[ANSWERED] Does Syphon work with M1 Macbook Pro? Or NDI instead?

[trevorn1]

Hi!

I'm using Zoom OSC with Isadora for an interactive installation and as a part of an orchestra piece, and for the show I'm planning to run a portion on an intel 16" MBP fully spec'd but I've been seeing and hearing about the M1 MBPs and wondering if that would be a better option. I'm enjoying using Syphon on the current computer because it's very low latency, I'm wondering if that's the case on Apple silicon or if NDI is pretty quick.

Basically, does Syphon work on M1 macs? If not, is NDI latency as low? 

Thanks! This has been a challenge to figure out and decide.

[Juriaan]

@trevorn1

Hi there Trevor, 

Syphon works on M1 Macs.

Syphon is basically texture sharing, it shares the image that your GPU produces directly with an other progress. NDI is an protocol that first needs to encode the stream (Using your CPU) to share it over the net (NDI stands for Network Device Interface)

Syphon will always be cheaper / less latency then NDI because of this extra calculation step.

[mark]

@juriaan said:

Syphon will always be cheaper / less latency then NDI because of this extra calculation step.

 @trevorn1

To emphasize what Juriaan is saying, it will be a lot faster (like instantaneous)  and consume far less (like nearly zero) of your CPU/GPU. NDI consumes a lot of CPU energy compressing the video.

Best Wishes,
Mark

[trevorn1]

@mark Thanks! That's really great to hear, I didn't realize NDI was compressing, that explains a lot. This is a huge help, thank you both so much for the thorough explanations. Just got my new video computer and I'm going to jump in. @Juriaan