OK now that’s just humblebragging. 
Do you prefer the small independent SSDs? I hate the cables and clutter.
There are some nice Thunderbolt → NVMe JBOD enclosures available. I’m not advocating for this product, just suggesting it as an example of the concept:
Sounds like an expensive day at the apple store, enjoy your studio
Sure costs quite a bit. But easy to get it accepted by the wife when it’s so much smaller compared to our current big tower server that is blasting out heat.
Still eager to see how much trouble I’m causing for myself trying to run everything on Apple Silicon… It seems like the regular limitation of only being able to have one hardware transcoding going at once is still a thing even with the Apple M1 Max with its dedicated encoding hardware so that might prove to cause some issues. But we are mostly direct playing, even 4K HDR10 and Dolby Vision these days so hopefully, it will be fine. The CPU should be able to shrug along with 1x 4K HDR through software as well I hope.
The reason for going for 4x Samsung T7 2TB is simplicity. I was researching external enclosures and there are some decent once. Like the ones from https://www.trebleet.com/product-page/thunderbolt-3-two-slot-m-2-nvme-ssd-storage.
But none are sold in my country so it will be expensive shipping, import taxes, and whatnot. And there isn’t any decent availability on decent NVMe drives to put into them. Evidently, the latest firmware for the Samsung 970 Evo Plus makes it compatible with macOS, and the price for drives such as Western Digital SN750 makes it more expensive to go down that route. And evidently Western Digital has had a refresh of the SN750 gimping it’s performance by a lot.
The easiest and cleanest option would be to simply opt for 8TB NVMe from Apple but their pricing for upgrading the storage is too much for me to swallow.
@elan I just wanted to respectfully ask if there was an ETA on the ARM version of the Plex Player? I know the Media Server has quite a bit of lead time due to dependancies (based on your recent post in this thread), but I’m wondering if there is any indication when us Plex Passers could get a build of Plex Player for our M1 Macs?
I’m aware actually putting a date on it is out-of-scope, but even a Q# would be very helpful.
Unfortunately the Plex Player on my M1 Mac is woefully cumbersome, luckily it’s not primarily how I view content over Plex, but it is rather painful.
Have you tried the iPad app? It works great on the M1 Mac. I actually prefer it rather than the old desktop app. And sync/downloads work.
An M1 Ultra base config fell into my lap today. Can’t plug it in until Monday but I am gonna play around with Plex for sure. Been waiting a long time for Apple Silicon support!
This is wonderful news I am very much looking forward to a native mac silicon version of the server app, thank you for all the hard work from you and your team, I have an M1 Ultra on the way which I’m hoping means plex can transcode so many hdr 4k streams its makes my m1 mac mini hide its cute little face in shame. Been using the mac server for so many years, and love plex to bits.
I put PLEX on my new M1 Ultra Mac Studio yesterday. So far not seeing much differences with my M1 Mac mini. Can’t wait to get an optimized version of PLEX!
Aw man. Sort of disappointing to see but not incredibly surprised based on initial reviews and benchmarks. What are you comparing it to (how many streams, transcodes, etc)? Ordered the Ultra (for Plex and main computer). But wondering if M1 Max is enough. I’m upgrading from a Haydes Canyon and been wanting to go Mac but hasn’t been a good alternative until now.
When transcoding a 4K remux to 1080p @ 8Mbps (which is a typical remote stream for me) the CPU seems to run at 20-25% in the plex dashboard on both the M1 and M1 ultra. I need to do more testing for sure.
I thought the M1 update for Plex Media server was still to come so this would be running under Rosetta, right? Maybe too it is not multi processor aware so the M1 and M1 Max processors would run similarly on single core.
Ok I did some more testing, I got to 6 streams of flawless 4K to 1080p@8Mbps on the M1 Ultra. The 7th worked but it did freeze a few times.
That looks really promising @WAYFLIX. This pretty much shows that the claims of macOS only being capable of doing single hardware encode at a time is not true for Apple M1 Ultra as you have six running at the same time. Considering the CPU performance on the M1 Ultra, what happens if you disable hardware transcoding? How many 4K streams are you able to do using software encoding?
Judging by the Apple developer forums there have been reports of developers claiming that hardware encoding on Apple Silicon is crazy efficient, but the end result is lacking. A lot of claims about hardware encoding on macOS using Intel QuickSync and NVENC looks better. Have you had the chance to watch any of these transcodes to see if there are any visual artefacts?
Hello folks
I’ve read this thread before I got my M1 Mac mini so it encouraged me to setup plex on that machine. Unfortunately I get frequent crashes in which Plex is not responsive or reachable anymore and I have to restart it by hand. Does anyone else on M1 having this problems? To solve it for now I do an automated restart of plex once a day and I’m a little concerned, since I already had a corrupted library db, that this automated quitting and restarting of plex could harm the db. What do you guys think?
Thanks for any input!
I turned off hardware transcoding and then turned it back on. For a single transcoding file you can see the difference.
Thank you. Looks like software transcoding of 4K HEVC is still a no-go even on the Apple M1 Ultra.
I mean… is it ever?
+1 for me. Waiting for a native Apple Silicon PMS version asap.
We absolutely need native M1 support for Plex Media Server. Apple silicon has been around for going on two years and every single Mac product has been upgraded to Apple Silicon except the Mac Pro, which is coming in a matter of months.
I love you Plex, but you’re insanely late on this one. Apple is literally no longer going to produce Intel anything. Plex Media Server is literally the only app in my huge arsenal that is still Intel, and that take sup precious memory and CPU cycles.
Maybe we need to start tweeting Plex and their founders/CEO?
Why do you think tweeting would help?
