Any idea when it’s coming? I know no one likes that question, but... well, I have an M1 Air, and I’d love to stream some coding sessions or tutorials. So arm64 support would be tasty.
Is there some way we could help with the arm64 patching?
I actually managed to build OBS for M1 Mac. All the dependencies do have arm support. I only had to make small changes in the cmake file for arm64. Right now I am stuck at the part of signing the OBS app package. Without code signing Mac cannot open it.
My smoothbrained take is that it'll be a little bit, since optimizing it for ARM is going to take a little effort. Like GP said, it's really about the encoders slowly being updated to better support the hardware.
There’s still also the lack of Metal support - OBS still uses OpenGL to composite everything together, and Metal should be more highly optimised on newer macOS versions and the new chips than the long-deprecated (on Mac) OpenGL.
Somebody actually did write a Metal renderer and contributed it in a pull request a few years ago. The comments were like “Oh, why did you do this? OpenGL is fine” from the lead developer. The backend just didn’t get merged (I think the developer who contributed it didn’t have great English so struggled to explain why they’d want it, and nobody who commented really seemed to know much about the Mac platform… the code looked fine though).
So that renderer was never merged, and then about six months later OpenGL was deprecated on macOS. The contributed backend is probably quite out of date with changes to OBS’s APIs etc. now.
It’s a shame, there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you for them doing much “optimising for ARM”.
> there just don’t seem to be many developers contributing to OBS that care at all about Mac as a platform
This has definitely become a trend as of late. If I had to guess, the lead devs are (rightfully) frustrated that Apple depreciated OpenGL so quickly for a proprietary solution that nobody really likes working in. Furthermore, maintaining a Metal compositor would be a royal pain in the ass, since there's no real middleware layer to help with debugging or tuning.
Honestly can't blame the poor people. Maintaining Mac software is a neverending chore.
I was able to build OBS from source for M1 Mac. I don’t know how optimized it is. But with few changes to the cmake files you can build it without errors. The only part I am stuck is with code signing. You need to code sign, if not it crashes.
Is there some way we could help with the arm64 patching?