How to Record Your Screen with OBS on Mac

OBS behaves differently on macOS than it does on Windows, and not in small ways. Apple gates screen capture behind a permission that only takes effect after a full relaunch, routes system audio nowhere by default, and reports Retina displays at a resolution that is not the one OBS needs.

Each of those produces a symptom that looks like a broken install rather than a setting: a black preview, a silent recording, or video that is soft for no visible reason. This page covers the macOS-specific half. For the platform-neutral steps — sources, formats, pressing record — the simplest OBS guide is shorter and covers it in four settings. The Windows version of this page deals with an entirely different set of problems.

Install the Build That Matches Your Chip

macOS downloads are split by architecture, and the choice is not cosmetic.

Check Apple menu → About This Mac. If it lists an M-series chip, take the Apple Silicon build. If it lists an Intel processor, take the Intel build.

The Intel build runs under Rosetta on Apple Silicon and appears to work, then costs you encoding performance and refuses to load any plugin compiled for the other architecture. If you have a plugin failing with an architecture error, this is almost always why.

Two installation details that cause problems later:

• Drag OBS into Applications. Running it from the mounted disk image works once, then loses settings and cannot update, because the image is read-only.
• Eject the disk image before launching.

How to download and install OBS Studio covers verifying the download itself.

The Permission Step, and Why It Needs a Relaunch

This is the single biggest difference from Windows, and skipping the second half of it is why so many Mac users see a black preview after granting the permission.

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and grant OBS:

Then fully quit OBS and reopen it. macOS caches the permission state per process. Granting Screen Recording to a running app does not apply to that running instance — Cmd+Q and relaunch. Minimising, or closing the window, is not enough.

If you granted it, relaunched, and the preview is still black, the cause is elsewhere. OBS black screen on a MacBook covers the remaining cases, including stale permission entries that need OBS removed from the list and re-added.

Use macOS Screen Capture, Not the Legacy Sources

Older tutorials tell you to add "Display Capture." On current OBS builds you want macOS Screen Capture instead — it is the source built on Apple's ScreenCaptureKit, and it is a meaningfully different thing.

Click + in the Sources panel and choose macOS Screen Capture. Inside its properties, the Method dropdown selects what it captures:

• Display Capture — an entire screen.
• Window Capture — a single application window.
• Application Capture — every window belonging to one app, which is the option most people actually want and rarely find. It survives the app opening a second window, and it keeps dialogs and inspector panels that a plain Window Capture drops.

ScreenCaptureKit also brings hardware-accelerated capture, correct handling of windows across Spaces, and — the important one — audio.

Choosing between whole-screen and single-app capture, and the ways window capture breaks, is covered properly in how to record a specific window in OBS.

System Audio Without BlackHole

For years the answer to "how do I record my Mac's sound in OBS" was: install a virtual audio driver like BlackHole or Loopback, build an aggregate device, and route everything through it. That advice is still everywhere, and on current OBS it is usually unnecessary.

ScreenCaptureKit captures application audio directly. Two routes:

• macOS Screen Capture has a Capture Audio checkbox. Tick it and the audio from the captured display or application is recorded alongside the video, with no driver installed.
• Application Audio Capture is a separate source type that grabs the audio of one specific app — useful when you want the browser's sound but not your music.

Your microphone is separate, under Settings → Audio → Mic/Auxiliary Audio. Choose it by name, not "Default" — the default input on a Mac changes the moment AirPods connect.

Two caveats worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Application audio capture requires a reasonably recent macOS. On older releases, the checkbox is either absent or does nothing, and a virtual audio device is still the answer.
• Some applications route audio in ways ScreenCaptureKit does not see. If you get silence from one specific app while others work, that is the case where a driver still helps.

The full picture, including when you genuinely still need a virtual device, is in how to record system audio in OBS on Mac and how to record system audio on Mac without BlackHole.

