Hello, my YouTube friends. I've taken a lot of heat over the years
for my stance on Max as a live streaming platform.
I flat out know that pre M1 Max are not suitable for a quality live stream.
Anything more than just the basics and it can't handle it.
And it's okay. That's not what they're built for,
but I keep hearing the new M1's have no problems live streaming.
So I picked one up for myself and decided to test it.
Today, we're going to know for sure if you should be streaming on an M1 Mac.
So you know what? Let's get to it.
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What I have right here is an M1 Max with 64 gigabytes of RAM.
It's the most powerful MacBook, you can currently buy.
It's not representative of a MacBook Air,
or just a Macbook, but I didn't buy just for test streaming.
I use it for editing and other stuff. So, keep that in mind throughout this video,
no matter what equipment you use, you want to optimize your streams as much as possible.
The first thing I did was export my scenes and profiles from my PC.
It's an easy process. You just go up here and select the scene and click export.
This works the same on profiles and scene collections. Next
I made sure all of the stream assets were in one folder and I copied the folder over to the Mac.
Then it's just a matter of importing the profiles
and scene collections into OBS and linking up all the assets.
Once I did that, I needed to install Black Hole to capture desktop audio.
If you don't know how to do that, there's a link in the
description to a video where I show you. Next,
I had to install the plugins that my stream uses,
the big couple, our stream effects and the move transition.
Once that was done, I had to take stock of
what else is missing and I realized there are things I can't bring over.
I use Twidget for all the chat effects
I do and it isn’t available on a Mac
and that's really a big one. Voice mod
for Mac is still unavailable and snap camera only works in 720 on a Mac.
There's also no way currently that you can separate out your audio,
but I guess I'm going to have to make do. Once I had my stream moved and all set up,
it was time to test. So I started out going through my regular standard screen, checking the
transitions, looking to make sure that my masks were working properly.
You could see I have the cloud mask on here.
Everything appears to be working fine on my tutorial page.
I have another mask over here and I have my stats window up.
It was impressively not dropping any frames at this point.
Now, I started this live stream and streamed using the Mac hardware encoder,
which I have used in the past and it seemed to work very well.
In the past, you would go an hour or five minutes or 10 minutes,
some indeterminate length of time. It would stop producing video and just send audio to the stream.
So, I wanted to make sure that I live stream for pretty long period of time to guarantee
that wasn't going to happen. What I did here is a window capture of the chat.
So then I just size it up and put it in the chat area.
This can kind of replace what I was using before,
which was Twidget. Then we flipped over to the guest screen to make sure that guests was working.
That guest audio was working properly and this is a window capture of my stats window.
You can see that we are using a very low percentage of our CPU which I was very happy about
and I'm using some very difficult Snapchat
filters and I kind of run through all of them to see how they work to see,
whether it would cause the machine to mess up or anything like that.
The cartoon ones tend to be very CPU intensive,
but I did not have any problems running through my face cams at all.
So now what I did was I recorded a piece of the
stream while we were streaming to see if actually recording something was going to give me a problem
and then I added it
as a screen capture and resized it up and stuck it down here in the bottom right-hand corner.
Now, I'm using window capture a lot in the
Mac because in the past it's been known to be a big problem.
I did not see any problems at all using window capture
and then I actually played this recording on stream that I had made earlier
and it played without any problems.
Very little noticeable effect at all.
I was really surprised. So now, I'm running filters.
I have two window captures and everything is running
absolutely perfectly. And you can see that we did reach about 26 percent of the CPU.
I started switching scenes to test
whether switching scenes was going to have any effect on our CPU usage or anything like that.
I didn't notice anything at all, you're able to switch back and forth.
We never got any stuttering
and you can see that we did hit a CPU usage of around 29% there at one point.
Now, I actually loaded up a game and I'm playing the game,
while I'm running a filter that almost always causes problems because it uses up so much CPU.
And you can see, even with the game playing in the background,
we're running at 27% CPU
usage, and we drop no frames due to render
or encoding lag and we had zero frames drop on the network.
I was absolutely surprised by this.
So I'm running the most difficult filter. I have to window captures in here and a display capture.
And here, I go ahead and capture another screen.
So, now, we have a display capture, a camera running snap filter, and three window
captures all running absolutely flawlessly
and I can switch scenes and switch back in and no problems whatsoever.
When I go in and play the game, the CPU usage never got really above 29 percent
and this is absolutely amazing.
This is a ridiculously unexpected result on a Mac.
I had absolutely no problems doing basically
whatever I threw at this thing. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this MacBook performed.
I still missed Twidget and snap camera in 720 isn't quite as awesome with those aren't deal breakers.
The lack of any kind of audio separation
for desktop sources is a lot more problematic but there are solutions on the way soon.
And there is even better news. Apple has become a major donor to the OBS project.
This no doubt means they're going to be pushing to get OBS
working natively on the M1, which could make it even more powerful.
It also shows a commitment that Apple's making to live
streamers that they've never showed in the past.
And that's a good sign. All in this
four thousand five hundred dollar MacBook Pro took everything I could throw at it
and would have taken more, but at 4,500 bucks shouldn't it?
You could build a comparable streaming PC for about half that price
that would tackle all this and give you access to a lot more tools.
With that being said, you definitely can stream on an M1 Mac.
So, rejoice if you're a Mac devotee, you can do a lot with this M1 Max.
And there is a lot of reason for optimism for the future of live streaming on a Mac.
If you want to see how capture desktop audio on your Mac,
you should check this video out. Big thanks to StreemTunes for sponsoring this video.
The links to StreemTunes and all the other sponsors that support
this channel are in the description below under the heading,
sponsors. Supporting the sponsors that help
keep the lights on here in the studio, is a great way to help me continue to make content
that helps you. I couldn't possibly do this without them
or you.
So thanks. And if you're always looking
for tools, tips, and tricks that can help make you a better livestreamer or YouTuber,
subscribe to the channel. My name is Michael Feyrer Jr.
Thank you so much for watching.
Have a great day, and I'll see you in the next one.