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Apple contributes to OBS to support screen capture using ScreenCaptureKit

722 points by frankjr 5y ago

yellow_lead 5y ago
It's a bit strange to open a pull request from "Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering" instead of an individual account. I wonder if every interaction from this account has to be approved by a board or something.
- mr90210 5y ago
  It's a valid point, however shall we at least celebrate a bit the fact that a Big Tech is actually contributing in the project?
  - masklinn 5y ago
    TBF I don’t know how much “we want $popular project to take advantage of our platform” is to be celebrated. It’s better than bitching about bad support without doing anything. But at the most fundamental of levels it’s really the company working for their customers, through a third party’s project.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Is a company working for its customers to have a good experience with an open source package something we should discourage instead? I’m perfectly happy to celebrate win-win outcomes.
      - masklinn 5y ago
        > Is a company working for its customers to have a good experience with an open source package something we should discourage instead? You are aware that there are more than two options?
        sokoloff 5y ago
        Of course. Apple has many options and their choice to contribute to OBS allows me many options as to how to react; I choose applause.
        q3k 5y ago
        I don’t know, this feels to me like applauding a car driver who uses their turn signals correctly. “Hooray, you did the thing you’re supposed to do. Good job you”.
        Someone 5y ago
        Why would Apple be supposed to do this? Without any other argument on the table, taking that statement to its logical conclusion, it would imply Apple is supposed to help make every single project run well on their hardware. Even when restricting that to “open source projects that (cl)aim to run on latest MacOS”, I think that’s not something a vendor is “supposed to do”. So, if Apple only “is supposed to” support some projects, what objective criteria should it use to pick them? I think it’s completely fine if Apple wouldn’t support any open source. I also think it’s completely fine if developers would choose not to write software for their OS because of that.
    - nisegami 5y ago
      I think situations where literally all parties involved are better off than they were before should be celebrated, even if the intentions behind it aren't just philanthropic.
      - masklinn 5y ago
        So you celebrate every time somebody makes a purchase of something they needed and had the means for?
        nisegami 5y ago
        If those goods were produced by people paid fair wages and using materials sourced sustainably/ethically, sure. So in practice, not very often
  - yreg 5y ago
    Is that rare? I would have thought many FAAG employees contribute to open source projects relevant to them as part of their work. After all that seems like the easiest way to influence the projects.
    - jhugo 5y ago
      And contributing changes back to an active project is much less effort than maintaining a fork in perpetuity.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      Facebook.. Yes... Amazon... Yes Apple... Not so much. Netflix.. A little Google... Yes...
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Amazon...it depends
      - viktorcode 5y ago
        There's a good post on HN about what it cos Apple to make OS X a certified UNIX. Due to the secrecy of the project they had to use non-corporate accounts for committing bug fixes. The amount of changes was pretty big, but nobody excepts the authors can say it came from Apple. Of course they will commit to open source projects if it suits their needs (if they use those projects). But people have different opinion on what Apple's needs are.
        couchridr 5y ago
        You probably mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016
    - swiftcoder 5y ago
      There's a pretty big distinction between FAANG employees contributing on their own time to things tangentially related too their job, and FAANG employees contributing on behalf of the company (i.e. being paid to do so as an official part of their day job). Judging by the Engineering account being used to submit this patch, this is likely to be an example of the latter.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  From experience in a big company (not Apple) likely direct manager then senior manager then legal department. The justification and hoop jumping would take much more effort than the coding. Well done to who ever it was.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Contributing to a new open source project requires Senior Vice President approval at Apple.
    - yellow_lead 5y ago
      Jesus
    - dagmx 5y ago
      Not accurate. There's multiple levels of contribution approval depending on the frequency, size and extent of the contributions.
      - saagarjha 5y ago
        I am aware of several projects that Apple has existing relationships with that have streamlined processes, but to my understanding the “ask a SVP” remains the standard policy for getting permission to contribute to an open source project.
        dagmx 5y ago
        It is not. You only need the SVP permission if you are doing larger contributions and frequently. Smaller contributions or one offs don't go up the chain as far, and can just require manager+legal approval
- onion2k 5y ago
  Don't Apple have a policy that their developers aren't supposed to contribute to Open Source without explicit permission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935263)? I imagine this is the result of that policy - if Apple wants to contribute to something as a business there isn't really anyone who would be able to use their individual account to do it without lots of people questioning why that person can when others can't.
  - dogma1138 5y ago
    Most companies have this policy it’s actually quite important to protect both the company and the project, it wouldn’t surprise me if big projects even mandate it on their side too. It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project. This looks to be the latter rather than the former so it would make sense it would come from an Apple account.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      > It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project. My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all.
      - threeseed 5y ago
        > My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all. I am not sure exactly but I suspect this is employee-specific and may be only for those working on sensitive projects. I worked at Apple years ago and it was never in my contract or mentioned to me. And there are plenty of more recent developers e.g. Holden Karau who were contributing to open source projects in their spare time whilst working at Apple.
