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Mac Mini vs. Media Center
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net is pitting the new Intel Core Duo Mac Mini against Microsoft Media Center. The first round of the fight concludes: 'The Mac Mini automatically recognised the LCD TV we're using, and the third-party tuner was similarly straightforward to set up. Compared to the hours we've spent coaxing similar results out of a Microsoft Media Center system, the Mini is definitely ahead so far.'"
"Nothing to see here, please move along".
Why in the world are they trying to compare a full blown PVR/Media Center (Windows Media Center) to a computer with a remote (Mac Mini)? Don't get me wrong, the Mini is a cool device and it it had PVR abilities I would happily buy one, but it doesn't. For the most part these are very different devices.
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I'm thinking about getting a new computer -- and Mac Mini is top of my list. But I'm concerned about the hard drive space and the integrated intel view.
The iMac is much more the machine I'd like, but I'm looking for something I can move later to my rec room -- don't want the integrated monitor.
Why can't Apple put out a machine with iMac capabilities in a small cool case -- like the Mac Mini but a little bigger -- I don't want to be confined to small laptop-sized hard drives.
boxlight
Where The Hell Is ROUND 2?
Why not just finish what you started...
And The Weather forecast for Saturday...
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
We pit a toy poodle against a box full of kittens. WHO WILL EMERGE VICTORIOUS?
Is there a way to incorporate another service (onscreen DVR) into the Front Row interface?
A newer product is better than a pre-existing one? You're kidding me.
Oh right if this were a new M$FT to older Apple product comparison only then will people raise the criticisms. People would be saying "M$FT had time to make newer drivers etc. etc." Anyway whatever, it's useless arguing against the fanboys who only see imbalances when it's in their favor.
..... So far in part one, all this article says is stuff we already know (the Mac is easier to set up and use blah blah blah).
Perhaps a more complete review will change my opinion.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I find that neither has anything on mythtv. open source and the latest version has firewire capture and channel changing from my SA3250HD. Check it out if you haven't yet. http://mythtv.org/
Several paragraphs to lead us to one conclusion: the mac mini recognized the LCD TV, the Media Center PC didn't.
There...I just saved thousands of slashdot readers from reading that poor excuse for an article. They may as well have ended it by saying, "we're just trying to cheese you into visiting our web site over and over."
Why is it MAC vs M$? Where're the Linux platforms? I've had better luck playing fullscreen HD H264 in Fedora than I had in Windows.
Put the big (loud) hard drive(s) in other machines, far away.
My hacked, Xbox that is. I'm a Mac owner, and a proud one at at. I tell most people I know that ask for advice to get a Mac (they're not computer geeks, or they'd not be asking me for advice, you see). I was seriously consider an Intel Mini core duo to replace my QuickSilver, but I think I'll wait and see what the new PowerMac replacement has to offer first.
So despite all of that, my hacked Xbox with XBMC is bounds and bound beyond what the Mini can do. *Maybe* the only advantage I can see for the Mini is a local PVR connection. Poor me is relegated to using a five-tuner Knoppmyth box on the backend and using xbmcmythtv on the Xbox. Okay, maybe the Mini can do HD; that's not a concern for me (yet).
--Jim (me)
I just don't understand where CNet is running into challenges. The process for hooking up my HDTV to my ATI RADEON:
1)Attach component adapter to DVI port.
2)Plug in TV.
3)Change channel on TV to component input.
How could they f*** that up? Mind you, things used to be a real chore about 10 years ago. I haven't run into a modern driver suite, that doesn't "just work".
I won't even touch the gross genealizations about an entire market of computers made in the first paragraph.
Every site raves about the ease of Media Center setup.
This guys claim that it takes hours to install is pure bull crap.
Of course the drawback is that devices that are not supported are nearly impossible to make work. And sometimes advanced features are sometimes not supported. And one sometimes needs to buy more expensive peripherals.
In spite of this, I always had better luck with the SCSI devices than any plug and play hack on the PC. Even now, iLife does a better job recognizing cameras and video and memory card, with no additional drivers, than anything else I have used. I would be surprised if the Mini required anything special to become a media center.
When talking about a media center, remember this. The PC has alwsy been about craming in as much as possible because adding stuff, no matter what anyone says, has always been a pain. Recall the hours spend figuring out the slave and master drives? Sure they were easy to install, just often impossible to get runing. OTOH, the mac has always including fast external busses so one could add what one needed. The busses were even chained so new hardware would not need to be added to connect new devices. This is not saying one is better than another, but I prefer upgrading a DVD drive by simply plugging it into the firewire port than having to muck around the inside and setting pins and installing new drivers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Is it just me, or has Microsoft been pushing Media Center really really hard lately? Mainly through box makers like Gateway and Dell? It seems that none of their strategies to monopolize the living room seem to be panning out, so now they're just doing a Dresden-style bombing of the market, pushing harder and harder and louder and louder until someone out there eventually decides to buy Media Center.
