Thanks in advance for any info you can share. It's hardly an urgent issue as my usage wouldn't challenge the Plex server even running under emulation, but I wouldn't mind the CPU usage being even lower. It looks like the server uses 'hardware' transcoding when running under Rosetta, but it's hard to know if this means that the CPU is doing the transcoding or if the H.264 / H.265 hardware transcoder block in the M1 processor is being used. I was wondering, though, when we can expect a native M1 processor build of the server. I migrated my Plex server over to an M1 Mac Mini (16 GB RAM) today and everything seems to work well.

Most Macs will clear these hurdles easily my 2012 Mac mini runs Plex like a champ. Either use the downloaded app from Plex or view the content in a web browser. To set Plex up as a basic media server, you'll need: An always-on, Internet-connected Mac running Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks or later, with an Intel Core i3 processor or faster, and 2GB of RAM or more. It's been extremely flaky on my M1 Max laptop. While you can theoretically run the iPad Plex app on your M1 Mac, I don't recommend it. Plex released the Apple Silicon version of their app recently. I'm playing back 4K video and the CPU / GPU graphs show loads of head room. Given the tiny usage I'm seeing on the CPU core graph in Activity Monitor, I guess it must be. Performance seems to be excellent, though I can't really tell whether it's using the media toolbox. I'm running the latest rev, 4.87.2, and there are no Intel processes running on my M1 Mac Mini at all. The native server has been available for a while now, and has apparently left the beta phase and is now in general release.

Plex media server mac