- iSnow 5y ago
  Could be related to the decision to remove individual names from the product about boxes back when Jobs came back to better control leaking of internal information and cut down on poaching. I would think that Apple does not want anyone to know who is working on the screen capture APIs as this PR would probably come from one member of that group "When Steve came back, one of his company-wide edicts was that the names of individuals must be removed from about boxes." https://bitsplitting.org/2014/01/24/cant-take-that-away/ https://bitsplitting.org/2014/01/24/cant-take-that-away/
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > when Jobs came back to better control leaking of internal information and cut down on poaching He also went further than that by illegally colluding with competitors to lower wages for employees. [0] [1]. What a great man. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-b... [1] https://9to5google.com/2012/01/27/court-filings-show-steve-jobs-told-google-to-stop-poaching-apple-engineers/ https://9to5google.com/2012/01/27/court-filings-show-steve-j...
- DangerousPie 5y ago
  Well, given the amount of publicity this PR is getting it probably makes sense to not just let a random software engineer post whatever they feel like.
- SloopJon 5y ago
  For those of you who have contributed to a Github (or similar) project in your capacity as an employee, do you use a work account separate from your own?
  - maccard 5y ago
    yes.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Depends on the company, usually. Currently, I make my contributions with a personal account.
- olliej 5y ago
  It’s very team dependent - look at llvm and webkit for instance. It could also be that someone would rather not be out in public, which is also understandable.
- viraptor 5y ago
  HP tried to do something similar when working with openstack. It was done for very bureaucratic reasons / company visibility. (Author was preserved, commit was by something like the-project-name@hp.com) A slightly misguided idea by people who don't normally work with big open source. It was reverted since it messed with project statistics.
jcelerier 5y ago
- #if __MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= __MAC_10_15 + #if __MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= 101500 // __MAC_10_15 ah, yes, clean code
- jamessb 5y ago
  The message for the PR (under the Conversation tab) justifies this as: > plugins/mac-capture/mac-display-capture.m:621 - The __MAC_10_15 define may not exist on devices running < 10.15, resulting in this section not being appropriately avoided during compilation. Swapping to 101500 should work for all versions of macOS.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    A conditional define might be a good alternative tho?
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    yes, it's the whole macos compatibility / availability layer which is terrible. In contrast a good system like Qt looks like #if QT_VERSION > QT_VERSION_CHECK(5, 15, 0) ... #endif and works also for Qt 5.1 or Qt 4 or 3 (i think that's when this macro was introduced, pretty much at the same time than os x 10.1 ?)
    - jakear 5y ago
      That’s just adding another layer of abstraction over exactly what the Mac case does. I prefer code that is so simple it doesn’t need to be abstract, as every abstraction layer is a potential bug layer. Not even just “potential” in QT’s case, a quick search turned up https://forum.qt.io/topic/31071/moc-and-qt_version_check-bug https://forum.qt.io/topic/31071/moc-and-qt_version_check-bug and https://forum.qt.io/topic/37882/qt-4-8-qt_version_check-and-moc-workaround https://forum.qt.io/topic/37882/qt-4-8-qt_version_check-and-... as cases where folks have been bit by some tooling in a Qt4 environment not understanding the macro properly.
      - 5y ago
artonge 5y ago
Apparently not the first time from the activity of the user: https://github.com/Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering?tab=overview&from=2021-08-01&to=2021-08-31 https://github.com/Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering?tab=overv... https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/pull/310 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/pull/310 Strangely, a lot of contributions to numpy.
- ink404 5y ago
  Not too strange if Apple wants a competitive development environment.
  - viktorcode 5y ago
    Maybe I'll be laughed at, but right now I consider the most competitive Apple's development environment the Swift Playgrounds on iPad. I just so wish to see this sleek and fast app replacing old cranky Xcode on macOS by adding missing features.
caaqil 5y ago
The pull request page might be more readable: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875
perryizgr8 5y ago
I wonder if this will provide a way to hide the yellow dot that appears in the corner (to indicate mic access). It is a great idea in most cases, but quite annoying to see on screen recordings.
pilif 5y ago
This commit in the PR https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875/commits/860a20696d280402b2c3cb1ed96e4256f9dd223f https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875/commits/8... provides an excellent example of why commit messages matter. This is more than 1000 lines diff to the build system (and thus potentially very dangerous because of possible supply chain attacks) which has the commit message of "CI: Update build scripts and Github actions workflow" Never say what you ware doing (it's obvious this commit is updating build scripts). Say why you are doing it, especially when your commit feels unrelated or at most very tangentially related to the objective of your PR.
- disintegrator 5y ago
  I'm all for well presented PRs/commits but I'm not sure how a good commit message mitigates the risk of a supply chain attack in this case.
  - pilif 5y ago
    It might help the reviewer to not flat-out reject the PR because it gives them a fame of mind as to what the intention of the change is.
- rkangel 5y ago
  > Never say what you ware doing (it's obvious this commit is updating build scripts) DEFINITELY say what you are doing. And then say why. This blog post is a good description of the most prevalent convention in how to write good and useful messages (e.g. this is what the Linux Kernel does and given the history of git there's some flow down): https://cbea.ms/git-commit/ https://cbea.ms/git-commit/ The key thing that means you should start with what is having a short one-line summary of what you're doing so you can look at a simple log and see which commit you're interested in.
  - pferde 5y ago
