Optimising OBS on a 2020 MacBook Pro

For the last few months (years, if I’m completely honest), I’ve been thinking about starting a YouTube channel. Nothing fancy, just a place to create the occasional map-making video or document my world-building session, that might one day graduate to a vlog of some form.

To reduce editing, I was thinking of streaming content directly to YouTube or Facebook from OBS. Since, OBS allows you to blend multiple video, audio and other sources and encode them live to a video stream or to disk, you can save a lot of editing time and overcome the limitations set by iMovie (such as only having two video sources). With a little know-how and a raster image editor like Photoshop, you can create all kinds of assets like overlays. Best of all, OBS is free and open source.

Unfortunately, the fly in my ointment is that I am a Mac user, and OBS isn’t optimised for Apple’s hardware out of the box. In fact, it’s so bad, any attempt to stream or record a 1080p feed at 60 FPS would bring my $3000 MacBook Pro to its knees. Somewhat deflated, I thought about investing in a secondary Windows PC to handle the OBS side, while leaving the Mac to do my content creation. I still may do that down the line, but stubbornly I set about to optimise OBS for my MacBook as much as I can to get me started — gear should never get in the way of creating content.