Question / Help Streaming from Two Macs with a Capture Card

jkam6033

New Member
My goal is to stream my music production sessions via OBS. I've been trying to use NDI to stream from my laptop while doing my work in Ableton on my desktop (2018 Mac Mini with 32gb RAM, 3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7), but even when I'm letting my laptop handle the streaming, OBS completely overload my mac mini and I start to get crackling/audio dropouts on Ableton. No idea why, I feel like that computer should be able to handle it, but here we are.

I'm wondering if I were to get a capture card if this would help? I know nothing about them, so any information you can give would be helpful. Specifically wondering:

- if i'm streaming from a dedicated streaming computer with a capture card, does OBS have to be open on my main production computer.
- If I'm using a capture card, would that in any way help the CPU load?
- Isn't using NDI supposed to offload the heavy lifting to another computer? Why does OBS still overload my mac mini when using it?

Very clueless here, any advice on how I can achieve this setup, even if it doesn't conform to this dual computer setup, would be welcome, thanks!
 

jkam6033

New Member
Don't know if this will help, but here are my current settings in OBS...They're identical for both computers:
 

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twindux

Member
Not for music, but I bring video & audio into my OBS on my MacBook Pro via HDMI through an Elgato HD60 S+ or Camlink 4K....both work equally well. No reason I can think of that multiple computers wouldn't work. I believe OBS sees these just as any other camera, so should not tax your OBS computer unduly.
 
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