    Also, if your commit message has parts that say "also, this", "also, that", don't be lazy and break those alsos into separate commits!
vault 5y ago
I hope those changes were planned and agreed upon beforehand. I'd hate to review 274 changed files out of the blue
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
twelg 5y ago
twelgblerg 5y ago
- the_duke 5y ago
  Why exactly did you create two new accounts to post the very same message? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113137 )
whazor 5y ago
Now I hope they improve the situation of virtual cameras. Now you need to code sign all kinds of applications in order for them to recognize your applications, which often breaks those applications.
- evanb 5y ago
  I really want to use the virtual camera in FaceTime. But it's near-impossible to get it to work.
- Telemakhos 5y ago
  I've still got an old iMac running High Sierra just so that can use virtual cameras. It used to work beautifully.
clock99 5y ago
hendry 5y ago
Makes me wonder how efficient Xorg vs Wayland capture is on Arch btw
avipars 5y ago
Nice to see them contribute to open source!
clone1018 5y ago
For anyone trying to find the actual changes made, vs the build system that was modified, you can find them with this compare: https://github.com/PatTheMav/obs-studio/compare/universal-build...Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering:macos_screencapturekit_support https://github.com/PatTheMav/obs-studio/compare/universal-bu... The branch on GitHub should change its reference until the build system is merged into the main branch.
shantnutiwari 5y ago
Maybe OBS will work on my Mac now. I struggled to get it working, everything recording as I wanted. Thought it was just "crappy open source" stuff, so gave up. Some time later, I tried OBS on Windows, and it just worked, first time, no fiddling required. And I realised the problem was on the Mac side, not Obs. I know, its just one anecdote.
- sprkwd 5y ago
  Getting the audio to work on MacOS OBS is always a pain.
  - j_koreth 5y ago
    Personally I had luck with using Blackhole
    - TillE 5y ago
      It shouldn't require a third-party driver! It's basic functionality which should be provided by the OS in a userspace API. Blackhole does its job, except your volume buttons stop working when you're on a multi-output device. Quite a pain.
- xd1936 5y ago
  How long ago was this? They've been making some big stability improvements over the last year or two.
- Johnyma22 5y ago
  Adding to the anecdote, OBS works great on Ubuntu.
- symfoniq 5y ago
  Between one and two years ago, my team had serious issues getting OBS working reliably on T2-equipped Macs. We switched to an expensive commercial product and all our problems went away. I couldn't duplicate the OBS issues on older Macs that didn't have the T2 chip.
acomjean 5y ago
ScreenCaptureKit seems to Apple only, so this only helps Mac users. While nice it seems to be a trend where Apple seems to contribute to open source projects now to improve its own performance only on their own devices (blender comes to mind). Maybe Im being a bit cynical. Still a positive I guess.
- outsidetheparty 5y ago
  While I see what you're saying, to be honest it seems pretty reasonable to me for Apple to contribute work that helps Apple. Many OSS contributions are "scratching your own itch", no?
- ninkendo 5y ago
  I mean, it's not a bad engineering philosophy for things as low-level as this to be provided by the OS as a framework. Capturing screen output at a high refresh rate without introducing lag may be better implemented with lower-level access to certain system components, in a way that may require certain privileges in order to make it work. You can provide a nice higher-level API (like ScreenCaptureKit) to access such "privileged" capabilities from normal apps, so that arbitrary open-source software (like OBS) can hook into it. It seems like Apple already made ScreenCaptureKit for their platforms, and wanted to help OBS by hooking it up to ScreenCaptureKit to take advantage of that work. The alternative, which is to do all the private/privileged stuff directly in OBS, means that Apple would have to give the general ability for arbitrary software to do what ScreenCaptureKit is doing, which may be a security issue (spyware that snoops on what's being displayed on screen comes to mind.) Making something like ScreenCaptureKit as the supported interface to do this kind of thing, can ensure the app triggers the proper permissions dialog/etc so that screen recording doesn't happen without user knowledge.
- maxwell86 5y ago
  > Maybe Im being a bit cynical. If Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Qualcomm, etc. would all contribute to open source to make everything work on all their devices with good perf, then that would be very good for all users. Expecting AMD to make open source contributions to improve software on Apple's hardware or Arm GPUs is "naive", not cynical. It would be like expecting Tesla to go to VW and help them improve their combustion engines for free.
ripe 5y ago
For others like me who had no idea what "OBS" in the title refers to: It's open-source software for video recording and live streaming. https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/
- ru552 5y ago
  It's actually some of the best software I've used for streaming. Also, the feature to record a browser tab is a life saver when I'm double booked and don't want to miss content from a meeting.
  - mcast 5y ago
    Just an FYI you may want to double check the laws in your state and company rules on personally recording meetings.
jagger27 5y ago
I want to know if they’re using Rosetta on their M1 test machine or running it natively. Hopefully this patch leads to a proper darwin/arm64 release so I don’t have to use this weird fork[0] with a private GitHub Action to get a native build. The Rosetta version is considerably slower. 0: https://github.com/carlosonunez/obs-installer-for-apple-silicon#download-experimental-official-build-v120-and-above https://github.com/carlosonunez/obs-installer-for-apple-sili...
- lelandfe 5y ago
  > I want to know if they’re using Rosetta on their M1 test machine or running it natively Natively. There's an open PR[0], #5155, to get OBS native on Apple Silicon. That's also what your weird fork uses. Apple's PR is on top of that work: you'll see that there are 10 or so initial commits. Thus #5155 will need to be merged first, before Apple's. #5155 is a huge PR and has been open for 5 months. Its release will also necessitate OBS get an M1 testing solution figured out. Here's a quote[2] from an OBS team member two days ago: > [This PR is] top of our priority list once we release 27.2. We're keenly aware of how badly people want a native Apple Silicon build, and I can assure you that we will definitely be publishing official test builds of OBS with M1 support as soon as we are able. I would nevertheless expect for all of this to take quite a while. [0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155 [1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155#issuecomment-1022340082 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155#issuecomm...