The bottom line is that most consumers just don't want a computer in their living room. They want consumer electronics that "just work," like TV's and VCR's and DVD players and surround sound amplifiers. At the end of the day when they plop down in front of the tube, they don't want to have to contend with worms and viruses and email and crashes and software installation/uninstallation and all of the other headaches that go with a typical PC (the availability of better OS's notwithstanding) -- they just want to switch it on and veg out!
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Windows is for people who value their time and Linux isn't.
Okay, we know that isn't quite right.
Mac OS is for people who value their time and Windows isn't.
That is more honest.
I've spent about as much time fighting with Windows as I have with Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc. The difference is that Microsoft's marketing is so brilliant that most people simply don't realize it. For every annoyance in GNOME, for example, there is one in Windows (e.g., registry corruption!). In this article's case, it was getting devices to work well. Other times it has been device conflicts. Yet other times it is applications stepping on each other. And so forth.
This is one reason companies like Apple, Sun, and IBM still have viable business models, because they reduce complexity where it counts for many people.
How is the Mac Mini going to compete against the UMPC platform unveiled yesterday? The UMPC is supposed to start at $600, and Otto Berkes said you can select the components carefully and get one down to $500. The Mac Mini's pricing starts at $600, and it's still mostly useless without a display. I think this is why Jobs was so resigned at his Mac Mini press conference a week ago, not to mention that it was his chip-buddy Intel who co-developed the UMPC spec.
Since when didn't Windows take a rediculously long time to install?
I've never seen a good explanation of why that is, so my guess is that the Windows installer either doesn't know how to, or can't enable DMA for IDE devices, so it runs everything in that dog slow (and CPU intensive) PIO mode.
Maybe someone with a fast SCSI cd-drive & HD can compare notes.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
One of our local internet providers broadcasts television content over high-speed (ADSL). We tried it out for a while, but switched back to satellite due to lack of good movie selection. However, I am also happy of the switch back for another reason: the constant flow of bits (actually megabits!) over our connection noticably degraded our internet experience.
I've been watching all of the talk lately about two-tiered internet and the rise of more and more content of ever-increasing size being sent across the net, and it makes me wonder when it will plateau. (I know, I know... it won't) If content providers keep pushing for internet video-on-demand and if more consumers switch to getting their movies and also regular TV programming from the internet, we are going to fill up those big bandwidth pipes. (Yes, again I know: the ISPs will just do traffic shaping and/or charge us more for premium service)
We at Microsoft never give up. Just wait and buy our next product.
I was using the Windows Media Center at my buddies house for a few days while visiting. It definately sucked. It was installed on a really nice machine, but it still performed pretty badly. The menu system was extremely unstable and required restarting at least once a day. Navigation was slow and would hang up all the time. It would appear to be frozen and sometimes would freeze, some times would come back. We mostly were using it for listening to a large music library while cooking or lazing around, and watched a few episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. To avoid having to use it, I just hooked up my powerbook and we watched stuff from there. Much better.
I've done my share of XPMCE setup, and most were all fine and dandy but one thing that really pisses me off is that it doesn't included a freakin codec for MPEG-2, which it requires to watch live television. It gives you an o-so-helpful standard M$ cryptic message that is of little use to John & Joe six-pack. Now I agree that its not much worse to install than your standard XP build, but the little details are what get you in the end.
The Mini is a really cool idea. I haven't seen any of the hardware that WMC is running on. Personally, I use KnoppMyth, which is alarmingly functional, as far as PVRs go. I am not so into Windows solutions, due to the FUD: How often do I have to reboot WMCE? Will it record my shows? Do I have to have a 500+ Ghz machine to run it on? Will DRM cripple my ability to watch NetFlix DVDs? With an open-source solution, I know that I can do what I want with my hardware, and in this case, means watch Star Trek whenever I want.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Disclaimer: I use MS Media Center with my old XBox and new XBox360 working as extenders to other TVs
;-) They barely even mentioned the media center ;-) The whole artice was about the mini (remote, ipod, will they get all kinds of AWSOME content now that Jobs is on Disney's board, etc) ;-) Here is every reference to the MSMCE in the "review":
Have to agree with parent, I built my own media center using spare parts. Once the OS was installed I think it took me about 5 minutes plug-in the cables from my satellite and to walk through the wizard and everything was working perfectly. I was hoping to see a nice detailed comparison, but this was pretty bad
Microsoft has been desperate to claim the living-room as its trophy wife, but a series of attempts to nail the Media Center concept have largely failed.
