If you stream video and audio online in 2022 you’re probably using OBS Studio. It’s free and open source software to stream to Twitch, YouTube and plenty of other services that have been created and gone out of business in the decade that OBS has been around. Today OBS Studio 28.0 came out with native Apple Silicon support on Macs since 2020 with M1 and M2 chips, the start of support for HDR (mainly on Windows, unfortunately), and lots more including a major update to the appearance of OBS.
I stream every day on Twitch and using an Intel version of OBS Studio on a Mac through Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer for running Intel binaries on Apple Silicon has been alright, but native support for the M1 hardware in my laptop I’m on will mean OBS runs more efficiently and is potentially less likely to kick on the fans. Unfortunately, one of the biggest features for Apple Silicon users, more support for hardware-based encoding, is still waiting for macOS Ventura which won’t be out until later in the year.
OBS Studio 28.0 is free directly from the developers for Windows, macOS, and Linux, at OBSProject.com. A lot of things changed in this release so I recommend reading the full release notes here and note that some plug-ins may need to be manually updated to support Apple Silicon. The OBS project has a guide for OBS Studio 28.0 plugin compatibility here and you may want to check for and backup installed plugins in these locations. Note that for the first few hours after this release the download link for macOS on OBSProject.com still points to the Intel (x86-64) version of OBS Studio. You may need to download the Apple Silicon (arm64) download directly from the bottom of the release notes page on GitHub.
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