As a long-term FFmpeg user, it’s been a while that I simply used the static build of FFmpeg from the website. However, ever since I got a Mac Mini with Apple Silicon, I was worried about whether all the codecs I was using were properly optimized. I found out a few threads such as this initially talking about x265 requiring a NEON patch to be 2 to 3 times as fast as the unpatched version.

For a while, I assumed the brew installation wasn’t properly optimized and got my FFmpeg build from the https://www.osxexperts.net website, which supposedly is compiled with all optimizations for the ARM architecture.

After some further investigation though, it seems the current version of FFmpeg available from brew already contains the patch, so most people should be good by now.

Some people even confirmed that the encoding speed seems to be the same: