One of the most asked questions I received on my M4 Mac Mini review the other day was how well the Mac Mini performs as a Plex server. In my latest video, we put its Plex serving capabilities to the test and compare it to the lowest cost Plex server you can buy – a $150 GMKTec G3 with an N100 processor.
The tests included playing back a standard Blu-ray rip, a 4K Blu-ray file with HDR-to-SDR tone mapping, and an AV1 file, with all videos transcoding down to 720p at 4 Mbps.
The M4 Mac Mini, powered by Apple Silicon, performed consistently well, leveraging Apple’s native APIs for hardware transcoding. Its hardware encoders and decoders, now supporting AV1, resulted in similar CPU consumption to what we saw on the Intel N100 with Quicksync.
Both systems performed similarly in handling basic 1080p-to-720p transcoding, maintaining stability with minor spikes in usage. Both also handled AV1 transcoding in hardware thanks to AV1 being added to the M4 chip’s hardware acceleration. They even handled hardware tone mapping with the 4k Blu-Ray MKV, converting the HDR media to SDR while brining the 2160p resolution down to 720p.
In terms of resource consumption, the results were quite different. The Mac consumed around 1.3 GB of RAM for two simultaneous 4K tone mapping transcodes, while the Linux system operated with a lean 320 MB, making it much better suited for scaling up with multiple users. The Mac also had a good chunk of its 16GB of memory already in use for all of the background tasks Macs do.
But for casual transcoding tasks and/or having the Plex server be a secondary feature alongside its primary desktop functions, the Mac proved viable. But when scalability and efficiency come into play, the Linux-based Mini PC outshines it for far less money. The Linux system’s ability to handle more users with minimal memory overhead and its compatibility with Docker make it a robust option for dedicated Plex server setups.