We've decided to pit Microsoft's Media Center offerings against Apple's new Intel Core Duo Mac Mini.
However, compared to the hair-pulling ceremonies we've held getting Window Media Center PCs to display anything at all on a TV, the Mac has delivered a nasty right-hook to Microsoft's fighter.
Microsoft Media Center can't export video in an iPod format.
Ding DING! We've reached the end of round one, and the Microsoft Media Center is already panting in the corner of the ring.
Compared to the hours we've spent coaxing similar results out of a Microsoft Media Center system, the Mini is definitely ahead so far.
I'd really have been interested in seeing the pros of the Mini, but this horrible puff piece just made me lose my interest.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
I just got a Mac Mini Core Duo exactly for use as a dedicated HTPC. After some testing, it supports 1080p MP4 playback just fine. The video card is aimed at media and 2D accelleration (for UI features) and thus actually works pretty well has a HTPC. You just need to make sure you have at least a GB of RAM. Note that if you're going to get the full 2GB it's cheaper to order from Apple ($300) instead of crucial ($370) unless you can make use of the two 256MB chips you could pull from the mini. Convential wisdom is that it's always cheaper to not buy RAM from Apple but it does not hold in this case (it might if Apple offered an option as they do in other computer to ship with one chip installed instead of two).
And if you turn on Apple Remote Desktop Sharing you can set it up to be controllable via VNC, so you can connect to it to do maintenience or control even if away from the TV.
Between the digital audio out and gigbit ethernet the new Mini has hadded just the right things to make it really work well as an HTPC.
One thing to note is that out of the box, for some reason the default in DVDPlayer.app is not to use 5.1 sound. So if you're hooking up the digital output make sure to go into DVDPlayer.app preferences and set the audio options to "Digital Only". I spent a little while figuring that out... DVDPlayer.app is what FrontRow uses behind the scenes for DVD playback, just as ITunes is used to do music playback.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For multiple-Mac owners like myself, the best features of the new Mini are being overlooked every time.
Yeah, it's faster. Cool.
Yeah, it's the same size. More Cool
Front Row w/Bonjour? Native HD output? Awesome!!
Being able to access the media on my non-Mac Mini systems (15" PB G4 and soon 20" iMac) is great news to me. Especially now that Apple is offering a "subscription" to the Daily Show and Colbert Report, which I'm sure will spread to other shows soon. Now I can download them to one of my systems in the office and watch them in the front room on my HDTV. Neat.
Media Center is just software. Bad software at that. They need to compare with something real like Beyond Media/Beyond TV. Or even MythTV.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
TFA isn't a review, a comparison, or anything resembling a thorough consideration. They're comparing a single experience without any apparent research.
...the hair-pulling ceremonies we've held getting Window Media Center PCs to display anything at all on a TV...Compared to the hours we've spent coaxing similar results out of a Microsoft Media Center system, the Mini is definitely ahead so far.
A few telling quotes:
Noisy PCs with fans blaring don't really appeal to many of us...Unlike our experiences with most Windows PCs, you won't have to turn up the volume to mask the sound of the small jet plane taking off inside.
Near-silent PCs are easy to build and readily available; there are companies who specialize in HTPCs that produce VERY little sound. My homemade unit produces very little noise. It's not the PC's fault they don't recognize the difference between a desktop system and a HTPC.
That said, the Mini probably is quieter than even most of those PCs; it hasn't been a priority for PC manufacturers.
the last thing you want to do when you get home is run a spyware removal tool and edit the registry before you can get Shrek to play.
The mantra of Mac zealots, neither of these things are regular events. I haven't edited my registry in well over a year, and spyware detection is easily automated and generally unnecessary--especially on a dedicated media PC protected by a firewall.
Oddly enough, I've never had a problem with any of this at all. It's rather telling that they neither link to articles regarding their problems with MCE nor go into detail on the problems with the process in this article.
If they're going to declare one product a winner over another, they need to actually show us the duel. Let us see the process for evaluating both products. Let us see how they selected a particular model of PC that is similar to the Mini in form factor, then discuss volume level. Demonstrate the setup process and discuss the pros and cons for each system. If one peripheral product is problematic, try another brand to determine whether it's a shortcoming of the OS or a problem with the product itself. Then delve into the functionality of both products; how does each one handle different tasks? What does FrontRow do that MCE doesn't, and vice versa?
