NDI Support for Apple Silicon in OBS 28. Finally.

So, it has been about two years since Apple introduced the M1 processor, which remains a truly impressive feat of engineering — I love how well things can run on even a low-end M1 computer. Since then, the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra and M2 have come out, but OBS — the standard bearer for live-streaming software — only finally added native Apple Silicon support in late August. That delay wasn’t a huge problem since Apple Rosetta runs Intel native apps incredibly well in translation. OBS is an intensive application, but runs at least as well on an M1 Mac through Rosetta as it does on a high-end Intel Mac.

The late but finally here native release should prove even better, but for one problem when using it in a setting like I do (and like many church users do) where you want to bring in graphics and video conveyed using NewTek’s NDI protocol. About two months after OBS finally went Apple Silicon native, obs-ndi is still not ready for the new version. Thankfully, DDRBoxman has done the work to make the old version of that plugin work on OBS 28 on all the major platforms.

Two caveats to getting it up and running; the installer installed the plugin to /library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-ndi.plugin, but OBS does not seem to find it there. I moved it to ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins to resolve that.

Also, you need an Apple Silicon native copy of the NDI Runtime, which is not included. A forum post on the obs-ndi GitHub tracker clued me in. I downloaded the latest, Apple Silicon native version of NDI Tools for free and the found the NDI Video Monitor app in the Applications folder. I right clicked it, clicked “Show Package Contents,” and then went into the Contents/Frameworks folder. The library located there needed to be copied to /usr/local/lib/ and renamed to libndi.4.dylib in order for the plugin to detect it.

Messy, but worth it: I now have native OBS with NDI support running on Apple Silicon.