I have used both and I personally love the Apple TV, but I am asking for my brother which is not an Apple person. I set him up with a 2012 Mac mini i5 quad core for the plex server, so he uses the plex media player on the Mac. My question is he has a pretty expensive theater system with pretty expensive speakers, so is there any advantages for using the Apple TV over the Mac mini or vise versa?
the Mac mini should do as it can output multi-channel audio via its HDMI-out. Running the PMP directly on the Mac might have some benefits compared to an Apple TV as there’s probably less transcoding.
From what I can see, output won’t be able to deal with 4K content… so unless your brother has tons of 4K content he should be fine.
https://support.apple.com/kb/SP659?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