This article needs a lot less fanboyism to be taken seriously.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
The UMPC competition is like a cliff diving competition that takes place over a dry lake. The way to win the compeition is not to enter. Microsoft failed that first test...
Instead Apple sill just sit back and sell iBooks, since if the device is big enough to need a bag you might as well just have a laptop. The tablet PC tought us all this lesson pretty well (as the tablet form has been doing for years) but only Apple seems to learn.
The mini itself has no competition in that it's a computer that can work without seeming like a computer. You could for example set it up to auto-boot, auto-login and run FrontRow and then just use the remote. Obviosuly for some adminsitration tasks you'll need to se a mouse and keyboard but those can all be done remotiley via VNC and the built in desktop sharing. So you could put a mini in the living room and never hook a keyboard up to it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which one can play FEAR and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?
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This is one of the worst head-to-head comparison articles I have ever seen. In fact, it isn't a comparison article at all, it's more of a blurb about using the Mini as a PVR.
Nowhere in the article do they cite what Media Center hardware they're comparing against. Similarly, they describe absolutely no objective tests with side-by-side results (a la Tom's Hardware). Yet they complain about *specific* MCE PC problems like spending "hours" to display "anything" on a TV and "jet plane" fan noise, both of which are very hardware-specific and have nothing to do with Windows MCE itself. This whole article reeks of fanboi-ism.
I don't have an issue with MPCs not shipping with a TV tuner card. As I see it there are 4 competing standards:
Analog
DVB-T
DVB-C
DVB-S
Of those, the only ones that would actually justify a £500 (I'm thinking signal quality and channel choice) box are DVB-C and DVB-S, but they rely on a CAM, which are almost impossible to source legally. The only feasable options are take the decompressed signal direct from the supplied decoder (limiting you to recording the channel your watching) or accept that Freeview is the only digital content you can actually PVR. This makes the BYO PVR a non starter.
Thats why I'm not suprised that Apple don't ship their minis with a tuner. The market is now so fragmented, that the only way they could provide a quality product is by buddying up with a supplier in each market. Expensive and anti-competitive: not good business.
I also think this makes comparing a Media Centre PC to a Mini fair game. So what if its got a built it tuner? It's not a feature so much as a bolt on. The only thing people can really do with this technology is watch downloaded content, DVDs and created content with a granny friendly interface, which is exactly what an XBox with modchip and XBMC can do for £100. OK, its not as quiet, or as small as the Mac, but its also £400 cheaper AND it plays XBox games!
This is why I'm so suprised that the 360 is so backwards when it comes to getting music from a Media Centre PC! If I could stream DivX/Xvid/H.264 from any network resource with little or no configuration or soldering I'd be very tempted by a 360. As it is, I see no reason to upgrade from my modded XBox (better graphics... meh).
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
In my mp3 collection, I have 18,000 songs in ~3,000 albums. It took Media Center more than 24 hours to add the first 1500 albums into it's database. Of course at that point I cancelled the operation. What kind of crappy Media Center takes that long just to build a song database? Ampache does it in less than 2 hours.
OK. Please explain something to me. With TiVo and other cable PVRs being so widely used, why would anyone want to incorporate a PVR or any TV-related functions into a Mac mini? What kind of tuner should it be--analog or digital? How does it get the program scheduling info like external PVRs do? What kind of remote would it take to program the thing? Do you want video hogging your hard drive?
Seems to me that having an external tuner/PVR box that can connect THROUGH the mini is the best situation. I don't have a mini, but if I did, I'd time-shift by recording programs on my DVD recorder, then play the DVD on the mini. I really don't understand the fascination or logic of having TV tuner/recorder functions in a computer. Would you please enlighten me?
How many Apple threads do we need? Seriously... this is getting out of hand.
And this is coming from a guy who's screen name is "AquaOSX"
Are people not submitting anything interesting? What's the deal?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Apple's site might say that but it's not the reality of the situation. I tried 1080p last night with the HD downloads they offer and it works just fine (on a Core Duo Mac mini with 2GB of RAM). Also read this account for more confirmation, and a number of other posts elsewhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been running MCE flawlessly for almost a year now, and it generally works great for me. But the ugliness of Microsoft's usual suspects is starting to rear its ugly face: MCE doesn't scale well.
I'm on the verge of trying MythTV for the 5th time in a year over just 2 basic problems with MCE: the more stuff I save, the slower things go. More memory and processor speed have done little to combat this problem, and the broad is getting frustrated with having to wait between clicks.
