Hardware Encoding macOS.

jfisher

Is anyone using using a Mac as a node?

I haven’t been able to get the Mac installation of fileflows working but do have it working inside docker desktop now but am not able to access hardware encoding.

I built a dummy flow to check what hardware encoders are available to my nodes but the Mac always outputs no hardware encoders available. I know that the integrated chip has intel quicksync enabled as well as an AMD you but I don’t know how to expose the to my docker desktop container. I sssume I just need to figure out the local path to the driver but I’ve been searching and researching for days.

Does anyone know where to look?

reven

Sorry, don't have any mac devices to help with.

But have you tried passing the device through?

This is how you do it in portainer for linux.

jfisher

I have tried passing it through as a device but it tells me that /dev/dri. N”o such file or directory exists” when trying to build the container.

This is the compose file for my main server node. I have tried passing the same lines through for the compose file for my fileflows node running inside docker-desktop on my Mac. There is a section in docker desktop to allow file sharing between certain folders on the Mac and the docker container. I assume I need to figure out what folder the driver is stored in but I can’t seem to find it.

reven

Asked this on the discord forum and supersnellehenk said you cant pass it through on mac docker

Quick google seems to confirm this
https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3110

Docker seems to run as a virtual machine on macos and cannot pass devices through

jfisher

Okay. Thank you for looking into that. I guess I will have to look at trying to get the macOS node to work instead.

reven

https://discord.com/channels/911563036832186408/911565092884197426/986989498309173328

User mentioned they got it working on a M1 here.

jfisher

Thank you but I cannot see the link even after signing up. If it’s an M1 it would be using whichever GPU they have since M1 macs do not have intel chips anymore.

reven

Screen grab of comment

But yes thats M1 not QSV.

Sorry I'm really no help here, I'm not a mac guy. And according to telemetry reported by users, theres are 0 mac users out there. (docker get counted as Docker).

So either theres no mac users, or mac users dont like reporting telemetry, either way, no stats for it, no developer resources spent on it.

jfisher

Should the macOS version of fileflows node be able to detect hardware encoders? Or have those resources not been put into it because of the lack of Mac users like you said? I have it running pretty well on my NAS using Intel Quick Sync, just wanted to help it along by having another node but all I have is this Mac. I cannot install docker on my older NAS I replaced because it does not have an intel processor.

reven

if ffmpeg supports those encoders, it should work. for hardware encoding it just tests
nvidia, qsv, vaapi, amf
using ffmpeg.

if ffmpeg cant use them, it falls back to cpu