Query over upgrading to Mac Studio Max

[mm8718]

Hi All

I have been happily using MakeMKV on my current windows PC which is a pretty powerful build as listed below and only one year old.

However i would like to move away from Windows and onto a more slimline PC form and more energy efficient as i have my PC running 24/7.

It has been a while since i ripped Blu Ray 4K on Mac and i wanted to ask a generic question whether all is working as it should and if you guys can recommend any external Blu Ray 4K drives that can be modified with custom firmware to decrypt 4K discs.

This is my current set up which works flawlessly at the end of this message and i just want to replace it with a base spec Mac Studio Max. Hoping to sell my current set up for as much as the Mac Studio or close enough. Am i sacrificing too much power? My most intensive task is re-encoding the 4K rips via Handbrake to and acceptable mid to high quality while utilising the built in CUDA hardware encoder on the Graphics card which can re-encode a 4K file in a 40-50 minutes sometimes less depending on settings. Plex is also running on this machine. I am not a gamer!

[Billycar11]

Huge downgrade apple is not magic your going form 16 cores to 10 you won't be able to use the nvidia encoder and I'm not sure if handbreak can use the hardware encoder on Mac.

[mm8718]

Huge downgrade apple is not magic your going form 16 cores to 10 you won't be able to use the nvidia encoder and I'm not sure if handbreak can use the hardware encoder on Mac.

Thanks @billycar11

I was half expecting this reply! Yeah it does sound like i am good where i am as it is. My build above was build with the view to 'keep' for at least 5-8 years just like the one it replaced from 2013 last year.

Thanks for the input

[creepycrawly]

I own an Intel Mac mini, and last year got my partner an M1 mini. I can confirm Handbrake does not currently take advantage of hardware encoding on the M1, as I literally did a side-by-side test today to satisfy my own curiosity. The M1 was only slightly faster with Handbrake encoding due to its overall better speed than the i7. It's too bad, because in a few other respects the M1 is a beast. I have a video upscaling pet project (using a program updated for Apple Silicon) that takes about 16 hours per 30 minute video on my Intel Mac. I decided to test it out on the the M1 and the same video went from 16 hours to just over 1 hour. Instead of taking weeks I figured I'd need to complete the project, I can knock it out in a weekend on the M1. YMMV.

[dcoke22]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Handbrake had Apple VideoToolBox support working on Apple Silicon Macs. I haven't used Handbrake directly recently so I don't have firsthand knowledge. I do, however, have first hand knowledge of using ffmpeg on an M1 MacBook Air. The most recent (stable) version of ffmpeg (version 5.0) does support making 10-bit h.265 files from 8-bit h.264 inputs (blu-ray rips) while using VideoToolBox (aka, Apple hardware encoder).

The OP was talking about transcoding 4K movies. Are the various tools to deal with Dolby Vision available for the Mac?

Finally, if you do order a Mac Studio… the GPU cores and the memory can't be changed later. It is +$200 to upgrade to a M1 Max with all 32 GPU cores (as opposed to 24 on the base model) and +$400 to upgrade to 64GB of unified memory (from the base of 32 GB). I'd strongly consider upgrading both to maximize the useful life to the machine.
The ssd storage on the machine may or many not be upgradable later. Early tear downs of the machine have found the storage is on a removable card. Those cards are not, however, standard M.2 SSDs. The storage controller doesn't live on the SSD like in a standard M.2 SSD, it is Apple designed and lives on Apple's SoC. Maybe Apple will sell you more storage after the fact (like they do with the current Mac Pro), maybe third parties will figure it out and be able to see you more storage, or maybe you'll never be able to upgrade the internal storage.

[hamsterdance]

My 2010 Mac Pro has an internal UHD-capable drive; in anticipation of my Mac Studio arriving (any day now; hurry up, DHL), I bought an LG BP50NB40 external drive. I needed to downgrade the firmware, then crossgrade to make it look like a BP60NB10. Both steps were easily done with the tools that come with MakeMKV. Does the job quite nicely - I tested it on the Mac Pro, and it worked.

I'm hoping that the USB C to micro B cable that I bought will supply enough power, rather than having to use the dual-A cable that came with it, but time will tell.

Software wise, MakeMKV is now a universal binary (meaning it has binary code for both x86_64 and arm64), so there should be no issue there, which means that the only question is around the transcoding that you want to do. On that front, I can't comment - I can only say that my Mac Pro has been more than adequate for my needs, and I expect the Studio to whomp all over it, ignoring the lack of internal expandability. (But then, any transcoding I need to do, I set running and walk away rather than waiting for it to finish. Overnight is not unheard of, meaning that speed isn't a concern for me. I only know that it's faster than real time playback.)

[Collyde]

Handbrake uses the Video Encoding toolbox which greatly benefits from the AV Media encoding cores.