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I'm considering buying the lower-end Mac Mini (1.6GHZ Core Duo, 512MB ram) as an HTPC. I don't intend to do any recording, so I don't need a capture card. I would like to be able to play back HD video though, as my projector is 720P. I'm pretty sure the 1.6GHZ mini can handle x264/h264 720P and 1080P content OK. One thing I like about the Mini is it's quiet, small, and easy to move around, so I can place it fairly easily. I was considering building an SFF PC (or buying a Shuttle), but the Mini is just so much smaller it's a huge win. I'm a bit concerned about buying an Apple product though because of the hardware/software lock-in. Is the integrated remote any good? Can I play MKV (matroska container) video just fine with Quicktime/OSX VLC? And how does it all perform? Any success stories with outputting 1280x720 video over HDMI (dvi->hdmi converted) and optical audio with the Mac Mini? And lastly, would it be worth it to upgrade from 512MB ram to 1GB? I'm only using this as an HTPC, not as a desktop machine, but I'm worried about HD playback stuttering. edit: Any info on the 'minis are going away' rumours? titaniumone fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jul 2, 2007 |
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Jul 2, 2007 21:50
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 18:33 |
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dfn_doe posted:Just dropping in to quote for truth. 1080p is a FAT data stream to process. A mini will certainly not be able to keep up with decoding without some sort of hardware h264 decoding which AFAICT does not yet exist for that platform. According to this SH/SC thread, it can play x264 1080p just fine. I posted there as well to try to get factual information as opposed to assumptions.
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Jul 3, 2007 22:48
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trinary posted:Apple's 1080 movie trailers are very low bitrate and use few of the codec features as compared to actual content from a Blu-Ray disk, for example. People need to stop using them as a benchmark for general 1080P capability. Do you actually have a Mini, or not? I doubt that it can do it myself, but people in the thread are saying with x264 encoded rips at 5mbps+ video bitrate it plays just fine. I'm looking for confirmation, not speculation.
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Jul 6, 2007 00:22
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Okay, people were correct and I've confirmed the Mini will NOT handle high-bitrate x264 streams. I'm considering buying this as my HD-HTPC. How does that look?
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Jul 6, 2007 23:28
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The pHo posted:As mentioned previously, you'd be better getting matched pairs RAM wise, so get 2x512mb sticks over the single 1gb for better performance. Also the HDD you could probably get another chunk bigger for not a lot more dollar.. I tend to work out price per gb when buying new drives and grabbing the best value one. I'm UK so I don't know what costs are like your side of the pond, so maybe the 320gb is the best value, I'm looking for a 500 as the jump to 750 is where the value starts to drop. There's always one rule of HDD space - you will run out of it. I have 2.4TB of space on my home network and space left in my fileserver for another drive; storage isn't a concern for this box. Does dual-channel memory really make that much of a difference considering all I'll be doing is decoding video? It only gives a ~5% performance increase, tops, and it's a lot more money. Also, is that processor fast enough? Or overkill?
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Jul 7, 2007 00:41
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OldSenileGuy posted:Where did you confirm it, and what's your threshold for "high-bitrate"? >6500kbps x264 video ate poo poo on the Mini, which isn't even a ridiculously high bitrate, really.
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Jul 9, 2007 21:54
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 18:33 |
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I posted this in SH/SC, but I realize it may get more information here. I plan on hooking up my HTPC to Logitech Z-5500 speakers. The Z5500's have optical spdif and 3-minijack in. I was originally planning on getting a cheapo (ie Chaintech $25) soundcard with optical out. It is my understanding that if I'm playing something with digital audio (like AC3 audio in a .mkv file), the audio will be passed through the soundcard untouched to the Z-5500's for them to do the decoding and playing. I'm wondering though, 1) is this correct? Will that work fine, and will it not matter if it's a $2 soundcard or a $200 soundcard, since the speakers will be doing the decoding? 2) what happens when the audio isn't something the Z-5500's can process? For example, if I start playing Counterstrike, or use Winamp, or Windows makes a noise -- what will happen then? Will the soundcard process the audio and push it out over spdif, or will I get no sound at all? If I won't get sound in the latter case, how do I make sure I get sound all the time? I'd really like to be able to use the optical connection so that I get proper surround sound. I'm fairly certain the Z-5500's can do all the processing correctly on DTS and DDL and all those other loving Dolby acronyms. Lastly, I'd REALLY like, when the source isn't some Dolby crap (and is therefore just plain-old stereo) to be able to set the Z-5500's to Prologic II, so that the source is expanded into 5.1. When the Z-5500's receive any kind of Dolby signal, you can't set the type of expansion to do.. So I'm thinking that if I have the soundcard set to always output DTS or something, when I start playing something in stereo, I won't be able to tell the speakers to expand it -- I'd have to rely on my cheapo soundcard. So, what's the ideal solution to this so everything "just works"?
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Jul 10, 2007 03:28
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