Performance issues with RTSP camera streams (OBS 27.0.1 on MacStudio M1 Max)

[_daniel]

Hello everyone,
I’m using OBS Studio because I need to manage a video wall that shows around 25 IP cameras from different vendors.
All the cameras are added using RTSP protocol, and each one is configured as a Media Source with the following settings:

• "Restart playback when source becomes active" → enabled
• "Network buffering" → 0 MB
• "Reconnect delay" → 1 second
• "Use hardware decoding when available" → enabled

I’m running OBS Studio version 27.0.1 on a MacStudio M1 Max (32 GB RAM) with macOS Ventura.

Here are the main issues I’m experiencing:

1. Video delay accumulation: over time, I notice that the streams develop a delay — about 1 second every hour. To keep things in sync, I have to automatically reboot the workstation every 3–4 hours.
2. Black video windows: sometimes a stream freezes or becomes unresponsive, showing a black rectangle. To fix this, I have to restart OBS manually.

The cameras that most often have delay issues are Cisco Meraki MV72, streaming in Full HD.

I’m wondering if there’s a way to reduce the performance load on OBS, or better handle a large number of RTSP feeds.
Any suggestion, workaround, or configuration tip is very welcome!

Thank you all in advance.
Best regards

 

[mishakim]

For a start, update OBS. The latest version (31.x) works just fine on an M1, so unless you're depending on some out of date plugin that doesn't support newer versions, start with that. 27 doesn't even have an Apple Silicon build, does it? So you're running in Intel compatibility mode, which may not be the only problem, but certainly isn't helping.

 

[_daniel]

Unfortunately I found that the versions after the 27 do not have a good compatibility with the RTSP protocol. So I'm stopped at v27 for this... :(