Should movies be transcoding to H264 via hardware on M1 or no?

[sfatula 207]

I have a Mac M1 server. I am testing it with a movie using the 4.9.1.80 non beta version, and intentionally reducing the bitrate to my browser to force transcoding. Transcoding is enabled, and, it is not using hardware to encode to H264. I expected it to since it's a choice. Is this supposed to work?

I suspect it's this but not sure what it means. I believe 77 is the main profile but it wants a 0-5 value.

 

11:08:02.357 [h264_videotoolbox @ 0x155609ea0] Value 77.000000 for parameter 'profile' out of range [0 - 5]
11:08:02.357 [h264_videotoolbox @ 0x155609ea0] Error setting option profile to value 77.
11:08:02.357 Error initializing output stream 0:0 -- Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height
11:08:02.358 [libmp3lame @ 0x15560bae0] 3 frames left in the queue on closing
11:08:02.360 Conversion failed!
11:08:02.360 EXIT

 

Also, enable throttling settings seems to have no effect at all, it will pre-transcode an entire movie.

 

ffmpeg-transcode-64748537-97f4-4238-8c95-58b0b20a6e15_1.txt

 

embyserver.txt

Edited October 29, 2025 by sfatula
Report throttling issue also

[sfatula 207]

@LukeIs it supposed to work at all? From reading around the forum, seems likle it at least partially works. Why not mine?

[Damien_ 30]

From what I understand, Mac Arm/Silicon machines still dont have native GPU support. 

[sfatula 207]

I had thought I saw some posts where some things do GPU transcode, but maybe not I guess. That's my experience, nothing does!

So, I was deciding between docker emby and bare metal Emby on M1, this makes the choice easy, docker Emby. Transcoding is not a major thing for me as almost all my hardware plays everything native. 

Edited November 9, 2025 by sfatula

[Damien_ 30]

On 11/8/2025 at 9:28 PM, sfatula said:

I had thought I saw some posts where some things do GPU transcode, but maybe not I guess. That's my experience, nothing does!

So, I was deciding between docker emby and bare metal Emby on M1, this makes the choice easy, docker Emby. Transcoding is not a major thing for me as almost all my hardware plays everything native. 

I ended up having to move to Jellyfin (least for the time being) just for this reason. If Emby does support its architecture at some point I would look at coming back. It's not just the transcoding, there's quite a few benefits to being able to play it natively.