that sometimes the sources video freezes which can easily be fixed by re-enabling the source.

At this point I believe the best solution is to run multiple instances of NDI Virtual Input and bring those devices in as "Video Capture Devices."

Anyone have binary or coding experiences want to take a run at this one to see if it's possible?
 
JohnBBeta

JohnBBeta

Member
Anybody tested the M1 with some pretty heavy scenes with loads of sources etc? I'm interested to see if can handle the wierdness I need it to deal with, 20+ scenes, multiple cameras, video media sources, browser overlays etc etc - 1080p60 - streaming bitrate 6000 for twitch... (see www.twitch.tv/johnbbeta for what kind of stuff I mean). If it's stable & as powerful as it seems - I will finally be replacing my aged 8core 2009 mac pro for a mini - been struggling a tiny bit lately on the encoding front & looking for an excuse to upgrade anyway. Its either that or I build a budget-ish streaming PC to replace the mac...
 
JohnBBeta

JohnBBeta

Member
nottooloud said:
Since browser support is currently bugged on recent Mac OSes, I doubt it.
Click to expand...

What's the issue with browsers on Mac currently? I haven't noticed any (obvious) issues & I'm runnning latest v of OBS on a couple of macs without issues. I have restream chat overlay working ok, and the streamlabs alerts are ok - sometimes audio stutters a bit on them but that's the worth I've noticed. Is there a dodgy behaviour I should be looking out for?
 
reedog117

reedog117

New Member
Has anyone tested whether Browser Capture has been fixed in 26.1 RC2? Holding off on purchasing an M1 (or other ARM system) until verifying compatibility has been fixed.
 
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