The other problem is also performance related: accessing data stored over the network is terribly slow and inefficient. It likely has to do with my bad WiFi router performance combined with Window's overall inefficiency in handling large files over a network.
I'm a big pro-MCE guy, and my home media network is MUCH larger than most people would care to use (I combine not just video and audio but financial market clips and personal video clips as well). For now, MCE is working, but it is quickly becoming unusable just because I can no longer scale it beyond the current amount of data I'm storing.
Anyone use MythTV or the Mac Mini to store terabytes of video and audio, successfully?
I personally owna media centre, 30 mins searching for the newest drivers and finding a mpeg decoder and it's up and running. Interface has never stuttered and it handles a library of 70+ programmes (~1.8GB/hr) and 2GB of music, not to mention my pictures and such. Microsoft Media Centre really is better than a slow computer with a fancy iTunes front end.
"Oh boy"
I think to most people (including MS) it's pretty clear that Apple is going to create a better media experience. However, the three way battle for the lounge room is not being fought on a single front. The real competitors for the Mac Mini are the Xbox 360 & PS3, not Media Centre.
Apple still wins this fight though because of the video store and other media integration. What happens when Apple hooks front row into an HD version of the video store? Game over, man.
You can get media into the 360 and probably the PS3, but the mini is the only box that would need nothing else to work, and has a simpler remote to boot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why in the world are they trying to compare a software suite (Windows Media Center) to a computer with a remote (Mac Mini)?
But the key is that that remote is in fact the front end to a software suite - each section of FrontRow makes use of different Apple software on the backend. iTunes, iPhoto, DVDPlayer.app and Quicktime are all invoked by FrontRow.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense when you reword it further to say:
"Why in the world are they trying to compare a software suite (Windows Media Center) to a software suite (Mac Mini with FrontRow)?"
Sounds OK to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I bought a Media Center pc about 2 months ago.
... that's it
Setting it up involved these steps:
- remove from box
- plug power, monitor, mouse, keyboard in
- plug tv cable thingy in
- turn on
- click next 4 or 5 times for the media center program to configure itself
-
We eventually just gave up and used an LCD monitor. We couldn't get any reasonable timings to work, either the resolution was way too low, or the text was too blurry to read. It was a nightmare. We spent several hours on it. Painful.
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Personally for me I like the mini because finally I can have a dedicated box to centralize my media on. My music collection was the big fat elephant on my primary Mac box. Now with the mini I can get all the media into one place at last, that is dedicated to always being on and serving media (via iTunes sharing). My other boxes are either laptops which spend the time they are not in use sleeping, so cannot be used as a server or my Powermac which is a development computer and thus I would not always want iTunes running consuming resources.
So you can have it either way, which is really nice. I probably will make use of the video streaming once I get a gigbit switch to hook the mini to the powermac at full speed.
I also agree on the true video subscription features of ITMS. I plan to disconnect my cable pretty soon after I get a few last things worked out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Analog
DVB-T
DVB-C
DVB-S
You missed one - ITMS.
Why do I need any of those standards when I can hook up a high speed connection and just download what I want?
That is Apple's plan. Sure it's not a full replacement right now, but in a year or two with more content and HD content in particular...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Worked the same for me, except I had to play with the resolutions a bit. I wound up with 1024 x 768 and it looks damn good. Had no issues whatsoever getting my card to recognize my TV (Sony 4210)
Makes it more unsightly than a Windows box. You have to add a hard drive -- external because the internals have OSX on it. There's one device.
:)
Then you need a TV Tuner -- external.
Then you need to be able to pass the sound to a reciever perhaps -- more external devices.
After all is said and done.... sad to say, but Microsoft's Media Center is more suitable for a DVR solution. However, if you're just using it to browse movies (you already have digitally stored) or music, then the Mac Mini may be a good choice, since Front Row is really nice. But for recording TV (As I do now), the MCE solution is far, far better. And it's unfortunate because I'd much rather have a mac on my TV
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
please, it doesn't take hours to get a tuner set up on MCE. You "may" need to install a driver for your TV, but, I haven't had to yet. The only valid comment is that the mini is quieter. Of course, you can also get a MCE machine that's quiet as well. Of course, what they haven't mentioned is that the amount of disk space on the mini isn't anywhere near enough to be a useful PRV. While they seem content with just popping on USB and firewire devices, they seem to ignore the kind of rats nest and clutter that would create. My MCE is contained in a single shuttle box. That includes two TV tuners and 400GB of disk space of which 100 is dedicated to Music and Video files I already have. That would be two USB Tuners, and at least one USB/Firewire external hard drive and all the external powercords and cables associated with them, just for the PVR capability I have in a single box that is 7.87" x 7.28" x 12.2" and quiet enough for the living room. In my case, I don't even have the media center in the living room. It's in the kitchen and used as a normal PC and in the living room my X-Box 360 acts as a media Center Extender giving me full access to all my videos, music, recorded TV and live TV without the clutter of having the PC there. Sorry, the mini might be a fun media center project for some, but it's nowhere near as good as a media center PC.
