H265 hardware acceleration on Apple Silicon?

jlbrown
jlbrown
in SecuritySpy

We are greatly increasing the number of cameras we have connected to Security Spy and was considering using a new Mac mini (hopefully the M1 Max version is released soon!).


Does anyone know if Apple Silicon based Macs do native H265 decoding? (All the new cameras will have H265 capabilities).


Can find info that it does H264 of course, but I haven't seen any mention of H265. Does anyone know?

Thanks, James.

Comments

  • Senna_F1
    Senna_F1

    Here are all my H.265 cameras on my M1 showing HW decoding. My problem is being able to play the videos back in the SS browser. I've had this issue from the beginning, but I don't know what the issue is other than SS and VTDecoder process taking up a lot of RAM. SS just really struggles, sometimes not even loading one frame of a video into the browser, and stuttering and stopping while trying to play the other videos. Hopefully, your M1 and H.265 videos wont have the same problem.

    https://imgur.com/a/WmLSTyC

  • Ben
    Ben

    Yes, the M1 chip certainly does support decoding H.265 video data in hardware. In fact its decoding performance for H.265 is significantly higher than that for H.264, so H.265 is definitely the best codec to use if your cameras support it. It's best to use our system requirements calculator to spec out your system, as this uses real-world test data to derive its results.

    @Senna_F1 - I'm not entirely sure what could be the cause of your problem, beyond a simple lack of memory (I believe your system has 8 GB RAM). I see that you've made another post about this in the Settings for camera that will use less RAM discussion so I will take a look at the info you have provided and will reply there.

  • jlbrown
    jlbrown

    Thanks Senna and Ben - just what I wanted to hear! 2% per camera is fantastic.


    The System Requirements Calculator was really interesting too. I thought the M1s would blow all the Intels away, but some of the high end Intels still hold up pretty well (28 cores probably helps a bit!).


    Fingers crossed for Mac mini M1 Max announcement next month!

  • Ben
    Ben

    Yes, some of the Intel machines still perform very well. This is partly because the faster Intel chips have a greater capacity for hardware-accelerated H.264/H.265 video decoding than the M1. But this will all change when the M1 Pro/Max chips come to the Mac mini. We have testing results from MacBook Pros with the Max/Pro chips and their capacity for hardware-accelerated decoding is much higher than the basic M1. Plus, they can take on a lot of additional decoding in the CPU too, and the combination blows any Intel Mac out of the water.

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