Beta Version of Plex Media Server With Native Apple Silicon Support Now Available

[JohnD]

Oh, I see now... They're spinning their dev resources on M1, yet not fixing the intel app they broke. 143 is the last working version on intel. They totally broke all functionality in 144 (totally blank screen in the app), and now that they've released 145, it's still broken! How about fixing what you broke, before attempting something new? Doesn't instill much confidence in their dev team.

PS - I should have mentioned this issue affects at least the 2013 Mac Pro (not sure about other machines). Whatever they broke in 144, is still broken in 145. I have a copy of 143 to be able to use the app, and have to be quick on canceling the auto-update (which you can't disable).

 

[Codestud]

Was going to pick up an Intel NUC to run as a Plex Server. Would an M1 Mac Mini be overkill?

Depends whether you want it to transcode in real-time or not. Personally I'm not bothered with transcoding for my server so I just use a Raspberry Pi based NAS.

 

[visualseed]

Perfect timing as I was just thinking of taking advantage of the price cuts on M1 Minis to replace my 2012 i7 Mini

 

[visualseed]

For those with large librarians, that’s reason enough.

 

[VictorTango777]

Does it use the same horrible, single line horizontal scrolling interface that the major streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO, Paramount) use? On some of these services, I have to click 20 times in order to see all the titles in a collection because there is no fast scrolling and no way to expand a collection to see all titles at once.

 

[EdT]

Ok, I have to manually upgrade on my Synology NAS, but how do I manually download and upgrade to an ATV? Right now it just upgrades itself.

 

[gordon1234]

Great news! My 2014 Mc Mini is getting sad and I've been eyeing an M1. Native is great, but does it use HW acceleration via videotoolbox for encode? I would particularly love to be able to transcode to h.265 instead of h.264 as well, it would give so much better quality.

It does use videotoolbox if you enable hardware-accelerated encoding, but does not encode to H.265, and doesn’t have any granular options for encoding in general. I personally find the automatic transcoding kind of rubbish. It produces large files with low video quality. I greatly prefer to create my own variants. For instance, using something like Handbrake you can create a ridiculously tiny 720p HEVC encoding of a video that will look great and stream at like 2 mbps.

For 4K blu-rays I generally keep the original disk encode as my local network streaming option, create a high-quality HEVC 1080p encode for remote streaming, and a high-quality 720p HEVC encode for low-bandwidth/flakey connection remote streaming.

 

[kalafalas]

It does use videotoolbox if you enable hardware-accelerated encoding, but does not encode to H.265, and doesn’t have any granular options for encoding in general. I personally find the automatic transcoding kind of rubbish. It produces large files with low video quality. I greatly prefer to create my own variants. For instance, using something like Handbrake you can create a ridiculously tiny 720p HEVC encoding of a video that will look great and stream at like 2 mbps.

For 4K blu-rays I generally keep the original disk encode as my local network streaming option, create a high-quality HEVC 1080p encode for remote streaming, and a high-quality 720p HEVC encode for low-bandwidth/flakey connection remote streaming.

Yup, this is pretty much my exact solution right now as well, but it would be nice to only have to store the fat copy

 

[topdrawer]

does it still do decoding on the server side only, or does the apple tv app play natively?

 

[teh_hunterer]

How can it be native but support both Intel and Apple architectures and then call it universal? Doesn’t seem to imply anything native.

What it means is they offer one download, and the installer detects whether you have an Intel or Apple Silicon Mac and installs the native version for whichever one you have.

 

[visualseed]

does it still do decoding on the server side only, or does the apple tv app play natively?

It will let most clients direct-play any video in their natively supported formats without server side re-encoding. I say "most" because some Plex clients don't have the latest codec support even though the hardware supports things like h.265. Apple TV plays just about everything directly.

 

[bigandtasty]

Yes but if you are in a bandwidth limited environment (like crappy hotel Wi-Fi) you get twice the quality for same bitrate

like pay by the hour (motel Wi-FI) stuff

 

[aj8690]

Exactly what I have a M1 mac mini for movie server but with Infuse on ATV, instead of Plex. The mac mini also functions as a network time machine backup for all our other macs and itself gets backed up to Backblaze.

I have an M1 Mac mini as my Plex machine as well, and I’m very impressed on how well it handles it. No issues with transcoding 4K at all even under Rosetta.

 

[KBallweg]

I think the M1 Mac mini would handle Plex very well. The biggest problem is lack of being able to expand internal storage. Sure you can add an external hard drive, but then that's another box and another adapter.

I use Plex on an Atom-based Intel NUC. Just a little 10w box. Using FreeBSD as the base OS.

Seems to have been working well for me for the last, nearly 3 years. It performs very well with my music library (~1500 albums). Sometimes flakes out on video media, but things working much better now that I have my AppleTV using ethernet instead of wifi.

Overall I like the NUC for it's low power usage and expandability. I think I'd only use a Mac if it were one that I had sitting around from being decommissioned.