  - jagger27 5y ago
    Thanks!
veenified 5y ago
If anyone watches "Meet Kevin" youtube channel, you would know the bad publicity Apple gets with him attempting to stream on his relatively new Mac Pro system. Any effort to improve that capability would be in Apple's best interest. Streaming is not going away.
- underdeserver 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUvvj5lwue7PspotMDjk5UA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUvvj5lwue7PspotMDjk5UA Seems like a money YouTuber, I've never watched him myself.
  - veenified 5y ago
    I found one of the timestamped video clips where he hits one of the streaming issues on his Mac... https://youtu.be/V5SYAHQhEx8?t=260 https://youtu.be/V5SYAHQhEx8?t=260 EDIT: ...and another one... https://youtu.be/HBXUy5fZNYU?t=890 https://youtu.be/HBXUy5fZNYU?t=890
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Oddskar 5y ago
I find this PR an interesting opportunity to discuss different types of documentation. I've internalized that there's a difference between the PR description, commit messages, and code comments. For me there's different intended audiences for all three, and their contents should thus be shaped accordingly. This PR basically combines all three into one and uses that as the commit message, and I'm not sure of what to make of it. Is this good practice? Personally I find the contents of the "#### Summary of Changes" list to be super-neat and helpful. But should these not be more helpful as comments inside the code? On the other hand, it does explain what the code is doing at this snapshot in time: which makes it more precise than comments in the code -- since future changes might eventually make those comments incorrect. What's your take?
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Personally I like for the dev to do little commits that document each change to a file and then when the branch is merged in you do a squash merge and each commit msg becomes a bullet point.
  - andreareina 5y ago
    I realize this is specific to having an interface that makes it easy, but I find it valuable to step through each commit in a larger merge review. I'm not a fan of how e.g. bitbucket doesn't make it easy to browse the commit contents .
- franga2000 5y ago
  > On the other hand, it does explain what the code is doing at this snapshot in time: which makes it more precise than comments in the code -- since future changes might eventually make those comments incorrect. If changes are made to the code, the comments should be updated accordingly. Getting from code to a PR text is a non-obvious and difficult process and when parts of the code are updated, the trail is easily lost.
  - Oddskar 5y ago
    I share the same opinion. While perhaps more brittle, it’s also immediately apparent
oldiphone 5y ago
< The __MAC_10_15 define may not exist on devices running < 10.15, resulting in this section not being appropriately avoided during compilation. Swapping to 101500 should work for all versions of macOS. So they are mindful of people with old Macs. This is good!
programmarchy 5y ago
In the PR description, if you expand the sections "Baldur’s Gate 3 Demo", "Shadow of the Tomb Raider", etc. it shows the performance improvement of capturing the respective games. Looks like a very significant improvement.
syspec 5y ago
Before / after side by side comparison video: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65677710/151421432-ca5c615b-4fa4-420c-a298-53255fc63d67.mp4 https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65677710/151421432... -- (This and 2 other videos are linked in PR conversation tab: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875)
- DoctorOW 5y ago
  The weird thing to me is that it's not just lower CPU/GPU for OBS, but lower GPU for the game. Maybe just a coincidence, since the CPU fluctuates so much between the two.
  - PudgePacket 5y ago
    Heavily speculating but it's not unreasonable that the recording process impacts the game fps. Eg if you had 2 processes trying to max out your CPU it'd be less efficient than doing them one after the other because they're fighting for resources, doing context switching (losing cache etc).
jscipione 5y ago
Does this mean I’ll finally be able to capture audio in OBS on macOS without third party tools like sound flower and blackhole?
- dodgepong 5y ago
  This is just for display/window capture, not audio capture.
deweywsu 5y ago
ffe2t2tt2t 5y ago
Apple should be ashamed. Microsoft does so much for open source (VS code, typescript, .NET, Blazor and dozens other projects) and even Goolge does quite a lot. And only $Apple$ is an ego-driven company that only cares how to squeeze as much money as possible from customers.
- viktorcode 5y ago
  Apple may have to be ashamed, but bringing up Microsoft as a good OSS citizen? https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22
- azinman2 5y ago
  I love how this comment is here on a PR from Apple for an open source project… WebKit, LLVM, Swift… these are pretty fundamental open source projects, in addition to a bunch of other stuff. You can’t please everyone all the time, and society is too addicted to outrage these days.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Doesn't Microsoft compile Edge with Apple's open sourced Clang compiler?
  - 3836293648 5y ago
    LLVM was a thing before Apple and Apple are far from the only ones working on it
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      Clang isn't LLVM and Clang was created from the start by paid Apple employees and open sourced by Apple. >One of the first uses of LLVM was an OpenGL code compiler for OS X The LLVM project originally intended to use GCC's front end. Apple chose to develop Clang, a new compiler front end that supports C, Objective-C and C++. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background Here's video of Apple's Chris Lattner giving a tech talk on the Google campus introducing Clang and LLVM 2.0 in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks
robbrown451 5y ago
Should this allow OBS to not capture the actual OBS window itself? I'd think it would be nice to eliminate that from what is captured, for those poor people who only have a single monitor. :)
stoicjumbotron 5y ago
How does one go about reviewing such a PR? If the PR consists of smaller commits then it would probably be easier. But if a large commit is made, then what would be the flow to review it?
NetOpWibby 5y ago
I am pleased to see Deus Ex: Mankind Divided in their testing.
nabakin 5y ago
How do we know this is Apple?

