VLC conversion performance

[pshufd]

I had three videos to convert to H. 264. I do not know what the source format is. I actually wanted to use iMovie to edit the files but iMovie wouldn't read them so I found out that I had to convert them. I started up VLC on my M1 mini and started the conversion and it was running really slowly. I glanced over at Activity Monitor and noticed that it was running through Rosetta 2. So I looked around and found that VLC also provides a Universal Binary and an AS-only kit - I just had to look around on the download page to find them. So I installed that and started the convert but I also started the same convert on my Windows system (i7-10700). The Windows system finished the conversions quite a bit quicker than the M1 mini did. I was a bit surprised at this as I thought that the M1 was really good at transcoding with special hardware support. It is possible that VLC only recently got their port done and that they haven't looked at using special M1 APIs for faster transcoding.

I did the rest of the transcodes on my Intel box. The Intel box also has eight high-performance cores so that might help. It also has a nice GPU though I didn't watch to see if it was used.

I've seen lots of videos showing the M1 beating theoretically faster Intel and AMD CPUs on some video editing jobs and was kind of expecting that but those beats are usually on pro software and maybe those programs take advantage of Apple's Special Sauce.

 

[Mr Screech]

Take a look at Handbrake using the VideoToolbox option, it uses h264/5 Apple Silicon hardware encoding.

 

[pshufd]

Take a look at Handbrake using the VideoToolbox option, it uses h264/5 Apple Silicon hardware encoding.

I'll test it out. I used to use Handbrake many years but I guess I didn't bring it over to one of my machines when I upgraded. VLC was more convenient because I use it to watch videos on my mobile devices and PCs. So it looks like software developers have to do specific work to take advantage of all of the hardware features in M1. Which means that things will get faster with time on our M1 systems.

 

[pshufd]

Timings:

Handbrake (M1 AS): 7:15 855.6 MB
VLC (M1 AS): 6:45 637 MB
VLC (i7-10700): 5:45 647 MB

I feel like one of those benchmark YouTubers.

I'm surprised that Handbrake was the slowest and generated the largest file. Perhaps it's using different quality settings or something else. My Windows system still seems the fastest. It does have a higher Geekbench 5 Multicore score so I guess that there's just more raw CPU performance in the i7.

I guess I'll do transcoding on Windows but capture and editing on the M1.

 

[Mr Screech]

If I'm encoding h.264(x264) I'm getting around 160fps on a certain clip. The same clip with h.264(videotoolbox) gets me 400fps. Maybe test your clip on handbrake's x264 to see if VLC is already using the hardware encoding?

 

[pshufd]

I played around with Handbrake and there were a bunch of quality settings so it may be that it's set by default to a higher quality than VLC is. I'm going to leave things the way they are as performance is good enough for what I need though I will experiment with the quality modes a bit more.