Streaming gameplay on Mac just got a lot easier

While streaming gameplay to services like Twitch continues to grow into a massive part of gaming culture, the millions of gamers who own Macs rather than Windows-based PCs have always had a harder time finding reliable streaming solutions. Those tides may finally be turning.

Open Broadcaster Software is arguably the most popular program for broadcasting game streams from your PC. It's open source, low-impact on system resources, and completely free. But up until now it's also been only available for Windows-based computers.

No longer.

As of an update released yesterday, the creators behind Open Broadcaster Software have introduced "OBS MultiPlatform." In its initial release, MultiPlatform is only available for Mac, but Windows and Linux versions are advertised as "coming soon." The current iteration requires OSX 10.8 or above.

OBS MultiPlatform is still very early. Bug and crash reports are popping up with frequency on the OBS forums, and currently users need to turn to other software, such as Wavtap or Soundflower, in order to capture desktop audio.

I've been using the Windows-only version of OBS to stream gameplay for over a year now, and I've come to expect fast and impressive updates from this team. These initial issues should get ironed out. I don't plan to switch over to streaming off of Mac, but just having it as a reliable back-up option is great. This should open the world of streaming up to many more people, which is better for everyone.