722 points by frankjr 5y ago

It's a bit strange to open a pull request from "Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering" instead of an individual account. I wonder if every interaction from this account has to be approved by a board or something.

mr90210 5y ago
It's a valid point, however shall we at least celebrate a bit the fact that a Big Tech is actually contributing in the project?
- masklinn 5y ago
  TBF I don’t know how much “we want $popular project to take advantage of our platform” is to be celebrated. It’s better than bitching about bad support without doing anything. But at the most fundamental of levels it’s really the company working for their customers, through a third party’s project.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Is a company working for its customers to have a good experience with an open source package something we should discourage instead? I’m perfectly happy to celebrate win-win outcomes.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > Is a company working for its customers to have a good experience with an open source package something we should discourage instead? You are aware that there are more than two options?
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Of course. Apple has many options and their choice to contribute to OBS allows me many options as to how to react; I choose applause.
        q3k 5y ago
        I don’t know, this feels to me like applauding a car driver who uses their turn signals correctly. “Hooray, you did the thing you’re supposed to do. Good job you”.
        Someone 5y ago
        Why would Apple be supposed to do this? Without any other argument on the table, taking that statement to its logical conclusion, it would imply Apple is supposed to help make every single project run well on their hardware. Even when restricting that to “open source projects that (cl)aim to run on latest MacOS”, I think that’s not something a vendor is “supposed to do”. So, if Apple only “is supposed to” support some projects, what objective criteria should it use to pick them? I think it’s completely fine if Apple wouldn’t support any open source. I also think it’s completely fine if developers would choose not to write software for their OS because of that.
  - nisegami 5y ago
    I think situations where literally all parties involved are better off than they were before should be celebrated, even if the intentions behind it aren't just philanthropic.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      So you celebrate every time somebody makes a purchase of something they needed and had the means for?
      - nisegami 5y ago
        If those goods were produced by people paid fair wages and using materials sourced sustainably/ethically, sure. So in practice, not very often
- yreg 5y ago
  Is that rare? I would have thought many FAAG employees contribute to open source projects relevant to them as part of their work. After all that seems like the easiest way to influence the projects.
  - jhugo 5y ago
    And contributing changes back to an active project is much less effort than maintaining a fork in perpetuity.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Facebook.. Yes... Amazon... Yes Apple... Not so much. Netflix.. A little Google... Yes...
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Amazon...it depends
    - viktorcode 5y ago
      There's a good post on HN about what it cos Apple to make OS X a certified UNIX. Due to the secrecy of the project they had to use non-corporate accounts for committing bug fixes. The amount of changes was pretty big, but nobody excepts the authors can say it came from Apple. Of course they will commit to open source projects if it suits their needs (if they use those projects). But people have different opinion on what Apple's needs are.
      - couchridr 5y ago
        You probably mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    There's a pretty big distinction between FAANG employees contributing on their own time to things tangentially related too their job, and FAANG employees contributing on behalf of the company (i.e. being paid to do so as an official part of their day job). Judging by the Engineering account being used to submit this patch, this is likely to be an example of the latter.
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
From experience in a big company (not Apple) likely direct manager then senior manager then legal department. The justification and hoop jumping would take much more effort than the coding. Well done to who ever it was.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Contributing to a new open source project requires Senior Vice President approval at Apple.
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    Jesus
  - dagmx 5y ago
    Not accurate. There's multiple levels of contribution approval depending on the frequency, size and extent of the contributions.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      I am aware of several projects that Apple has existing relationships with that have streamlined processes, but to my understanding the “ask a SVP” remains the standard policy for getting permission to contribute to an open source project.
      - dagmx 5y ago
        It is not. You only need the SVP permission if you are doing larger contributions and frequently. Smaller contributions or one offs don't go up the chain as far, and can just require manager+legal approval
onion2k 5y ago
Don't Apple have a policy that their developers aren't supposed to contribute to Open Source without explicit permission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935263)? I imagine this is the result of that policy - if Apple wants to contribute to something as a business there isn't really anyone who would be able to use their individual account to do it without lots of people questioning why that person can when others can't.
- dogma1138 5y ago
  Most companies have this policy it’s actually quite important to protect both the company and the project, it wouldn’t surprise me if big projects even mandate it on their side too. It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project. This looks to be the latter rather than the former so it would make sense it would come from an Apple account.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    > It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project. My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all.
    - threeseed 5y ago
      > My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all. I am not sure exactly but I suspect this is employee-specific and may be only for those working on sensitive projects. I worked at Apple years ago and it was never in my contract or mentioned to me. And there are plenty of more recent developers e.g. Holden Karau who were contributing to open source projects in their spare time whilst working at Apple.
iSnow 5y ago
Could be related to the decision to remove individual names from the product about boxes back when Jobs came back to better control leaking of internal information and cut down on poaching. I would think that Apple does not want anyone to know who is working on the screen capture APIs as this PR would probably come from one member of that group "When Steve came back, one of his company-wide edicts was that the names of individuals must be removed from about boxes." https://bitsplitting.org/2014/01/24/cant-take-that-away/ https://bitsplitting.org/2014/01/24/cant-take-that-away/
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > when Jobs came back to better control leaking of internal information and cut down on poaching He also went further than that by illegally colluding with competitors to lower wages for employees. [0] [1]. What a great man. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-b... [1] https://9to5google.com/2012/01/27/court-filings-show-steve-jobs-told-google-to-stop-poaching-apple-engineers/ https://9to5google.com/2012/01/27/court-filings-show-steve-j...
DangerousPie 5y ago
Well, given the amount of publicity this PR is getting it probably makes sense to not just let a random software engineer post whatever they feel like.
SloopJon 5y ago
For those of you who have contributed to a Github (or similar) project in your capacity as an employee, do you use a work account separate from your own?
- maccard 5y ago
  yes.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Depends on the company, usually. Currently, I make my contributions with a personal account.
olliej 5y ago
It’s very team dependent - look at llvm and webkit for instance. It could also be that someone would rather not be out in public, which is also understandable.
viraptor 5y ago
HP tried to do something similar when working with openstack. It was done for very bureaucratic reasons / company visibility. (Author was preserved, commit was by something like the-project-name@hp.com) A slightly misguided idea by people who don't normally work with big open source. It was reverted since it messed with project statistics.