If you have a large movie library - more than one TB - an M1 Mac is going to need an external drive anyway. What the M1 offers is thunderbolt 4 connections to external drives, which in turn allows you to easily upgrade to larger drives When you need to. I use a ThunderBay 4, and just moved from a 6 TB to a 16 so I could stop scattering my library over multiple drives.

 

[Deihmos]

Who runs Plex on an expensive Mac?? I have been running Plex on the same PC I built for very cheap since 2013. It is still running like a champ.

 

[TomAustralia]

Who runs Plex on an expensive Mac?? I have been running Plex on the same PC I built for very cheap since 2013. It is still running like a champ.

Not everyone wants a stand-alone Plex server. I have been running Plex for years on a 2014 Mac Mini and recently an M1 Mac Mini in the background, as it doubles as my home computer for other uses. The M1 has been flawless.

 

[elmateo487]

Who runs Plex on an expensive Mac?? I have been running Plex on the same PC I built for very cheap since 2013. It is still running like a champ.

Is 600 dollars expensive for a machine that sips power and can transcode / tone map 4K HDR rips?

 

[sudo-sandwich]

It would be just the right amount of kill.

I have an M1 mini running a Plex media server. It'd be overkill if it only ran Plex and nothing else, but it's my work/personal computer too, plus it runs some other server stuff.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

Who runs Plex on an expensive Mac?? I have been running Plex on the same PC I built for very cheap since 2013. It is still running like a champ.

Me cause the M1 mini is low-power. But that's not all it does.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

Does it use the same horrible, single line horizontal scrolling interface that the major streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO, Paramount) use? On some of these services, I have to click 20 times in order to see all the titles in a collection because there is no fast scrolling and no way to expand a collection to see all titles at once.

I don't know, but the bigger issue is how glitchy the interface is. Occasionally it just locks up and I have to refresh the page.

 

[masterin]

Was going to pick up an Intel NUC to run as a Plex Server. Would an M1 Mac Mini be overkill?

There is an official version of Plex Server for armf 64bit linux... as in raspberry pi, so this is pretty organic and wasn't that hard to do... Also, M1 as a Plex Server? Waste of an internal SSD ... even if you use external drives, print a 3D bracket for it and the mechanical drives, still a cable mess... A NUC Extreme or a proper NAS will be better for the price.

 

[currocj]

Plex experts, I'm running a 2016 Synology DS916+ with an Intel Pentium N3710 quad-core 1.6GHz and 8GB ram.

Would I do much better running a Mac mini M1 connected to the same NAS via usb (for media access) to run the Plex Server software? Better would be faster/more efficient H.265 encoding, faster buffering, zippier UI...

 

[Eorlas]

Was going to pick up an Intel NUC to run as a Plex Server. Would an M1 Mac Mini be overkill?

thing is, you can purchase a NAS for around the same cash, probably quite cheaper for either on sale, and then have the space to put lots of files.

using an M1 anything would still require the bulk external storage. it's a really, really cool idea given the form factor, but it doesnt have the storage capability you're thinking of.

for what you're trying, perhaps it'd be better to go with something like an SFF PC with high capacity HDD's

 

[turbineseaplane]

Is 600 dollars expensive for a machine that sips power and can transcode / tone map 4K HDR rips?

It's just sort of overkill is all -- especially since you still need a storage solution (enclosure) or external NAS, etc

Comparison gets expensive when compared with doing a build just for the purpose here, but can be a good setup/value still depending upon needs.

I might switch to a Mac mini M1 once newer models are out and they get even cheaper on secondary market. I'd be doing that to make cloud backups and sharing my iTunes library a bit easier on myself mainly though, not just for Plex.

My FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) continues to chug along and do yeomans work for me for now

 

[Eorlas]

Plex experts, I'm running a 2016 Synology DS916+ with an Intel Pentium N3710 quad-core 1.6GHz and 8GB ram.

Would I do much better running a Mac mini M1 connected to the same NAS via usb (for media access) to run the Plex Server software? Better would be faster/more efficient H.265 encoding, faster buffering, zippier UI...

It should undoubtedly decode faster, whether or not it will be fast enough to justify that difference in cost is a different story. Do keep in mind that the Mini introduces some amount of latency to the load times, as it first must pull the data from the NAS drives, then transcode, stream, etc.

Zippier UI should not factor in if it's just running as the server, how nicely the UI runs is up to the client running the Plex app.

Looking up your NAS, according to the specs page by Synology, it can only transcode one stream of 4k H264(5), or 3 1080p at once. If you don't share your NAS, or find multiple devices in the house in need of streams, then the Mini would further be useless to you here. If this does matter, I imagine the Mini would overcome this issue.

Something I don't understand: how would the Mini interact with the NAS as an external drive? Synology appears to load an OS directly, how would macOS deal with that?

People may have already sorted this kind of thing out, perhaps not with a Mini, but the idea being the same. May just have to google around for other experiences