Well, after reading this article, I have even less faith in the news from cnet. What type of video card are they using that they cant get windows to display? I have no problems at all getting any of my systems to display via s-video, DVI, or component out on several Sony HDTV's. I can get them to display native 1080i, 720p, or even 480i via component out. I didnt do anything special other than install the current drivers. Secondly, they say that media center cant export video to an ipod. Well, not natively, but with 4 pushes of my mouse I have it on my ipod video. Very very simple, again no hacking involved here. I just installed a simple free program and use nero (or other programs). This is a joke. Finally, talking about the TV downloads on itunes. They must be kidding, I personally will not violate my HDTV with the less than stellar video and ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE audio from these video downloads. I cant believe they even brought this up in talking about a media center.
I hadn't realized that the difference in TV between the EU and the US explains the odd fascination for the elusive media centre. In the EU, we have free-to-air digital TV (DVB-T) which is just like free analog TV, but it's digital. If you want a media centre, you get an Elgato DVR box and plug it into a Mac (Mini, 20" iMac, whatever) and you're set. A Bluetooth phone (Salling Clicker) makes a nice remote. From what I understand from a friend in the US, who was trying to do the same thing - it's a completely different thing there. There is no free-to-air digital and the Elgato boxes tend not to be compatible with any of the cable or satellite services. Thus, the fascination, I guess. It sounds like the problem is one of TV standards, rather than computers.
After using a regular Mac for an entertainment centre, I am somewhat skeptical about the Front Row, simplified media centre thing. If you want simplicity, you end up paying for it with simplicity. Over time, it became apparent the opposite was true - we want the living room Mac to have email and iChat and web access and everything else one uses a computer for.
Both have there good points and bad points. I think it would be safe to say that most of the PC users on /. built there own computer. Whether it was a Linux or Windows. My whole device cost about $700USD and it was my gamer. I built about 5 more for friends. Can you do ANY of that with a Mac? No. Can produce some of the best graphics and audio the world has seen? Yes. So then the why do we keep having to talk about who is better. Lets just co-exist and have fun or change the world or whatever. Just quit telling us 'my Mac is better than your stupid PC...'.
um... Moby Dick, live version. Bitchin' drum solo.
To get my dual-booting laptop on my wireless network, I bought a wireless card that I knew had at least half-decent Linux support. It was some low-end SMC model, with a Prism 2 chipset.
I started with Windows. Following the CD install to the letter, I ended up having to install/re-install/reboots about 5 times just to get the card recognized. Then, the stupid software that came with the card would never find any WAPs, even though Netstumbler did. Windows sometimes found the WAP sitting 2 feet next to the laptop, sometimes it didn't. Eventually I managed to guess the right settings to use (entirely different than the manual said, incidentally) and 3 hours later my laptop was on my wireless network.
My basic Knoppix-to-hard drive install of Linux, on the same laptop: I plugged in the wireless card and heard the system speaker make a little 'beep'. I fired up a browser and was surfing the web within 10 seconds. Looking into logs, the card was recognized, the Prism2 driver was loaded, and the wireless interface was brought up, all automatically.
Needless to say, this laptop spends most of its time in Linux when I want to go wireless. IT JUST WORKS.
Oh, and "I can't find a way to change the default OS on the boot-selector thingy"? You'll have to learn how, if you want a multi-boot machine. There's just no way around this. It isn't a Windows problem, it isn't a Linux problem, and it certainly isn't something that Apple can help you out with. It's just part of a multi-OS booting system. It's pretty straightforward, incidentally - just find a FAQ on Grub or LILO, depending on which one you've got.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I would like an objective review of MythTV .19 and MCE.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
There are a number of solutions out there that provide an external hard drive with the same styling as the min. Take this one from Lacie: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1072 7
o mpatibility.html
BTW I should note that there are competitors to Front Row that are appearing one the scene. For me MythTV still feels a bit clunky to install, but this one looks like a possible candidat: http://www.equinux.com/us/products/mediacentral/c
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Grandparent: When is Apple going to either stop making Quicktime suck or enable it to play all of the codecs out there? It just took me 2 computers and "Divx Doctor" to watch a low quality fight video off of video.google.com, that is ridiculous.