jcelerier 5y ago

- #if __MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= __MAC_10_15 + #if __MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= 101500 // __MAC_10_15 ah, yes, clean code

jamessb 5y ago
The message for the PR (under the Conversation tab) justifies this as: > plugins/mac-capture/mac-display-capture.m:621 - The __MAC_10_15 define may not exist on devices running < 10.15, resulting in this section not being appropriately avoided during compilation. Swapping to 101500 should work for all versions of macOS.
- masklinn 5y ago
  A conditional define might be a good alternative tho?
- jcelerier 5y ago
  yes, it's the whole macos compatibility / availability layer which is terrible. In contrast a good system like Qt looks like #if QT_VERSION > QT_VERSION_CHECK(5, 15, 0) ... #endif and works also for Qt 5.1 or Qt 4 or 3 (i think that's when this macro was introduced, pretty much at the same time than os x 10.1 ?)
  - jakear 5y ago
    That’s just adding another layer of abstraction over exactly what the Mac case does. I prefer code that is so simple it doesn’t need to be abstract, as every abstraction layer is a potential bug layer. Not even just “potential” in QT’s case, a quick search turned up https://forum.qt.io/topic/31071/moc-and-qt_version_check-bug https://forum.qt.io/topic/31071/moc-and-qt_version_check-bug and https://forum.qt.io/topic/37882/qt-4-8-qt_version_check-and-moc-workaround https://forum.qt.io/topic/37882/qt-4-8-qt_version_check-and-... as cases where folks have been bit by some tooling in a Qt4 environment not understanding the macro properly.
    - 5y ago

artonge 5y ago

Apparently not the first time from the activity of the user: https://github.com/Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering?tab=overview&from=2021-08-01&to=2021-08-31 https://github.com/Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering?tab=overv... https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/pull/310 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/pull/310 Strangely, a lot of contributions to numpy.

ink404 5y ago
Not too strange if Apple wants a competitive development environment.
- viktorcode 5y ago
  Maybe I'll be laughed at, but right now I consider the most competitive Apple's development environment the Swift Playgrounds on iPad. I just so wish to see this sleek and fast app replacing old cranky Xcode on macOS by adding missing features.

caaqil 5y ago

The pull request page might be more readable: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875

perryizgr8 5y ago

I wonder if this will provide a way to hide the yellow dot that appears in the corner (to indicate mic access). It is a great idea in most cases, but quite annoying to see on screen recordings.

pilif 5y ago

This commit in the PR https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875/commits/860a20696d280402b2c3cb1ed96e4256f9dd223f https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875/commits/8... provides an excellent example of why commit messages matter. This is more than 1000 lines diff to the build system (and thus potentially very dangerous because of possible supply chain attacks) which has the commit message of "CI: Update build scripts and Github actions workflow" Never say what you ware doing (it's obvious this commit is updating build scripts). Say why you are doing it, especially when your commit feels unrelated or at most very tangentially related to the objective of your PR.

disintegrator 5y ago
I'm all for well presented PRs/commits but I'm not sure how a good commit message mitigates the risk of a supply chain attack in this case.
- pilif 5y ago
  It might help the reviewer to not flat-out reject the PR because it gives them a fame of mind as to what the intention of the change is.
rkangel 5y ago
> Never say what you ware doing (it's obvious this commit is updating build scripts) DEFINITELY say what you are doing. And then say why. This blog post is a good description of the most prevalent convention in how to write good and useful messages (e.g. this is what the Linux Kernel does and given the history of git there's some flow down): https://cbea.ms/git-commit/ https://cbea.ms/git-commit/ The key thing that means you should start with what is having a short one-line summary of what you're doing so you can look at a simple log and see which commit you're interested in.
- pferde 5y ago
  Also, if your commit message has parts that say "also, this", "also, that", don't be lazy and break those alsos into separate commits!

vault 5y ago

I hope those changes were planned and agreed upon beforehand. I'd hate to review 274 changed files out of the blue

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

twelg 5y ago

twelgblerg 5y ago

the_duke 5y ago
Why exactly did you create two new accounts to post the very same message? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113137 )

whazor 5y ago

Now I hope they improve the situation of virtual cameras. Now you need to code sign all kinds of applications in order for them to recognize your applications, which often breaks those applications.

