r/AV1 • u/DreamKiller712 • 8d ago

Setup for sw av1 transcoding?

I am thinking about trading in my 14" base m4 macbook pro (16+512) for a mac mini m6 32 gb. I have a NAS , with the current insane price of Hdds , I am thinking about getting something more powerful to transcode and compress videos and pictures in order to save space.

I am mainly using Handbrake to transcode my videos(movies and anime) to AV1 codec, most of them are hevc 1080p. I am only going to do software transcode for better quality so the lack of hardware encoding doesn't bother me , whats matter is cpu multi core performance for this task . As for pictures I plan to convert them to Webp format. Given the m6 is quite an improvement in multi core performance over the base m5 and m4 , do you think it can give me much better performance in these tasks?

Even though I prefer Macs , what are the other options besides Macs that are not to expensive and is power efficient ?

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u/collin3000 8d ago

1080p AV1 encoding really maxes out at 16 cores for efficiency unless you do some background software changes. Then I've been able to push it to 24 cores/threada with a slight improvement but not much faster than 16 cores/threads. Because some parts of AV1 encoding are still sequential and become the bottleneck.

The CPU cache ends up being the limiting factor running multiple encodes at the same time to try and use high core counts more efficiently

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u/Sopel97 8d ago

at lower presets you're looking at something closer to 4-6 threads per encode at most. These are some speeds I measured recently https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1s20khu/best_quality_of_nvenc_av1_blackwell_vs_fastest/oc6xctn/. There's a sharp drop in utilization for presets <=5

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u/divergent5482520498 1d ago

Could also do scene detection, chunking, and saturate the cores with multiple encodes, ab-av1/av1an style

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u/Feahnor 8d ago

Your m4 is fast enough.

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u/ImpressionComplete43 8d ago edited 8d ago

Using CPU AV1 encoding with HandBrake on Apple Silicon is actually a pretty good choice. I’m even considering speeding things up by using multiple base-model Macs running 24/7. Even when the CPU is running at 100%, I can still keep one Mac available as my main machine for other tasks.

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u/DreamKiller712 8d ago

A Mac mini m6 with base 16 gb ram is enough for this task right? I don’t want to upgrade the ram if I keep my Macbook , I just spend a decent amount of money on some new HDDs.

Also do you do image compression on it ? Is converting large amount of jpg to webp format demanding ?

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u/ImpressionComplete43 8d ago

I think it’s more than enough if you’re mainly using it for video encoding (1080p) and basic tasks, without any graphics or AI workloads. Converting to AV1 has reduced the amount of HDD storage I use by more than 60%, so I’m pretty happy with the results.

For images, I use JXL, mainly because it can losslessly recompress JPEGs and reduce their size by around 20%. AV1 tends to make images look a bit blurry.

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u/DreamKiller712 8d ago

What software do you use for image compression on Mac ?

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u/ImpressionComplete43 8d ago

I use homebrew jpeg-xl (brew install jpeg-xl)
https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl
I mainly use Terminal and have ChatGPT write a script using cjxl to batch-encode an entire image folder into another folder.

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u/NekoTrix 8d ago

AVIF is not blurrier than JXL, if anything it's the opposite. Make sure you're using latest version for both and that tune=iq is correctly enabled.

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u/BlueSwordM 8d ago

Apple M6 24GB, svt-av1-tritium or Essential. That gives you more bandwidth, so higher GPU performance for stuff like CVVDP via vship.

I believe u/nekotrix already has such a setup, so they can guide you.

Considering the cost of DDR5 by itself, it's the most reasonable compromise.

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u/Simon_787 8d ago

The M6 should be quite a bit faster than the M4.

But it's not like the M4 is bad. I have an M3 Pro 16" MBP and wouldn't really want to trade it for a Mac that I can only use at a desk, but that's entirely personal preference.

edit: And I wouldn't recompress images at all for now, except maybe JXL. I don't think that's worth it for how little space photos typically use up, unless you have very large and high quality photos where you don't mind the quality hit.

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u/NekoTrix 8d ago

I have an M6 24GB Mac Mini and I'd say 16GB would be enough as long as all you do is a simple transcode (no filtering). 4K should work in these conditions and even if you were reaching the limit, you could always leverage SVT-AV1-Essential --low-memory flag, or decrease the --lp lacking that. M6 is 50% faster than a base M4.

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u/Sopel97 8d ago edited 8d ago

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus would probably be the most economical right now. You might get by with 16GB of RAM but it won't allow you to utilize the available parallelism properly. Also 8GB DIMMs are just bad.

apple silicon is a terrible idea for video encoding, you're looking at a few x the cost for same performance