;) No, really, for a company priding itself on multimedia, Apple is pretty bad with handling any formats that they haven't come up with themselves (for the most part, at least, I don't mean this as a blanket statement). I have one friend who's quite a computer geek himself but uses a Mac almost exclusively, and he actually has to worry about trying to get things to play occasionally; this is quite foreign to me!
Parent: Why didn't you just download the 3rd-party divx codec for Quicktime? For that matter, why didn't you just use VLC? That app plays pretty much everything. Sounds like you were making things tougher on yourself than you had to.
Firstly VLC does things certain ways, and has some various failings of its own that I'm not going to bother going into in detail, but the fact remains that not everyone wants to use VLC. Furthermore, he was talking about how bad Quicktime was, so using VLC doesn't exactly solve that problem
I'm not sure about Grandparent, but I would suspect that he might very well have tried a 3rd-party DivX codec and it just didn't work for one reason or another; don't blame him, ou seem to be acting under the assumption that it's always fun and games in Mac-land. Maybe it is for you, but the Mac OSes have their flaws and quirks, just like any other OS, and believe me, Quicktime is just one big potential frustration waiting to happen (not that I'm defending, say, WMP, although at least Microsoft is surprisingly nice enough in that case to leave mplayer2.exe which earns them alot of points in my books).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Windows is VERY easy to install initially, but making it work properly once it's installed is still a pain in the ass. You need register it, update a ton of drivers that need to be downloaded from all over the place, install the latest service packs and security updates, install Anti-virus and anti-spyware software, and then install a bunch of additional software that would have come pre-bundled with Mac OS or Linux.
Don't tell us that you've already tried this.
Or at least tell us the results.
Microsoft has partnered up with directv for a video store, and there are rumors the ps3 will do something similar.
You mean just like Microsoft and Sony have music stores today, that launch after Apple has grabbed all the market share.
Next?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been researching this STB specifically in the last week, and have a technical question for you:
Will the SA3250HD provide, via 1394, the Analog cable channels that are not sent digitally to it, or do you only get the "clear QAM" (pure digital, non-encrypted) channels via the 1394 connector?
For instance, my cable provider only offers channels like Comedy Central and Sci-Fi via Analog, and the STB makes them available (I know for sure) on its DVI-HDCP port. I was wondering whether those same channels would be available also via the 1394 connection on the SA3250HD.
I would buy Mac Mini in a second, but to me, the real problem is that I won't be able to enjoy watching movies on it, since most of my movie collection is in .avi with either Divx or Xvid codec.
I know that I should be able to play that if I were to install VLC on it, but then my collection will not be usable via FrontRow, and I am not sure if the remote will work with VLC.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
I bought a mac mini and hooked it up to my HD TV, and it was slick and cool and all great... But to compare the two is stupid as hell.
They aren't even remotely related... The MediaCenter (or I prefer mythTV) is a full system for DVR/Thin Clients/Etc... The mac mini just has a silly little remote control to let me change tracks in iTunes, and "FrontRow" software is nothing more than a black screen with 4 icons to let me browse my iTunes in a larger font. It's great for what it is, but it's not related to Media Center in any fashion.
Steve Jobs kept boasting about how his Mac remote control was far superior to the Windows Media center remote controls because it has fewer buttons. Well I hate to break it to you Steve but your remote has fewer buttons becuase there are no features for it to control.
With my media center remote I can enter numeric digits to change the channel I am watching, but your MacMini doesn't have a tuner.... So you didn't need those buttons did you? With my mac mini remote I also have unbearably little control over watching a DVD... I can't change audio tracks, aspect ratio, specify chapters, go into slow motion, or really anything useful. So quit boasting about your remote control.... It's not even comfortable to hold, the back end is sharp as a razor.
Ugh, I'm tired of these stupid apples & oranges comparisons... They do nothing but mislead the uneducated consumer, and piss off the educated ones.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
w00t
So I went to the local PC online store and slapped together a machine, a shuttle with a 740 Pent M, 2 gigs high end memory, 800 gigs of hard drive space, a PVR-500, Media center remote & keyboard, and a 16x NEC dvd burner and of course a copy of Windows XP Media Center addition, it costs 16,965 norwegian crowns.
I went to the apple norway web site, mini duo with 120gig, wireless keyboard and mouse, 2 gigs of ram, etc... I added 3x250 gig drives and an elgato eyetv 200 to the cart. That costs 20,106 norwegian crowns.
