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
do you have any results on the number of transcoded streams the M1 can handle?
I just listened to Marco's decision to upgrade is Mac mini server to M1 on episode 411, and now that you're saying there's no fan noise, I'm very tempted. How fast is comskip, for example with a 30 - 60 minute recording?
Wow -- great work! I currently run my 2012 Mac mini behind my living room TV, and I can hear the fans all day. I'm really tempted to make the jump. Are you just running the base 8GB RAM config? With High Sierra, my 2012 Mac mini with 16G uses around 500 MB swap memory, which kinda bothers me.
Looking at power consumption, I'm shocked Mac mini power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information - Apple Support
Mac mini (M1, 2020)
Idle 6.8 W 23.2 BTU/h
Max 39 W 133 BTU/h
Mac mini (Late 2012) 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
Idle 11 W 38 BTU/h
Max 85 W 290 BTU/h
I got the 16GB version, but not sure I needed it. @dbloom is using a 8GB model as his DVR without issues.
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I forgot to edit the comskip.ini file. Do we need to do anything different for M1 Apple Silicon? With 8 cores, do you have any recommendations? Thanks! @dbloom
Since Channels DVR reads the override comskip.ini each time it runs comskip you could experiment.
Change to thread_count=2 then Redect Commercials on a recording
Change to thread_count=4 then Redect Commercials on the same recording
That's what I did with my quad-core NAS.
thread_count=4 was just slightly faster than 2 or 3, but brought my NAS to its knees.
I settled on 2.
With 8 cores you could experiment with values up to 8.
I'm just realizing that you had a build for M1 here. Are the updates being pushed out through the DVR Server Settings pane ARM64 native? Thank you!
Yes
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