MacOS 11, Apple Silicon and Channels

No worries. There are some fairly legit reasons developers might wish to disable it, but I imagine most will embrace it.

Did the team “benchmark” how well Channels Server performs on the Apple Silicon Dev Kit? Or are you all planning to see how it fares with M1 next week?

I’m debating upgrading to the M1 Mac mini from 2012 quad-core i7 Mac mini. Comskip, ffmpeg and HLS transcoder / encoder are my concerns.

We'll have Apple Silicon Macs in a few weeks. While we expect the computers to be fast, it shouldn't effect Channels DVR Server too much as it's not really performance heavy software, but commercial indexing should be faster.

Channels DVR Server has been running on ARM for years so we expect things to work well. We'll be able to say more in a couple weeks when the hardware arrives.

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How about the Channels App? Will the iOS app now work with MacOS?

Not until we’ve had time to try it.

First report I've seen, apparently it works flawlessly. And now it looks like I'll be buying an M1 MacBook Pro sooner rather than later :slight_smile:

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The DVR doesn't work perfectly. I've had it freeze a couple of time using a M1 Mac mini. Overall it seems okay, but it never froze on me using an intel Mac.

The developers are aware of this and told me there might be problems at first running under rosetta.it's not unusable, just not perfect yet.

In the latest pre-release build we have fixed the freezing issue under Rosetta 2

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Has that build been published? I switched from a Raspberry PI install to a Mac mini M1 install for transcoding. Currently on 2020.09.14.2100.

Pi DVR was fine, but something happened to the hard drive where the DVR lost permissions to the hard drive, checking the drive with Disk Utility killed off all the recordings. Was able to save a backup and migrate to the Mac, but lost all my recordings :(. Gave me the reason to move.

We are testing a new ARM64 native build of the dvr server for M1. To try it out, download the latest installer from https://channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com/InstallChannelsDVR.zip

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Downloaded and installed. Working great, the only difference I can tell between it and the Pi is seek times seem slower.

Hey guys! I noticed you released your Apple Silicon version today - congrats! Out of curiosity, how well does it run? Are tasks like transcoding hardware accelerated on the M1, or are they processed by the CPU? I mean, I'm sure a CPU transcode would be plenty fast, but I'm curious if you were able to offload work to the video-related hardware...

Video transcoding is hardware accelerated, yes.

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Any update? @loudsnorelax seems to be fairing well. I'm curious how much the M1 Mac mini fan spins up during comskip and transcoding.

It’s been perfect. I’ve not heard the fan turn on.

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Is it a universal ? Its not coming up in the App Store search on the Mac

E: Oh you are referring to the m1 arm dvr. Thought it was in reference to client app

The fan never seems to turn on. Performance is great, especially compared to my old Mid-2011 Mini.

Comskip results on a 1-hour H264 recording:

  • 2011 Mini: 4m42s (with fan blasting full speed)
  • M1 Mini: 2m55s (with no fan noise)
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The new installer for Apple silicon Macs, doesn't have an option to re-install, do we just uninstall and then re-install? we won't lose anything?

Yes you can uninstall/reinstall.

Check Activity Monitor first and see if channels-dvr shows as Intel or Apple

It shows as Intel, so I'll reinstall it