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I’m thinking of getting the new Mac Mini M4, putting Plex on it and pointing it to my Synology for the media.
Does anyone know how the Apple Silicon chips go for transcoding and will 16gb ram be enough?
The M4 is a beast… 
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Well I cannot yet tell you much, but I have ran Plex servers on many different Mac minis (with Intel and Apple Silicon) over the last 10 yrs or so and they’re good machines for that. I have my M4 with 10G Ethernet already ordered and hopefully can soon put it to work (will take a few weeks, the model is on backorder apparently). Pretty sure it will be the most powerful Plex Server so far for me. 16GB RAM should be just fine.
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I haven’t put it through a stress test yet, but upgrading from a base model 2014 Mini to the M4… i’m blown away by how fast it is.
i’m not having any of the issues i previously had with menus loading slowly or not at all and the server doesn’t disappear for a few minutes every time i add new media .
I imagine I won’t have to upgrade this thing for another 10 years 
it just works.
M4 Pro even better… 
Thanks sounds like it will do the job.
There would be a huge difference I’d say, the M chips are a long way in front of intel, especially something so old.
Hope you enjoy it.
True it would be but I’ll be using it pretty much just as a Plex server so probably a bit of overkill, I’ll save the Pro chip for my main machine.
I have no trouble using the pro for a server and Everyday stuff, 2 x iPad pro, LG OLED and 3 remote users. It just does what I ask. My only restriction found, is upstream of 50mbps max for my location. Down is fine with 1000mbps
The thing is though my main machine is a laptop which travels a lot with me and tethers to my phone frequently so not an ideal case for a Plex server and I’m not too keen on doubling the price on a Mac Mini just for the M4 Pro chip which will be the Plex server and that’s about all.
I’m very lucky to have comparably cheap serverhousing offer in a local data center for Mac minis. They already affirmed to me they’ll be supporting the new form factor. The internet connection from the data center of course is much better than at home, so… I admit it’s a bit weird maybe but I love to have my own full Mac mini in a rack with great up- and downlink.
I got my M4 Mac Mini today and I can tell you one thing they are horrible for using as a Plex client. I can’t seem to get HDMI passthru working and lots of issues with Audio formats.
If anyone else is having issues with the mac mini m4 and Plex client, please let us know how you got things working!!
Well this is explicitly a thread about using it as a server (see the OP and the tags they set). Mine don’t even have any displays connected.
That being said, weird to hear that you’re having issues using it as a client. The regular Plex client works fine on my M2 MacBook Air with macOS 15.1, the Mac mini M4 should be running pretty much the exact same software.
What have you tried as far as trouble-shooting goes? Have you used an HDMI adapter instead of the built-in port to see if there is any difference? Does the web app have different playback behavior from the stand-alone app? Is video playback in general working (for example, YouTube or local files via QuickTime Player) fine / how specific is this issue to Plex? etc. etc. There are a lot of obvious troubleshooting steps you could take and you should include all that info in a forum post if you expect useful replies.
Sorry, didn’t realize it was for the server part and didn’t mean to hijack for Client issues.
As far as trouble shooting, I tried everything and ever called Apple and they confirmed that the HDMI pass thru is only available for their AppleTV+ and Quicktime. If I watch something on AppleTV+ I can go into the AppleTV+ setting and chose passthrough and Atmost and everything comes thru fine. If I use the Plex Client or VLC or any other video app there is no option for audio passthrough and I only get ‘multi channel’ output, not the DTS or ATMOS.
Give it a shot and let us know your results. If your having the same issues, maybe I’ll open a thread with the proper tags.
I dont think the problem is on the Plex side. I think Apple locked down the ability.
I have some issues with my Mini M4.
I have the 10Gb Ethernet turned off AEB.
Every one or two minute i have a stuttering and the network data spikes to 900Mbps. The Data lies on a NAS, this was always the case…
With my old 10 Gb M1 machine everything worked fine
It is a bummer there must be a setting or is there a known problem with the M4 and the PLEX Server?
Thank you
Patric
Hi,
I also got a 10Gb model. I think there is something wrong with the Ethernet on these machines. I don’t think it was anything to do with Plex. Try just running something like ping indefinitely to another machine. It doesn’t work properly for me, after 30 minutes or so at the most I start getting packet loss. There shouldn’t be ANY packet loss at all.
I will test some more at the beginning of this week with regards to network settings on the Mini and the router that it is plugged into, but probably I will end up returning it and getting another one. I suspect the 1Gb models might be working better. MacStadium already has 1Gb models in their data centers, if they were having Ethernet issues that would’ve shown up in their testing.
If you can share some of your testing results I would be happy to see that, could help me in my further testing of this machine. For now my M2 Plex server keeps running fine But I hope to be able to migrate at some point.
Hi Enko,
I did ran a test with a ping to the M4 Server from my Mini M2 
And yes i get some packet los every now and then, sometimes the ping time is going up to 20 ms and then it goes normal.
I did know that AEB sometimes make problems i even configured the interface to 10Gbit fix.
I already migrated, but kept the M2 as backup, maybe i will need to return it too.
Too bad it is a very good machine, maybe a software update on macOS would help…
Let me know if you find any helpful infos i will try to do the same.
Just fyi: my tests from Monday to Tuesday indicated that the Mac is now indeed running fine. Unfortunately I don’t know if a configuration change was the solution or not. But so far, even with the macOS update to 15.1.1, the Ethernet connection has been stable. So I plan on keeping the 10Gb machine.
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Hi Enko, just wondering how the Mac mini is going? I’m about to pull the trigger on one but wanted to check how the 10gb port is going.
M4 transcoding- the benchmarks Im reading, I can pretty confident saying (as someone who doesn’t own one) this is something you won’t need to worry about… Without knowing your use case, maybe it’s perfect for you/maybe overkill but the machine is an absolute powerhouse.
I didn’t quite follow the tethering from iPhone analogy (Im also tired) but tethering or utilizing cell service to play something is precisely when transacting ability becomes an important variable as the bandwidth often isn’t enough (especially if it’s mirroring on to a larger screen)…
