Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpdb | Hacker News Reader

I interact with Jim (obs creator) pretty regularly and he definitely deserves the support. Dude is extremely talented and kind. He puts an insane amount of effort into OBS.

View on HN

It really shows. I just switched back to Windows after 10 years of macs, and OBS was a driving factor. Can't believe how powerful and easy to use it is.

I ran my high school's analog TV studio 25 years ago, and we ran a live news broadcast everyday for the lunch room. Effects that took half a room of gear and thousands of watts of power are all a few clicks and sliders away.

> OBS was a driving factor

Why? OBS runs on macOS too

It runs horribly on macOS. Like a night and day difference. If I understand correctly the difference is primarily regarding the encoder.

I also switched my streaming machine over to windows recently.

Edit: ok, “horrible” is dramatic, but it was honestly shocking the first time I booted into windows and gave OBS a try there. Exact same computer that struggled with OBS in macOS produced a much better output without breaking a sweat.

Using Boot Camp or a Hackintosh to be able to do that on the same computer? Might help to make the distinction between it overperforming via Boot Camp or underperforming on a Hackintosh.

Over-performing via Bootcamp. The machine is a fairly new Mac Mini.

Beside horrible, it's terrible, Just upgraded and can't even resize the panes. And the CPU usage is high even when not streaming or do any capture etc.

Huh. Happy OBS macOS user here.

Do you do any picture-in-picture of other apps with heavy CPU utilization, or apply any filters (chroma key/crop) or animated overlays? Multiple cameras or input sources? Multiple audio sources?

The framerate was terrible, the entire machine would lag, and the audio would constantly glitch out at best. Saved recordings were unwatchable.

I tried tweaking everything with the process priorities in OBS and the other apps, and could never get an acceptable result. AMD ThinkPad worked out of the box, did everything I described above, and CPU utilization stayed around 2-3%, and I couldn't even notice it was running while using other apps. All of this while I had it hooked up to extend the desktop onto 3 monitors. Streams and recordings are flawless.

Yeah, this is news to me too - we’ve been using it on a Mini (granted, it’s an i7 - but still, it’s a laptop in an aluminum case) with zero issues. Integrating NDI, no less!

What version of OS X are you running? What GPU do you have?

I guess YMMV. Used OBS a couple of times on macOS and was impressed with how smooth it ran.

"horrible" is not dramatic.... it was unusable.

I'm about to buy the first license for Windows in the past decade specifically because I believe that OBS runs better on Windows and want to switch my next broadcast to be OBS on Windows instead of OBS on Linux. To be clear, OBS has run amazing on Linux, but there appears to be more mature high quality 3rd party plugins for Windows. The fact that OBS works so well on Windows and Linux is amazing to me, and a ton of respect for the team to make that happen. But with empirical evidence that both you and I are paying Microsoft for an improved OBS experience is a good enough reason that Microsoft should also financially sponsor OBS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com