M1/M2 GPU acceleration support

[100Tomer 10]

It seems the new 4.8 release does not includes M1 acceleration support. Does anyone know when will this be added? 

[xiaowang 2]

Version 4.8 service cannot use m1/m2 GPU hardware decoding

[digiti 2]

Waiting anxiously for the ARM / M1-M3 support update. I have high hopes that my M1 would work better with DoVi HDR 10 etc than the latest (and yet old) Nvidia Shield Pro. I also have 2.5G network ready with NAS waiting for using Emby on my M1.

[100Tomer 10]

Is there any news? It’s been years since the M1 release and version 4.8 still doesn’t support it.. 

[BBQThunder 3]

2 hours ago, 100Tomer said:

Is there any news? It’s been years since the M1 release and version 4.8 still doesn’t support it.. 

I have been looking into JellyFin which is an open source version of Emby.  It appears JellyFin has M1/M3 hardware acceleration support.  The only downside I see is that the JellyFin server GUI needs to have Rosetta installed to run.  I am not sure when/if they will have Apple Silicon support. 

 

https://github.com/gnattu/jellyfin.org/blob/apple-doc/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/apple.md

[kalanihelekunihi 6]

I feel like a complete idiot subscribing to Emby Premiere, where we’d be lied to for years now about “no really, we are doing it… please just be patient.”

[AJV_20 57]

On 2/20/2023 at 10:31 PM, Luke said:

Hi, we are working on it and hope to have it included in the upcoming 4.8 server release.

Any updates on this? It's been over a year

[100Tomer 10]

Is there any updates? Even an estimated time for the feature will be better then nothing.. 

[TaoZZZer 0]

fingers crossed.

[100Tomer 10]

Jellyfin has just released full hardware acceleration support for Apple Silicon. We've been waiting for over a year for the promised hardware acceleration support in version 4.8. Even after the update, we still haven’t received any answers about it. Any response would suffice, but the silence is deafening. I’ll switch to Jellyfin and won’t renew my Emby license when it expires. Sadly, it has come to this

[suwmlee 0]

any progress？

[sanjaydevani 4]

I don't think so.

[AJV_20 57]

I would love to use the full power of the M4 Pro with Emby. It’s literally been years, I wonder why they’ve taken so long

[CMJR23 8]

yea,  me too...just ordered the M4 Mac Mini

@Lukeany progress for Apple Silicon hardware transcoding?

Edited November 7, 2024 by CMJR23

[twalker294 2]

Same here. I arrived at this thread after seeing my new M4 mini with all CPU cores pegged when transcoding and my GPU napping at 5%. I can't believe they still haven't implemented this on the Mac side. I would hate to have to switch to Jellyfin but I may have no choice.

[Luke 42077]

HI, yes we are working on improving this. Thanks.

[sshalaby 1]

On 02/01/2025 at 06:27, Luke said:

HI, yes we are working on improving this. Thanks.

When is the support to Apple silicon will take place, 

[RobbyBobby 17]

I like Emby, the devs seem to do their best, and I cannot blame them for giving priority to Windows, but the Apple platform are demonstrably a huge hassle for the developers.

For e.g. the Emby theatre app still can't play audiobooks properly (it basically stops updating the timeline after a while) and Apple TV development is a joke: every update is "improvement to playback" apparently, with no indication of what's been done.

I get the sense that Apple products are worked on as an afterthought: we'll write a tiny block of code and send that on its way and call it an update. We hope it works. 

Makes me sad. 

[wdhome 0]

Is there any news about Apple's M1-M4 GPU acceleration? The transcoding efficiency is very high using jellyfin on the M2 chip! But I prefer to use emby. After all, I bought Lifetime. I hope they will adjust it as soon as possible. This is not a person's wish.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, yes we are working on it. Thanks.

[BigIrn 10]

On 1/31/2024 at 5:33 AM, kalanihelekunihi said:

We still aren't getting macOS builds... Why does this keep happening, especially when there's no issue building 67 other targets?

I’m very confused by everyone saying it doesn’t have a Mac arm build. I’m running this right now on my M4 server with no issue at all. I’m even working with a community developer on converting m3u VOD to strm plugin which is coming along well. 

[BigIrn 10]

I’m sorry I guess I understand the confusion. I have it working with m4 but it’s not using hardware acceleration. What does HA do that the CPU doesn’t already? Apologies if this is a dumb question. 

[AJV_20 57]

No one is saying that it doesn’t work for Mac. We’re asking for Apple Silicone hardware support. Mac chips have a section specifically made for transcoding, when is used it basically doesn’t touch the CPU and it can be free to be used somewhere else. 
 

The HA can also do many more transcodes at once than just the CPU

Edited March 18, 2025 by AJV_20

[yocker 1247]

8 minutes ago, BigIrn said:

I’m sorry I guess I understand the confusion. I have it working with m4 but it’s not using hardware acceleration. What does HA do that the CPU doesn’t already? Apologies if this is a dumb question. 

Hardware acceleration uses hardware specially made for video decoding and encoding.
Basically it moves the work of transcoding/encoding from the CPU to the GPU thus making it much faster and require less resources.

CPU's can do the job and is arguably better image wise (talking huge bitrates and 8K) but does as said use a lot more resources and is a lot slower.

Edited March 18, 2025 by yocker

[kalanihelekunihi 6]

There's also MediaEngine, which are co-processors designed specifically for Audio and Video Transcoding. One of those reasons why a lot of people like editing video on a Mac, because accelerated at high quality without impacting either the CPU or the GPU.