Retina Canvas: the Setting That Softens Your Video

A 14-inch MacBook Pro has a 3024×1964 panel that macOS presents as roughly 1512×982 points. OBS works in physical pixels. That gap is where Mac recordings lose sharpness.

Under Settings → Video:

• Base (Canvas) Resolution — set this to the display's physical resolution as OBS reports it for that screen, not the scaled figure from System Settings.
• Output (Scaled) Resolution — what gets written to the file.

If Base is 3024×1964 and Output is 1920×1080, every frame is being downscaled, and small interface text is the first casualty. Two workable approaches:

• Match them to get a pixel-exact recording, at the cost of a very large file and a 3K-ish output that many platforms will re-encode anyway.
• Set both to 1920×1080 and record at a lower display resolution, so nothing is scaled at capture time.

What you want to avoid is the accidental middle: a huge canvas, a 1080p output, and a Downscale Filter left on Bilinear. If you must downscale, set the filter to Lanczos under Settings → Video — it is noticeably sharper on text.

Why your OBS recording looks worse than the preview covers the other causes of the same symptom.

Encoder and Format on Apple Silicon

Under Settings → Output → Recording:

• Encoder — choose Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder (VideoToolbox). On M-series chips this is the media engine, and it barely touches the CPU. HEVC is available too and produces smaller files, at the cost of compatibility with older software. x264 works and is unnecessary here.
• Recording Format — Hybrid MP4 for anything you will upload, or Hybrid MOV if the file is going into Final Cut Pro. Both survive a crash or a sleep event; plain MP4 does not.
• Recording Path — ~/Movies is the sensible default.

If you edit in Final Cut and want an intermediate rather than a delivery codec, ProRes is available under the Apple VT encoders. It is enormous — budget for gigabytes per minute — and worth it only if you are actually colour grading.

macOS Housekeeping Before You Record

• Turn on a Focus mode. Notification banners appear in display captures, and they are the usual reason a finished recording has to be redone.
• Hide desktop icons. defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false && killall Finder clears them; swap false for true to bring them back.
• Stop the Mac sleeping. A display sleeping mid-recording produces a file full of black. Set Settings → Displays → Advanced to prevent sleep while the display is off, or just move the mouse occasionally.
• Check the menu bar indicator. macOS shows a recording indicator whenever an app is capturing the screen. It is a useful confirmation that OBS actually has access.
• Full-screen apps live on their own Space. A Window Capture of an app you then send full-screen may stop updating. Application Capture handles this better.

Where OBS Stops on a Mac

Once permissions, sources, audio and canvas are right, OBS produces an accurate, high-quality recording of your Mac's screen. That is exactly what it is for.

The gap is the same one it has on every platform, and Retina displays make it worse rather than better: a pixel-accurate capture of a 3K display is less readable on a phone than a 1080p one, because the interface was drawn for a screen sitting two feet from your face. Closing that gap in OBS means exporting the file and keyframing zooms in Final Cut or Resolve for every meaningful click.

Cubix Capture does that part while recording instead. It requests its own permissions on first run, applies zoom that follows your clicks, cursor smoothing and window framing during capture, and runs natively on macOS and Windows — which matters if you are on a Mac and your colleagues are not, since Screen Studio and most Mac-first tools leave half a mixed team without an equivalent. The free Starter plan is enough to record the same walkthrough both ways and compare legibility on a phone.

If you are streaming, switching scenes live, or running a multi-camera setup, OBS remains the right tool and nothing here changes that.

Keep Reading

• How to Record Your Screen with OBS on Windows — the PC-specific traps, which are entirely different.
• How to Record System Audio in OBS on Mac — the full audio routing picture.
• OBS Black Screen on MacBook: Complete Fix Guide — when permissions are granted and it is still black.
• How to Screen Record on Mac with Internal Audio — the non-OBS routes to the same result.
• How to Screen Record: Mac vs Windows — what actually differs between the two platforms.