Download OBS for Apple Silicon M1 and M2 Macs
September 20, 2022 Update: OBS Studio 28 is out
The OBS development team has officially released OBS Studio 28, which is available for download here. Simply download the Apple Silicon installer, and you're good to go!
What you needed to do before the official release
The OBS Studio development team merged a pull request with code changes to produce universal OBS builds to add native macOS OBS support for Apple Silicon Macs a few months ago, including the latest M1 chips and their arm64 architecture, while maintaining builds that support Intel chips.1
Until the OBS team adds a stable release for Apple Silicon to the official download page, there's a way in which you can download and install the latest build.
Download OBS for Apple Silicon
Let's see how we can download the latest build from what's called the master code branch following the steps suggested by Ryan Foster on this GitHub pull request.
- Login to GitHub
- Go to OBS Studio GitHub repository
- Click the green checkmark or the red cross2
- Click Details on any entry listed in the menu that appears
- Click Summary on the page that loads.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and download the macOS (arm64) build, currently labeled
obs-macos-arm64.
I've live-streamed several times with these builds and they're really stable. But you may find third-party plugins aren't still supported on these new versions.
Download the latest OBS Studio build — July 26, 2022
Note that you'll see a 404 error if you're not logged into GitHub.3
Third-Party Plugins and the Official Release
Note that current builds of OBS Studio for Apple Silicon still don't run with all third-party plugins available in the Rosetta 2 version. For instance, I can't still use the Stream Deck to control the arm64 build of OBS, plus there are work-in-progress pull requests for the websocket and ipc plugins.
You can track the OBS Studio 28.0 Milestone to see what's left for an official release to be downloadable through OBS's site.
The new native arm64 build can run natively, without Rosetta 2, on Apple's latest silicon chips, including the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra, resulting in incredibly fast performance. ↩
A green checkmark means all checks have passed on the latest code commit, whereas a red cross means some have failed. As of commit
14f6ea0, there was a red cross because some checks either failed or are in progress. But the macOS (arm64) build was passing. You can actually go to themainbranch's commit history, click on any checkmark or cross, and see the same details and builds for each of the targets. ↩Thanks to Andrew Gabriel for the tip. I'm usually logged into GitHub, so I hadn't encountered this error. But, as he points out, this can be highly confusing or make people think the link is broken. What happens is that GitHub only provides access to downloads to logged users. ↩