You talk about PMS as if it doesn’t work on Apple Silicon. It’s perfectly adequate on M1 (i.e. no slower than on Intel)
Would it be great if it was on Apple Silicon? Yes. Is that where I’d put resource at the moment? No.
In the end it’s not down to us. We can express our opinion, but the Plex team have to decide their strategic direction. The only things you can do are make them aware of your wishes and decide whether to pay for a Plex Pass or not.
Plex will no longer be supported on macOS hardware in the future unless they develope a native solution.
As @elan stated above they are working on it and are “close”.
Longshot but I’ve sometimes gotten better results from other companies by tweeting them and their CEO than emailing or posting in a forum.
Well it should be screaming fast on M1, not adequate.
Unless I’m doing something wrong, I have my HDHomeRun Quattro set up in Plex to use hardware transcoding to convert from mpeg 2 to h.264. It is converting but it takes up way too much CPU power which leads me to believe it’s not utilizing the dedicated decoders in the new SOC.
Again, please correct me if I’m wrong.
The CTO is on the forums and even posted in this very thread. It won’t help. They are working on it, slowly.
There is active work occurring to track down remaining issues. Very excited about this one myself.
I’m curious to know if mpeg2 decoding is accelerated on M1. But even if it isn’t, that shouldn’t be very CPU intensive.
You might open a new post and share logs.
These random pop-ins give us a glimmer of hope. Thank you so much Elan for responding here. Try to take these loud commenters as “we love you and are anxious to get our hands on this new optimized Plex so we’re taking it out on you with words” and nothing more. 
thanks for all the hard work you’re doing. Eager to read about it in a Plexcerpt soon 
Given the incredible gains we’ve seen in our studio migrating steadily to M1, PMS should really see a significant boost. Very exciting to see this!
Thanks a lot for doing this Elan & Team. As a Plex Lifetime member, I really think you have been doing a great job lately. Some of the recently released features might not be my coup of tea, but I think Plex Server and Plex players (using new AppleTV) have never been better. You guys have come a long way through the years, and I know a lot of us really appreciate what you spend your time on every day - so thank you!
Can’t wait to buy a M1 Mac and run Plex Server on it. I, like many others, will need to see comments and such from the community before we upgrade - so don’t be too bothered by the download- and usage statistics in the very start, it will come.
Just bought a Mac Studio with M1 Max and I’m waiting for Apple Silicon support on PMS before to renew my Plex Pass.
I am on the fence with this. Yes I would love to see PMS running native on M1, but Apple have done such a good job with Rosetta 2 that I don’t think it will make much of a difference.
Of course Elan and Plex will make it native as Apple won’t offer R2 forever, but for now it is fine. PMS just works using R2 and I would argue more stable compared to when I ran it on my old iMac i7. Performance wise, it is miles better so when native one could only hope it gets even better.
But for now, it works. I mean Windows 10/11 runs better under Rosetta 2 than on Microsofts latest and greatest Surface (there was a study out about it a few months back).
As someone who is married to a Dev, we all owe them a thanks for continuing the work to make it native. It must be an absolute minefield to get working.
[conspiracy theory mode]
Will PMS Apple Silicon be launched as part of Apple’s WWDC M2 announcement, as in they are in the video detailing how much more performance they got from building an AS-native app.
June 6th it is :).
[/conspiracy theory mode]
Really looking forward to this release!
Does anyone else experience really lagged response from Plex on Mac M1? I mean once something starts playing it’s OK but everything I click, including the pin login at the beginning has a big delay like 1-2 seconds it shows after being pressed. Thanks.
@marshalleq I’m running Plex on Mac Studio Max, no issues around laggy GUI behaviour that I’ve noticed at all.
Thankyou that’s very interesting. Just checking, we are talking about the Plex client and not the server right?
Thanks.
Yep Plex client on 16" M1 (build 1.44.0.2981-e2d72ac2), it isn’t buttery smooth, and does take a little while to load, but when running it is fine for me.
I do note that “QtWebEngineProcess” is consuming fairly constant CPU (about 25%), even when no media is playing, perhaps on the M1 processor this might impact more than the M1 Max.
Also note that the iOS client can be installed on your M1 Mac (I’m running the TestFlight Beta), and offer native non Rosetta experience. You can have both installed.
Thanks yeah I have a 10 core version of the M1Pro 16", with 32G of ram. As far as I know the CPU’s are the same on Pro and Max just the GPU’s are different. The issue isn’t really with watching content, it’s just that anything I click on etc is delayed before it shows as having been clicked. So the menu system looks nice and everything but it’s just a bit frustrating to use as it’s slow. I have the iOS version installed, but it’s menu is so small on my screen it may be snappier, but not really nice to use. So I’m continuing to use the proper client for now.
I’ve done a completely fresh install for M1 too, so I’m really not sure what it could be if it’s not happening to you.
Thanks!
I just put some of the interface delays down to content loading from Plex Server, but now I look at it a little closer something is indeed wrong.
I’ve created this thread in the Mac Player area:
I am running Plex server on a Mac Studio and noticed it is running in Intel emulation mode. Whilst I can see that Plex server is NOT resource hungry I too would like to see an Apple Silicon version.
Apple Silicon is about to release their second generation chips M2 and by end of 2022 all Macs will have transitioned to Apple Silicon.
It offers great performance and unique hardware accelerators for video.
So I would like/support a native version.
