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In a follow-up to my 16GB Mac Mini review last week, I tested the Mac Mini M6’s viability as a Plex media server. Plex recently released several updates for the Mac version of its server software that specifically target hardware efficiency and new codec support.

See how it works in my latest monthly sponsored Plex video!

One recent addition to the Mac server is hardware tone mapping. This feature allows the server to take an HDR video and convert it to SDR in real time using the hardware transcoder. During my testing with a Blu-Ray 4K HDR film, I transcoded from a direct stream at 150+ megabits per second to a 1080p stream at 10 megabits per second. The system maintained HEVC compression throughout the process, which resulted in consistent visual quality at a significantly lower bit rate. While this was running, the color remained accurate, matching the performance of other dedicated hardware tone mapping devices.

Monitoring the system resources showed that the 16-gigabyte Mac Mini handles these workloads with minimal impact on the CPU and RAM. A single 4K transcode required approximately 700 megabytes of memory. Even when I initiated a second simultaneous 4K transcode with tone mapping, the memory pressure remained low and CPU utilization did not increase to a level that would hinder other tasks.

Subtitle burn-in has also been integrated into the hardware transcoding pipeline on the Mac. Subtitle burn-in is required for playback devices that cannot overlay subtitles natively. Traditionally, burning subtitles into a video file can be a resource-intensive process. I tested this by enabling subtitles on a 4K Blu-ray rip while transcoding. While there was a slight uptick in system activity, it managed two concurrent sessions of hardware-transcoded subtitle burn-in without performance degradation.

The update also introduces AV1 hardware decoding, a feature compatible with M3 processors and newer. I tested a 4K60 video encoded in AV1 and observed the system successfully decoding the file in hardware and transcoding it to HEVC for browser playback while the other two transcodes were still ongoing. Although older Apple Silicon chips like the M1 and M2 do not support this specific AV1 feature, they still benefit from the expanded HEVC support and general hardware transcoding improvements included in this release.

The efficiency of these chips allows the Mac Mini to function as a primary desktop while serving a media library to a moderate number of users. The hardware remains quiet even when the active cooling system is engaged during heavy transcoding sessions. With these software optimizations, the Mac Mini platform, from the older M4 models to the current M6, serves as a functional and energy-efficient option for media management.

Disclosure: This was a paid sponsorship from Plex, however they did not review or approve this content prior to uploading.

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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.

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