Mac Transcoding issues

[jchapman24]

Hello,

I’m having a strange issue with transcoding. I have a Mac Mini M4 as my server. I’d like to stream from the server when traveling away from home.

I have found that after some period of server uptime, transcoding to a lower bitrate does not perform adequately. I wind up with <1x transcoding speeds, regardless of the bitrate I select for streaming. This results in frequent pauses for buffering.

If I reboot the server, I am able to get much stronger transcoding performance - >2x transcoding speeds - which resolves all buffering pauses. But, I’d prefer not to have to restart because it interrupts any recordings in progress.

Any thoughts on why the transcoding speed is poor? The hardware transcoding is enabled, and debug doesn’t show any issues. I’ve looked at logs and can’t seem to sort out a difference before and after restart.

Any thoughts?

[tmm1]

Are you watching live or recording ?

1x is the max possible for live tv

[jchapman24]

Yes, I know that and it makes sense.

The issue happens with both live and recording. When I say I’m getting less than 1x, it’s like 0.9x and sometimes spiking down to 0.3x. And I get the same performance watching a recording. If I restart the machine, I can get a consistent 1x from live, and 2x+ from recording.

[tmm1]

That's quite strange. We haven't heard of this before..

[jchapman24]

Anything I can do with logging or otherwise to help identify root cause and troubleshoot?

[tmm1]

Can check Activity Monitor when this happens to see if there's excessive CPU or MEM or IO usage

M4 is a very powerful machine, so my best guess would be a bottleneck on IO side, maybe due to failing hard drive.