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FlyingTexan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 13, 2015
941
783
For a plex server I’m wondering if the M1 mini has hardware acceleration for transcoding. My server can only do software (Ryzen) so may need to add something to better serve.
 

russell_314

macrumors 604
Feb 10, 2019
6,671
10,271
USA
For a plex server I’m wondering if the M1 mini has hardware acceleration for transcoding. My server can only do software (Ryzen) so may need to add something to better serve.
I have never done the PLEX server thing so I'm clueless but I remember watching this video on YouTube so maybe it will help?

 

jdb8167

macrumors 601
Nov 17, 2008
4,859
4,599
For a plex server I’m wondering if the M1 mini has hardware acceleration for transcoding. My server can only do software (Ryzen) so may need to add something to better serve.
I don't know about Plex but if you use the M1 native version of Handbrake, you can use the hardware supported h.264 and h.265 codecs for transcoding. In Handbrake they are H.264 (VideoToolbox) and H.265 (VideoToolbox). If you add them to the config in FFMPEG they work there too.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,678
They have the hardware, the question is whether Plex supports it.
 

Dameatball

macrumors regular
Feb 7, 2014
148
69
San Francisco
For a plex server I’m wondering if the M1 mini has hardware acceleration for transcoding. My server can only do software (Ryzen) so may need to add something to better serve.
I was curious about this myself. Did you ever get an answer or find out first hand?

I was also wondering if hardware transcoding was even necessary due the m1 processing power that's utilized with software transcoding.

I have the 2018 i7 mini and it's fairly beefy but the m1 apparently blows the doors off it in both single and multi-core. sounds like it's all upside from what I understand.
 

jdb8167

macrumors 601
Nov 17, 2008
4,859
4,599
I was curious about this myself. Did you ever get an answer or find out first hand?

I was also wondering if hardware transcoding was even necessary due the m1 processing power that's utilized with software transcoding.

I have the 2018 i7 mini and it's fairly beefy but the m1 apparently blows the doors off it in both single and multi-core. sounds like it's all upside from what I understand.
Comparing transcoding in Handbrake between the videotoolbox hardware accelerated h.264 and h.265 vs the pure software versions, the hardware accelerated speed is 10x with a considerable loss of either quality or compression size.
 
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