H.265 encoding on the 2018 Mac Mini

 T2 also features HEVC video transcoding that’s up to an incredible 30 times faster, enabling pro users to work more quickly with higher resolution video throughout their workflow.1

Note 1

1 Testing conducted by Apple in October 2018 using preproduction 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7-based Mac mini systems with 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSD, and shipping 3.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i7-based Mac mini systems with 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac mini.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/new-mac-mini-packs-huge-punch/

I can't find anything that says Handbrake makes use of the T2 chip. This says in Jan 2018 HB did not support it.

Yeah, it's much faster - I've tried HEVC using the T2 chip with both Screenflow and Handbrake.

It's not only fast, but obviously the HEVC H265 encoding produces smaller files as well without sacrificing quality.

(Mac Mini 2018 32gb 1tb ssd)

I haver tried both handbrake in the gui and cli variety and I do not believe it is supporting the T2 chip yet.

I have done multiple encodings and though it is faster than my Win10 i7-6700K, its not that much faster. I would have to do some side by side testing to get some real numbers but I'm still close to 1min of video/audio taking 45s to encode an mkv contianer 1080p30 q 22 vfr haac @ 128bit 5.1 x265

I have heard ffmpeg can use the chip but I have yet to get into testing it at all. I also hear that the encoder really isn't optimized quality for size. So you would be giving up disk space for encoding speed.

Overall though I am very happy with the the new mac mini. I would mention that I haven't noticed any significant slow down of the machine while having a long handbrake queue running. So even though handbrake isn't using the chip its not that big of a deal as I can just let it process and go about my business. And if I want to play games I just swap the input to the windows box with the Nvida card.

This Handbrake issue report - https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/issues/1689 discusses a problem encoding to H.265 using Handbrake on a T2 equipped Mac model. It also mentions using the videotoolbox processor which this discussion - https://www.reddit.com/r/handbrake/comments/9zmn0k/does_handbrake_support_apples_t2_chips/ says is used by ffmpeg for T2 accelerated processing.

Based on this I would say that Handbrake 1.0.0 and later do indeed support the T2 chip but that currently there may still be a significant bug in this implementation.

See also https://github.com/mackworth/cTiVo/issues/343#issuecomment-450963991

Thanks for the great info. Looking forward to the bugs being worked out. I kinda figured it would take a bit of time for support for the chip to be implemented solidly.