Hello everyone, I have been using Plex server and player on my 2012 Mac Mini, Core i5 with 16Gb RAM and Catalina OS. I have a few 4K files that will play but are very juddery or they stop and start. I have a 4K TV and 4K capable AV amp so the issue must be the Mac. Is the Mac up to playing 4K, should I use hardware acceleration on the Plex media player, are there any other settings I should make a change to?
Thanks
Peter
With that setup you might get lucky if the 4K media can be direct played… any transcoding will be over the Mini’s head.
The CPUs available with that model support Intel’s QSV (by name), it’s been quite an early version with very limited support (from what I could find, it’ll basically just support h264/AVC decoding and encoding (+VC-1 decoding). The support article on hw-accelerated transcoding strongly recommends to use a Kaby Lake generation processor (2016+).
The CPU’s Passmark score (benchmark) gives you 5500-5700 points. In order to transcode a 4K movie you’ll need to double that performance (for 4K SDR; 4K HDR transcoding requires more than 3x the performance).
Hi Tom, thank you for getting back to me. In layman’s terms, what is the basic spec I would need to have to play 4K then? You’ll have to forgive my ignorance
Peter
That depends…
If you need to transcode that 4K video… go for a 2016+ Intel CPU w/ iGPU or a supported modern GPU to handle the hw-accelerated transcoding.
If the video to be transcoded has subtitles or requires transcoding by CPU for some other reasons, go for a CPU that has a Passmark Score above 17000
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html
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