So I’m perplexed, Running a 6 Core Xeon E5v2 in a 2013 Mac Pro, with 64GB of ram and dual D700 graphics cards.
Am I going to see Hardware encoding supported on non-quick sync enabled units anytime soon? Right now I can stream 6-8 movies at a time without overloading my CPU, I use 4Mb transcodes for all clients, however the minute I attempt to use HDHomeRun Prime to feed a single stream of cable into Plex live tv and regardless of what quality I chose I see my CPU usage sit at like 60-90% at any given time.
Now I have successfully pulled up multiple tuners and multiple devices at the same time and not had any issues for extended periods of time, but obviously looking at a cpu thats nearly at 90%+ the whole time it raised concerns.
While I get the Mac Pro is an older machine, I’d love to see hardware encoding and decoding support added to the cards, I mean these cards work amazing in video editing software so they should be more then capable of handling some video encoding and decoding.
On a 2nd note, When you select 3 separate channels, you can’t connect a 4th client, however if the 4th client is attempting to view a channel which you are already watching it looks as if you can connect as many people as you want at the same encode rate?
@“adam.krem” said:
So I’m perplexed, Running a 6 Core Xeon E5v2 in a 2013 Mac Pro, with 64GB of ram and dual D700 graphics cards.
I share your pain, I have a Mac Pro 2013 as well. Beast of a machine, but the GPU doesn’t support VideoToolbox, sadly:
[h264_videotoolbox @ 0x7fc1d882f000] No device available for encoder (device type videotoolbox for codec h264_videotoolbox).
AVDCreateGPUAccelerator: Error loading GPU renderer
[h264_videotoolbox @ 0x7fc1d882f000] Error: cannot create compression session: -12915
[h264_videotoolbox @ 0x7fc1d882f000] Try -allow_sw 1. The hardware encoder may be busy, or not supported.
Oddly enough, I’ve set up a script to purge the memory every few hours and so far I’m not seeing as drastic of a work load on my server. What I am now finding interesting is I have lost the ability to select quality on my Apple TV.
I can’t imagine that apple has video toolbox enabled on all the iOS devices and never turned it on for their big boy pro machine, whats also weird is I have seen some things pop up as a hardware encode, since I didn’t turn this function on until I moved my server over to the Mac Pro.
I really don’t want to build a pc to benefit from hardware encode and not having my cpu blasted when doing live tv.
@“adam.krem” said:
I can’t imagine that apple has video toolbox enabled on all the iOS devices and never turned it on for their big boy pro machine
Imagine it
Threads like this (and I tried myself using ffmpeg) indicate it’s pretty poorly supported.
The new Metal API has all kinds of flaws that apple isn’t acknowledging at the moment. I have a 2010 Mac server edition sitting on my desk that freezes the screen constantly since put to high Sierra yet doesn’t fail a hardware test or have any issues having windows running for weeks on end without a single graphics freeze. Whats weird is I have never had issues running Resolume Arena and I could have sworn that it was banking on ffmpeg.
So more or less I’m to a point of needing to build a properly supported rig for hardware encoding. I mean I only put the Mac Pro in because I stopped doing studio audio work and was tired of it just sitting on my desk. Guess I can transition it into my work computer for my video rack again and cycle the Mac mini I have there into the mixer controller.
@“adam.krem” said:
I can’t imagine that apple has video toolbox enabled on all the iOS devices and never turned it on for their big boy pro machine
Imagine it
Threads like this (and I tried myself using ffmpeg) indicate it’s pretty poorly supported.
Actually I hate to even ask this but, Does Windows running on the 2013 Mac Pro support hardware encoding? I’m not sure how to test it, but given the D700’s are essentially the W7000’s I’d assume that apple isn’t dictating the drivers completely for the graphics cards.
Just happened to think about it and wondered if windows on the machine would work better, obviously it doesn’t add intel quick sync but maybe it would add some better support of hardware encoding?
@“adam.krem” said:
Just happened to think about it and wondered if windows on the machine would work better, obviously it doesn’t add intel quick sync but maybe it would add some better support of hardware encoding?
I’m not sure; in theory either OS could offer acceleration via the incredibly overpowered and underworked GPUs, but I’m not sure either does.
Just looking forward to seeing what the new Mac Pros look like #fingerscrossed.
@“adam.krem” said:
Just happened to think about it and wondered if windows on the machine would work better, obviously it doesn’t add intel quick sync but maybe it would add some better support of hardware encoding?
I’m not sure; in theory either OS could offer acceleration via the incredibly overpowered and underworked GPUs, but I’m not sure either does.
Just looking forward to seeing what the new Mac Pros look like #fingerscrossed.
I totally want to test this however I have enough users on my plex who would have a mini meltdown if I took the server offline for a day or 2 and installed windows LOL.
Does hardware acceleration only work with quick sync or can it utilize older cards?
I just don’t want to drop 1k on a windows home theater machine, without a dedicated graphics card right off the bat and find out that it’s not much better.
Looking at the i7-8770k 3.7k 6 Core, debating between 16 and 32GB of DDR4 ram, just not sure if I want to drop that much money atm and might just see how well the Mac Pro holds up with the purge memory task running every few hours.
Thank you Elan for all the helpful information you’ve been providing. I guess I really have just 1 question left at this point. The way I’m reading the system requirements is that Nvidia has a 2 streams done via hardware encoding limit, is this driver overall or is it per card based? If I were to run 2 1060’s for example would I have 4 total streams? Obviously it looks like the quick sync can handle a lot of it on it’s own but it never hurts to have a dedicated graphics card does it.
now to hope that when I build this my library transfer goes smoothly
