How to get the Blur filter and other effects on OBS Studio for MacOS
If you’re reading this article you are also probably using OBS Studio. Furthermore, chances are you are using OBS Studio for MacOS. Although from version 26.x.x, it has been amazing on this operating system, there are still features that are only available to our Windows and sometimes Linux-using counterparts, which we can only dream of. This guide is about enabling some of these for your stream or video production with OBS Studio on Mac.
What is OBS Studio?
Quite simply, Open Broadcast Software is a freely available open-source, streaming, and recording software. A good amount of streamers use it for streaming on and producing content for video platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and a few others. The software provides a plethora of options to play with, customize and create fantastic and professional scenes or videos.
At the time of this writing, the version of OBS being referred to is 26.1.2. I anticipate that this solution will work on future versions too.
Why a blurred background?
Have you ever been on a video call where one of the participants had that very professional appearance, almost as if she/he was being photographed with a single-focus lens, with their background being softly blurred, giving them a very clean look?
I was looking for ways to replicate the above: a very nice, clean, professional-looking frame while not depicting any kind of chaos going on with the scene’s background.
One way to achieve is this to invest in the type of DSLR that allows for both photography and streaming, then get the right lens, and work out all the related technicalities: the golden solution. However, if you’re not ready to invest in such equipment and only have a regular webcam (Logitech C920 for me) with low processing power, you would have to find another way.
For me, it was being able to do it through OBS Studio and some kind of filter(s) combination. Unfortunately, this does not seem possible with a default MacOS version of the app:
On the Windows version, using the right plugin(s), streamers had been able to do it for many years. So how do we achieve the MacOS version of the software?
Enter OBS-StreamFX version 0.10.0b1.
What is StreamFX?
As per the project’s GitHub page:
StreamFX is a plugin for OBS Studio which adds many new effects, filters, sources, transitions and encoders — all for free! Be it 3D Transform, Blur, complex Masking, or even custom shaders, you’ll find it all here.
As you can see, it goes beyond the basic effects and transitions provided by a barebone version of OBS. StreamFX was originally built for OBS on MS Windows. From version 0.8.0a4 they started to support and provide binaries for Ubuntu 18 and 19.
Version 0.10.0b1 was announced and released on February 21st, 2021 with the support of MacOS.
From the release page:
Official support for MacOS 10.15 and newer!
Thank to Elgato sponsoring an Apple MacBook Pro M1, the project has made massive advancements into supporting the unusual MacOS platform. While the support is still limited, it should work on most up-to-date MacOS machines. This will likely become a core part of StreamFX releases, and the instruction to install StreamFX now feature a MacOS section. Please note that at the current point in time, MacOS support is purely for testing purposes.
There was also a Twitter announcement about this:
Needless to say, I am sure a lot of people using OBS Studio on MacOS had been hoping for this day to arrive. The new plugin version is said to work on the newly released Apple M1 machines. However, I do not own or have access to one of these and therefore have not been able to confirm.
Do keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and may still be quite buggy. Overall though, it has worked quite smoothly on my setup.
In the remainder of this write-up, I will walk you through how to set up the OBS StreamFX plugin.
A step-by-step guide to setting up OBS StreamFX Plugin
Let’s get started by heading to their releases page on Github. Depending on when you’re reading this article and following this guide, a different release version might be displayed. I think it should be OK as long as it is a release that is greater or equal to 0.10.0b1. You might need to navigate to the right release. In order to do so, click on the Tags tab as follows:
Once on the Tags page, find the appropriate release version and click on the Downloads link:
On the release page, scroll all the way down and pick one of the MacOS-based release archives. They would tend to be the following format: streamfx-macos-xxxxx. As long as there is MacOS in the name, you’ve got the right one. Proceed to download one of these and unarchive it as follows:
At this point, it gets a little tricky depending on whether your OBS Studio has been set up just for you as a system user or globally:
- If OBS Studio was set up globally, in Finder you may want to head to the following directory path (Menu Bar -> Go -> Go to Folder or simply SHIFT+CMD+G as a shortcut):
/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/ - Assuming that like my own setup OBS Studio was installed just for you as a system user, using the same combination (Menu Bar -> Go -> Go to Folder or SHIFT+CMD+G), you should head to the following directory path instead:
~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/
Once in the right directory, check whether there is a folder named “plugins”. As I found out, that directory sometimes isn’t available unless you’ve installed other plugins in the past. In case the directory is not present, please go ahead and create it:
Next, open the aforementioned plugins directory and move the whole of the previously unarchived StreamFX directory into it as follows:
Once the above operation has been performed, from within the plugins directory, open StreamFX/bin in order to navigate to the StreamFX.so file. If the file isn’t present in the bin directory, something may have gone amiss during the previous procedures. I would recommend you try again from the very beginning.
At this point, we can go ahead and right-click or CTRL+regular-click on the file. From the contextual menu that appears, select the “Open” submenu.
You will be asked to find an application to open StreamFX.so. Select the “Choose Application” option:
A dialog box will pop up right after this selection. Something important to note here is that all applications may not be enabled/selectable/clickable. In such a case, take care of changing “Enable Recommended Applications” to “Enable All Applications”. This would allow you to pick the OBS Studio application:
It’s not over just yet. Due to the underlying security system of MacOS, you will get an additional notification that the developer of the application had not been verified. The dialog box will look something similar to the following:
Fear not. Let’s grant the necessary permissions to StreamFX.so in order for it to execute by selecting the “Open” option.
We are nearly finished. If all worked out well, you will be greeted with the StreamFX dialog box right by OBS as follows:
There isn’t anything more you to do from this point onwards, other than using the new features provided by the plugin. As you can see, the Blur effect filter and a few others are now available for your convenience:
Use the new filters, transitions, etc… to your heart’s content for your stream or video production with OBS Studio on MacOS.
A Couple of recommendations
Should you want to find out more about creating a blurred background to get that clean and professional effect I was mentioning at the very beginning of this guide, this quick and short video guide from SeeNinetyThree on the subject comes highly recommended (under 5 minutes).
Additionally, if you do like this plugin, I would recommend supporting the developer(s) behind it and sponsoring the project through their Patreon or other available means. Details are available on the StreamFX project Github page.
References:
- OBS Studio: https://obsproject.com/
- StreamFX Github Page: https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-StreamFX
- StreamFX Wiki (read more about available transitions, effects, etc.): https://github.com/Xaymar/obs-StreamFX/wiki
- Official StreamFX Installation Guide: https://github.com/xaymar/obs-streamfx/wiki/Installation
