Unable to launch OBS at all

[nd4ios]

Unable to Launch OBS at all due to the program not being able to create any required files apparently, I had to manually create the folders it was requesting but now I'm stuck at Failed to open global.ini: -1 then closing that error pops up Failed to initialize global config

Help, this is probably not the only file its not able to find/create, once this file is created or modified then it'll probably ask for more. Any Ideas as to what to do to fix this please thanks

 

[itst]

It should not ask you to create folders or files. How did you install OBS?

On a Mac, you download the .dmg-file, open it and then drag the program icon to the applications folder. That‘s it.

 

[nd4ios]

It should not ask you to create folders or files. How did you install OBS?

On a Mac, you download the .dmg-file, open it and then drag the program icon to the applications folder. That‘s it.

i did it that way ive tried uninstalling and reinstalling etc... also my mac is an apple silicon mac and when i launch obs it says it cant access said files because the folders and files it is saying it cant launch are non existent, i even checked the installer file and the installer file does not have any of those files that are needed. I see i forgot to mention im running it on an arm Mac OS computer

 

[itst]

And you used the arm64/Apple Silicone installer?

 

[nd4ios]

And you used the arm64/Apple Silicone installer?

yep, i even tried manual installation too, i checked the package installer contents and the installer doesnt even have the required files

 

[nd4ios]

These are the 3 notifs after creating the required folders i get when i launch OBS

 

[RustyPeterson7]

I cannot even get OBS go open up. It just goes to not responding. I am running a 2023 Macmini and Mac OS Ventura 13.4 - this is M2 Pro CPU - Apple. Any suggestions?

 

[nd4ios]

Still not working same issue here must be something wrong with the installer or the program is missing certain files or it is not asking for required permissions and unable to create certain files thus making the app unlaunchable and unusable

 

[shadow steel]

reinstall obs

 

[nd4ios]

reinstall obs

yep this is what happened, i deleted it from my system for several months then since i saw that the latest update was from june so i downloaded it and still gives me the same error. doesnt matter how many times i uninstall and reinstall it seems as it just sticks to the exact same issue (ive unistalled and reinstalled several times before, i even looked at the installers package contents and i do not see any global.ini files there either, so its either missing files, or unable to create required files, or some program that creates the required files is either missing, not called, or a bug/typo in that code that doesnt even let it run.

 

[jeanpaultru]

This is crazy I have an older Mac and OBS started acting up a few days ago when I deleted a scene. and died. Now nothing opens the application

 

[pixelcoin]

So I've finally found the issue and hopefully this helps anyone else.

1. Go to the obs-studio folder. You can do this via the terminal by running the following commands:
   

   cd "/Users/<YOUR_USER>/Library/Application Support/obs-studio"  # change <YOUR_USER> to your login username
   open .

2. Notice that the global.ini and basic are actually aliases which are linked to non-existent files. This is the cause of our error! See the below image of what it looked like for me.
   
   
3. Remove the global.ini and basic aliases.
   

   rm global.ini basic

4. Now try launching OBS again and this time it should all work. Notice that the global.ini file and basic folder get repopulated into the obs-studio folder.

I'm not sure why or how they became aliases in the first place. For context, I've been having this issue for over a year. I tried running OBS from a different user on the same Mac which worked fine and helped me isolate the issue to being within my own user account. Then the rest was history.

 

[Ron0x]

I had this problem too after trying to restore my backup of OBS after a new Windows installation. Thanks to the post above here I found the global.ini, basic and the user.ini. After deleting the files, I actually could start OBS again. But then I encountered new problems.

I restored the backup again and instead of deleting those files I went and edited the ini files and I found out that under [Locations] in the ini file it was referring to my old \\users\[account name] folder. When I changed it to the correct path name everything worked again without any issues.

 

[kagie]

i for the love of god cannot get this to work. I'm having similar problems, "Failed to create directory /Users/<myuser>/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/basic"
And I tried going into terminal, figuring out what application support was, but the folder is basically empty and only has a folder called "plugins". help plss. I also have the popup "OBS quit unexpectedly". idk what to do anymore

 

[realslimjd]

i for the love of god cannot get this to work. I'm having similar problems, "Failed to create directory /Users/<myuser>/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/basic"
And I tried going into terminal, figuring out what application support was, but the folder is basically empty and only has a folder called "plugins". help plss. I also have the popup "OBS quit unexpectedly". idk what to do anymore

I just had the same problem. When I checked the ownership of the the obs-studio folder I found that it was owned by root rather than my user. You can check this in terminal if you go to /Users/<myuser>/Library/Application Support/ and run ls -lah | grep obs. You should see an output like this:
drwxr-xr-x@ 12 {user} staff 384B Sep 1 16:13 obs-studio
If it says root rather than {user}, you can fix it by running sudo chown -R {user}:staff obs-studio. Hope that helps!