Salvatore Sanfilippo published h3.c, an open-source program that runs MiniMax's H3 video-and-audio generation model directly on Apple Silicon Macs. It supports text prompts, first and last frame anchors, and reference images, with settings that trade quality for speed and an option to stream model weights from disk to cut memory use sharply. It is a work in progress and requires building from source with the model downloaded locally.
What changed
Running MiniMax-H3 video generation locally relied on the released MLX-based path with full weight residency.
What it unlocks
Generating short video with audio from MiniMax-H3 on an Apple Silicon Mac, including streaming weights from SSD to cut memory use to about 2 GiB.
- DiT memory 36.5 GiB to 2.0 GiB
- 4-pass denoise 3.5s vs 26.4s
- 1.2k GitHub stars
What you need to act on it
- Apple Silicon Mac (M3 Max / M5 Max tested)
- local MiniMax-H3 model download
- FFmpeg and FFprobe installed
- building from source
Sources