evanb 5y ago
I really want to use the virtual camera in FaceTime. But it's near-impossible to get it to work.
Telemakhos 5y ago
I've still got an old iMac running High Sierra just so that can use virtual cameras. It used to work beautifully.

clock99 5y ago

hendry 5y ago

Makes me wonder how efficient Xorg vs Wayland capture is on Arch btw

avipars 5y ago

Nice to see them contribute to open source!

clone1018 5y ago

For anyone trying to find the actual changes made, vs the build system that was modified, you can find them with this compare: https://github.com/PatTheMav/obs-studio/compare/universal-build...Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering:macos_screencapturekit_support https://github.com/PatTheMav/obs-studio/compare/universal-bu... The branch on GitHub should change its reference until the build system is merged into the main branch.

shantnutiwari 5y ago

Maybe OBS will work on my Mac now. I struggled to get it working, everything recording as I wanted. Thought it was just "crappy open source" stuff, so gave up. Some time later, I tried OBS on Windows, and it just worked, first time, no fiddling required. And I realised the problem was on the Mac side, not Obs. I know, its just one anecdote.

sprkwd 5y ago
Getting the audio to work on MacOS OBS is always a pain.
- j_koreth 5y ago
  Personally I had luck with using Blackhole
  - TillE 5y ago
    It shouldn't require a third-party driver! It's basic functionality which should be provided by the OS in a userspace API. Blackhole does its job, except your volume buttons stop working when you're on a multi-output device. Quite a pain.
xd1936 5y ago
How long ago was this? They've been making some big stability improvements over the last year or two.
Johnyma22 5y ago
Adding to the anecdote, OBS works great on Ubuntu.
symfoniq 5y ago
Between one and two years ago, my team had serious issues getting OBS working reliably on T2-equipped Macs. We switched to an expensive commercial product and all our problems went away. I couldn't duplicate the OBS issues on older Macs that didn't have the T2 chip.

acomjean 5y ago

ScreenCaptureKit seems to Apple only, so this only helps Mac users. While nice it seems to be a trend where Apple seems to contribute to open source projects now to improve its own performance only on their own devices (blender comes to mind). Maybe Im being a bit cynical. Still a positive I guess.

outsidetheparty 5y ago
While I see what you're saying, to be honest it seems pretty reasonable to me for Apple to contribute work that helps Apple. Many OSS contributions are "scratching your own itch", no?
ninkendo 5y ago
I mean, it's not a bad engineering philosophy for things as low-level as this to be provided by the OS as a framework. Capturing screen output at a high refresh rate without introducing lag may be better implemented with lower-level access to certain system components, in a way that may require certain privileges in order to make it work. You can provide a nice higher-level API (like ScreenCaptureKit) to access such "privileged" capabilities from normal apps, so that arbitrary open-source software (like OBS) can hook into it. It seems like Apple already made ScreenCaptureKit for their platforms, and wanted to help OBS by hooking it up to ScreenCaptureKit to take advantage of that work. The alternative, which is to do all the private/privileged stuff directly in OBS, means that Apple would have to give the general ability for arbitrary software to do what ScreenCaptureKit is doing, which may be a security issue (spyware that snoops on what's being displayed on screen comes to mind.) Making something like ScreenCaptureKit as the supported interface to do this kind of thing, can ensure the app triggers the proper permissions dialog/etc so that screen recording doesn't happen without user knowledge.
maxwell86 5y ago
> Maybe Im being a bit cynical. If Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Qualcomm, etc. would all contribute to open source to make everything work on all their devices with good perf, then that would be very good for all users. Expecting AMD to make open source contributions to improve software on Apple's hardware or Arm GPUs is "naive", not cynical. It would be like expecting Tesla to go to VW and help them improve their combustion engines for free.

ripe 5y ago

For others like me who had no idea what "OBS" in the title refers to: It's open-source software for video recording and live streaming. https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/

ru552 5y ago
It's actually some of the best software I've used for streaming. Also, the feature to record a browser tab is a life saver when I'm double booked and don't want to miss content from a meeting.
- mcast 5y ago
  Just an FYI you may want to double check the laws in your state and company rules on personally recording meetings.

jagger27 5y ago

I want to know if they’re using Rosetta on their M1 test machine or running it natively. Hopefully this patch leads to a proper darwin/arm64 release so I don’t have to use this weird fork[0] with a private GitHub Action to get a native build. The Rosetta version is considerably slower. 0: https://github.com/carlosonunez/obs-installer-for-apple-silicon#download-experimental-official-build-v120-and-above https://github.com/carlosonunez/obs-installer-for-apple-sili...

lelandfe 5y ago
> I want to know if they’re using Rosetta on their M1 test machine or running it natively Natively. There's an open PR[0], #5155, to get OBS native on Apple Silicon. That's also what your weird fork uses. Apple's PR is on top of that work: you'll see that there are 10 or so initial commits. Thus #5155 will need to be merged first, before Apple's. #5155 is a huge PR and has been open for 5 months. Its release will also necessitate OBS get an M1 testing solution figured out. Here's a quote[2] from an OBS team member two days ago: > [This PR is] top of our priority list once we release 27.2. We're keenly aware of how badly people want a native Apple Silicon build, and I can assure you that we will definitely be publishing official test builds of OBS with M1 support as soon as we are able. I would nevertheless expect for all of this to take quite a while. [0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155 [1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155#issuecomment-1022340082 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5155#issuecomm...
- jagger27 5y ago
  Thanks!

