I noticed in the streaming settings that I’m not afforded many options for which encoder I can choose to encode my stream. I’ve also noticed in recent release notes that mimoLive does give an indicator in the streaming status as to whether my stream is using a hardware or software encoder. I would like to have some measure of control as to whether I stream with the software encoder, or the hardware encoder. (Or a third party hardware encoder like the AMD/nVidia hardware h.264 encoder I can use with other streaming software depending on what Mac I’m using)
Is there anything I can do to select the hardware or software encoder myself, or anything I can do to influence how mimoLive selects which encoder to use?
Currently, OS X makes the decision on what encoder to use. Basically, if there is an h.264 hardware encoder, it will use that. If there isn’t, it defaults to a software encoder. Since the software encoder is not very efficient, if it is used, it seriously degrades system performance. In order to diagnose this, we’ve added the information to the streaming status window.
H.264 is currently the only option available on OS X for encoding live streams.
Maybe I should have worded this differently. A 12 core MacPro will certainly do fine, but the cores will be busy encoding. mimoLive does most of its magic on the graphics card, so encoding will not impact mimoLive severely. However, if you plan to also use 6 HD video sources, it might get busy…
We use the smallest Mac Pro to test on purpose to make sure that we catch any issues, and we did a live stream from Berlin using 5 HD cameras with our MacPro.
The comments about the Mac Pro not having a built-in hardware h.264 encoder are interesting. It makes sense that the Xeon line wouldn’t have QuickSync like the Core i3/i5/i7s, but is it also the case that the dual AMD GPUs don’t have hardware h.264 encoders either? I can’t seem to find much on the Internet saying one way or the other. It just seems odd when pretty much all their other product lines over the past couple years have had hardware h.264 encoding built in.
If there’s no h.264 hardware encoder anywhere in a new Mac Pro, I would happily pick up a thunderbolt enclosure and a mid-range consumer grade nVidia/AMD video card just to get the hardware accelerated h.264 encoding. Is that something that mimoLive would potentially support in the future?
@madden64freak Currently, mimoLive doesn’t choose which encoder is used. This is done by macOS. The software encoder is only a fallback in case there is no hardware encoder.
@JMVBMW Unfortunately FMLE is using the old 32-bit-QuickTime technology to capture video from video sources. mimoLive is build on AVFoundation which isn’t compatible with the old QuickTime capture API. Why do you need to use FLME since mimoLive can stream by its own?
I have a Matrox MX02 hardware scaler and audio i/o that no longer operates with mimoLive. It used to work with BoinxTV. Im using OSX 10.10.
The scaler works fine with other apps. Is this a bug?