Hardware Video Compression in Rust on macOS — ffmpeg with VideoToolbox

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. All results from shipping 7 Mac apps as a solo developer....

martedì 16 giugno 2026 New tab

393 words~2 min read

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. All results from shipping 7 Mac apps as a solo developer. No sponsored opinion.

HiyokoAutoSync optionally compresses videos during sync. Software compression on an 8-year-old MacBook Air is slow. Hardware compression via VideoToolbox is fast. Here's how to use ffmpeg's hardware acceleration from Rust.

VideoToolbox basics

VideoToolbox is Apple's hardware video encoding framework. ffmpeg supports it via the h264_videotoolbox encoder. The difference on Intel MacBook Air:

Software (libx264): 2-3 minutes for a 1-minute 4K video

Hardware Video Compression in Rust on macOS — ffmpeg with VideoToolbox

Hardware Video Compression in Rust on macOS — ffmpeg with VideoToolbox

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