How to setup OBS on MacOS for screen recording

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is a free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. This post is a step-by-step installation guide for MacOS.

Use it when you need to:

• record a video of a meeting or a call with your customers or colleagues
• record a video tutorial on any “how to” question (e.g how to run guest MacOS 10.14 in a VirtualBox running on host MacOS 10.15)
• stream your screen and/or camera in a real-time (e.g might be used to share your game play in a real time)

Limitations:

• OBS is not a video editor. It cannot cut/splice/edit recording in anyway, or remove noise from the audio. Use another tools. For example, use ShotCut for video editing, and/or Audacity for working with audio channels.

Step 1. Download and install

Navigate to https://obsproject.com/ and download “DMG” file for MacOS.

Next, open “Applications” directory and find “OBS.app”. Click it to open.

If you prefer using Terminal rather than the graphical user interface, you can install OBS with the following command (given you have Brew already installed):

# check if you have brew installed
$ brew --version
# Install OBS
$ brew install --cask obs
# Launch OBS
$ open /Applications/OBS.app/

Once OBS is launched, here is how the initial screen looks like:

Step 2. Install virtual audio capture device

On MacOS, by default, OBS is not able to capture native audio signal from your machine. In the out-of-box installation of OBS, if you record your screen while watching YouTube video, OBS will capture just your screen, but not the audio signal, which you would otherwise hear through the headphones or internal speakers.

To gap a bridge between default MacOS audio output and OBS, we’ll need to install virtual audio device driver — iShowU Audio Capture.

Download the installer. It supports all recent MacOS versions, except for the BigSur (v11.x). Installation process depends on your MacOS version, so choose and follow the right guide:

• Sierra (v10.12) and High Sierra (v10.13), step-by-step installation guide
• Mojave (v10.14) and Catalina (v10.15), step-by-step installation guide

It’s best to restart your system upon successful installation.

To verify you’re all set, navigate to “System Preferences → Sound”, and check the “Output” tab. It should list the new virtual audio output device — “iShowU Audio Capture”.

Step 3. Create multi-output audio device

“IShowU Audio Capture” device we’ve just created will be used by OBS to capture the audio signal. The last thing to do is to pipe the audio signal from our Internal speakers or headphones (what we hear as humans) to “IShowU Audio Capture” virtual device (to let OBS hear that as well).

Navigate to “Applications → Utilities → Audio MIDI setup” and open it.

Here you will see all audio input and outputs, registered in the system (incl. iShowU audio device we’ve just installed).

Click the “+” icon in the left-bottom corner and select “Create Multi-Output Device”.

Now configure the multi-output device, as follows:

Finally, go back to “System Preferences → Sound”, and choose the “multi-output device” as the primary output device, and whatever microphone you’re going to use as an input device.

Step 4. Configure audio settings in OBS

Go back to OBS application. Open “Settings”, pick “Audio” menu item. Choose your desired microphone in the “Mix/Auxiliary Audio” input. Leave all other inputs “Disabled” by default.

Apply changes and close “Settings” popup. In the main screen, in the “Sources” widget click “+” icon and add new “Audio Output Capture” source.

In a popup in a “Device” dropdown, select “iShowU Audio capture” device. Click OK.

To verify you’re all set, launch some video or music on your local machine (e.g watch a video on YouTube). Talk to your microphone. Make sure that OBS detects your audio input/output signals, by looking at the green bars in the “Audio Mixer” section.

Step 5. Configure video settings in OBS

Go back to Settings in OBS, and choose “Video” menu item. Configure output video resolution (HD or FullHD), and frame per seconds (30 fps, 60fps) settings.

In the same “Settings” popup choose “Output” menu item. Configure recording quality and the directory to store your video files. Make sure to choose “MKV” video format, in order to be able to resume recordings where you left off in case of disruption or power outage.

Step 7. Capture your display

Go back to the main screen. In the “Sources” widget click “+” icon and select “Display Capture” source. If you have multiple displays, choose one you’d like to record.

Once you see your screen instead of the black area, right click on it to bring the context menu, and choose “Transform → Fit to screen”.

Finally, you should see the following screen. What’s happening is OBS app records my primary screen with OBS app shown inside, which is recording itself, and so on and so on. The recursion is infinite and looks like this. That’s OK.

Now you’re all set up with OBS and ready to make your first recording. Hide the OBS app for now to avoid distraction and overloading your CPU.

Step 8. Making your first recording

First, make sure your “System preferences → Sound” settings are all correct. Occasionally, MacOS might change them whenever you plug or unplug headphones or your AirPods. Make sure to choose “Multi-Output device” in the “Output” tab, and your mic (I prefer Internal Microphone for better quality than the AirPods mic) in the “Input” tab.

Now prepare you desktop for the recording. Launch the app you want to record (e.g browser tab with a Google meet). Optionally, make it fullscreen. Don’t switch back to the OBS app. Just hover on the top of the MacOS menu bar, and choose “Start recording”. In the same way, choose “Stop recording” once you’re done.

After you stopped the recording, open the directory where you choose to store video files, and ensure your new recording is there. Open in it your favourite video player to test.

Step 9. Convert from MKV to MP4 video format

Open back OBS application, and choose “File → Remux Recordings” menu. Select just recorded MKV file as a source, and click “Remux”.

Now you’ll get your recoding in an MP4 format in the same directory. Open it and play.

Additionally, you can explore video/audio codecs, resolution and other media info via mediainfo command in a terminal (install it via Brew first).

$ brew install media-info
$ mediainfo <path_to_video_or_audio_file>

CONGRATULATIONS!!

That’s it. You’re done with your first recording. Share the video with a friends, or upload it on YouTube. Then take a break and brew a cup of coffee. That’s was pretty tough to configure, wasn’t it?