veenified 5y ago

If anyone watches "Meet Kevin" youtube channel, you would know the bad publicity Apple gets with him attempting to stream on his relatively new Mac Pro system. Any effort to improve that capability would be in Apple's best interest. Streaming is not going away.

underdeserver 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUvvj5lwue7PspotMDjk5UA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUvvj5lwue7PspotMDjk5UA Seems like a money YouTuber, I've never watched him myself.
- veenified 5y ago
  I found one of the timestamped video clips where he hits one of the streaming issues on his Mac... https://youtu.be/V5SYAHQhEx8?t=260 https://youtu.be/V5SYAHQhEx8?t=260 EDIT: ...and another one... https://youtu.be/HBXUy5fZNYU?t=890 https://youtu.be/HBXUy5fZNYU?t=890

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Oddskar 5y ago

I find this PR an interesting opportunity to discuss different types of documentation. I've internalized that there's a difference between the PR description, commit messages, and code comments. For me there's different intended audiences for all three, and their contents should thus be shaped accordingly. This PR basically combines all three into one and uses that as the commit message, and I'm not sure of what to make of it. Is this good practice? Personally I find the contents of the "#### Summary of Changes" list to be super-neat and helpful. But should these not be more helpful as comments inside the code? On the other hand, it does explain what the code is doing at this snapshot in time: which makes it more precise than comments in the code -- since future changes might eventually make those comments incorrect. What's your take?

edgyquant 5y ago
Personally I like for the dev to do little commits that document each change to a file and then when the branch is merged in you do a squash merge and each commit msg becomes a bullet point.
- andreareina 5y ago
  I realize this is specific to having an interface that makes it easy, but I find it valuable to step through each commit in a larger merge review. I'm not a fan of how e.g. bitbucket doesn't make it easy to browse the commit contents .
franga2000 5y ago
> On the other hand, it does explain what the code is doing at this snapshot in time: which makes it more precise than comments in the code -- since future changes might eventually make those comments incorrect. If changes are made to the code, the comments should be updated accordingly. Getting from code to a PR text is a non-obvious and difficult process and when parts of the code are updated, the trail is easily lost.
- Oddskar 5y ago
  I share the same opinion. While perhaps more brittle, it’s also immediately apparent

oldiphone 5y ago

< The __MAC_10_15 define may not exist on devices running < 10.15, resulting in this section not being appropriately avoided during compilation. Swapping to 101500 should work for all versions of macOS. So they are mindful of people with old Macs. This is good!

programmarchy 5y ago

In the PR description, if you expand the sections "Baldur’s Gate 3 Demo", "Shadow of the Tomb Raider", etc. it shows the performance improvement of capturing the respective games. Looks like a very significant improvement.

syspec 5y ago

Before / after side by side comparison video: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65677710/151421432-ca5c615b-4fa4-420c-a298-53255fc63d67.mp4 https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65677710/151421432... -- (This and 2 other videos are linked in PR conversation tab: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875)

DoctorOW 5y ago
The weird thing to me is that it's not just lower CPU/GPU for OBS, but lower GPU for the game. Maybe just a coincidence, since the CPU fluctuates so much between the two.
- PudgePacket 5y ago
  Heavily speculating but it's not unreasonable that the recording process impacts the game fps. Eg if you had 2 processes trying to max out your CPU it'd be less efficient than doing them one after the other because they're fighting for resources, doing context switching (losing cache etc).

jscipione 5y ago

Does this mean I’ll finally be able to capture audio in OBS on macOS without third party tools like sound flower and blackhole?

dodgepong 5y ago
This is just for display/window capture, not audio capture.

deweywsu 5y ago

ffe2t2tt2t 5y ago

Apple should be ashamed. Microsoft does so much for open source (VS code, typescript, .NET, Blazor and dozens other projects) and even Goolge does quite a lot. And only $Apple$ is an ego-driven company that only cares how to squeeze as much money as possible from customers.

viktorcode 5y ago
Apple may have to be ashamed, but bringing up Microsoft as a good OSS citizen? https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22
azinman2 5y ago
I love how this comment is here on a PR from Apple for an open source project… WebKit, LLVM, Swift… these are pretty fundamental open source projects, in addition to a bunch of other stuff. You can’t please everyone all the time, and society is too addicted to outrage these days.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Doesn't Microsoft compile Edge with Apple's open sourced Clang compiler?
- 3836293648 5y ago
  LLVM was a thing before Apple and Apple are far from the only ones working on it
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    Clang isn't LLVM and Clang was created from the start by paid Apple employees and open sourced by Apple. >One of the first uses of LLVM was an OpenGL code compiler for OS X The LLVM project originally intended to use GCC's front end. Apple chose to develop Clang, a new compiler front end that supports C, Objective-C and C++. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background Here's video of Apple's Chris Lattner giving a tech talk on the Google campus introducing Clang and LLVM 2.0 in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks

robbrown451 5y ago

Should this allow OBS to not capture the actual OBS window itself? I'd think it would be nice to eliminate that from what is captured, for those poor people who only have a single monitor. :)

stoicjumbotron 5y ago

How does one go about reviewing such a PR? If the PR consists of smaller commits then it would probably be easier. But if a large commit is made, then what would be the flow to review it?

NetOpWibby 5y ago

I am pleased to see Deus Ex: Mankind Divided in their testing.

nabakin 5y ago

How do we know this is Apple?