Mac Mini M1 (Apple Silicon) + SecuritySpy = CRAZY
There is no fan noise, everything is butter, the companion SecuritySpy iOS app feels much more responsive now. I'm also running Sighthound (only for the pet detection, believe it or not), nothing phases this thing.
So, because it's silent, I decided to use this Mac Mini as my main computer until Apple releases new hardware later this year. After an hour of simultaneous installations (Plex server scanning, Adobe Creative Cloud installs, Backblaze migration, iCloud Drive syncing for the first time) *while* running all both SS and Sighthound, I reached over to touch the case, it was ice cold.
Prior to this M1, I was running SS on a maxed out late-2019 Intel Mac Mini with 32 GB ram and a 1 TB SSD as a dedicated security camera computer. I experienced consistent frame drops in the logs, so I had to reduce to 20 FPS per camera, and even then the fans ran all the time, the closet was hot and noisy.
These new M1 chips are insane.
Comments
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Many thanks for sharing your experiences, it's great to hear the M1 mini is working so well for you. The new chips are quite amazing!
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I think I am going to have to make the jump. I thought everything was going good after fixing some networking issues that caused timing delays. Of late though I am getting frame decoding issues. There were no changes to the computer and I have security only patches set for auto update. I did update everything to the latest releases and still getting the errors. The crazy part is that they are happening at what should be low volume times (3am on one ovation, 5am on another). All I can think is that the Intel Mac Mini is coming to the end of its processing capabilities.
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Hi @schneideris images in the middle of the night tend to be low-light and therefore more noisy, so this could be producing video streams with higher bandwidth and complexity, which could be overloading the Mac's hardware video decoder. But the difference between day and night here shouldn't be large, so it sounds like you could generally be on the edge of this Mac's decoding abilities.
One thing you can do is to reduce the frame rate of all cameras until you no longer see these warnings. Otherwise, an M1/M2 Mac mini would certainly solve these performance issues!
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Thanks Ben,
that is good to know. I am going to see if I can adjust the night config in the cameras and make the difference to extend just a little more the Mac Mini life.
-Peter