With the Windows Media Center PC, I get a large base of plugins, including My Movies which allows me to image all my sons dvd's to his computer and catalog them by using the imdb.org or amazon.com websites for movie data and artwork. I am able to record one channel and watch another. I can install all my sons PC only educational games (there are none in norwegian or swedish for mac that I've been able to find). I can run Windows WMVHD dvds which I own a few of. I can use my iTunes music library using a plug-in I wrote to integrate iTunes to Windows Media Center, etc...
On my Mac Mini (I have 2 macs, one server, one mini, 2 Linux systems, a VMWare partitioned Linux/Windows server, 3 Windows notebooks, and a BeOS toy in the house, all using licensed software), I fight and struggle to find programs to do the simplest things. For MPEG encoders, I'm limited to a terrible selection including that included with iDVD, the one that comes with Compressor for DVD studio pro, and the third party one for a lot of money I tried but found to be little better than compressor. I can't find childrens games, I can't find any decent development tools (argue with me on this one, I dare you), I can't find decent programming documentation. TrollTech Qt can't even generate project files for use with XCode. I can't use Windows Media files in any application (and Flip4Mac only works 1 in 10 times). I can't get good performing video codecs, etc...
That being said, I ordered the new Mac Mini the other day, it looks like a nice machine and since I have experience developing applications for EFI on ia64, I figure it'll be fun to try and emulate real mode long enough to boot Windows Media Center onto a pretty cool machine.
Later
There is actually a reason for the Mac Mini to be thought of as a good
media computer, which hasn't been touched on yet. The future holds
a threshold date after which all analog TV transmissions become null
and void, when digital receivers (set-top boxes) must be used to get
any off-the-air broadcasts.
And all those set-top boxes are going to have Firewire ports.
Most PCs are unsuited to the entertainment center because they lack the
basic amenities (silence, remote control, low power consumption, firewire).
The Mac Mini doesn't suck. It IS suited to this location, and it's available
now. Heck, it was available last year, and the year before that...
Remember, too, that adding a set-top-box means you have to have multiple boxes to
do familiar tasks (tape the news on channel N while watching the movie on channel M?)
and that the task of tuning in a channel is no longer something your VCR can do,
'cuz it takes the signal from that set-top-box...
You'll want a sane interface, using a single remote control,
reading a single menu from a screen,
and having it all JUST WORK without any of the little gotchas...
Remember that VCR that was hard to tell whether it was AM or PM?
Remember that VCR that wouldn't do its timed record unless it was in
OFF/standby mode?
Remember the recording that hit the end of the tape (or DVD) and lost
the final scenes?
Remember the power glitched, and nothing kept its settings (a computer
with filesystem and backup battery would have solved that problem)?
Remember the cute accessory outlet on the cable box that turned off the TV,
and how the before-sleep ritual of turning the TV off meant the VCR was
taping from a turned-off cable box and it taped a lot of nothing?
Remember how the universal remote got bumped to TV and you tuned the TV instead
of the cable box and nothing showed up right?
Remember how the Beta and VHS recorders were daisy-chained and somehow the
signal was getting noisy until you unplugged some of them?
All those glitches are soluble but the solutions are in the form of integration
of functions and good software modeling and display/control functions.
Tivo does most of this, but not all (multiple-channels-at-once? Gonna cost ya!)
The need for information integration and a control terminal (keys on the remote,
menu and status on the big screen) with responsibility for the
whole media center is here, NOW.
I think a lot of folk will have a computer of some sort next to the TV in the next few years.
The happiest of those folk might have a Mac Mini.
I actually do not have it hooked in quite yet, but I have an eyeTV HD receiver I am planning to hook to it (already tested it with a Powerbook previously to see how well it would work long before I got the mini). In the meantime other HD sources include Apple's HD trailers page, and bittorrent, both of which I plan to use as primary HD sources until ITMS starts selling HD video (I am thinking mid-year).
A downside to the OTA HD receiver is I live in Denver, and fanatical anti-radiation zealots control the surrounding hills. So, TV stations are forced to broadcast HD from secret bunkers downtown until we can talk the stupid hill people into accepting an HD tower to serve the whole metro area, which ironically will reduce the total amount of radiation residents receive as older less efficient towers are removed. Thier plan seems to be to have no towers at all, even though the ones already there wil never go away until we get new ones.
As you might imagine receiving HD sigals from places not meant for broadcasting yields terrible signals. Though the HD reception sites claim I could access just about anything by pointing an antenna in different directions, the reality on the ground is that I can get one major network if I have the antenna just right (Fox) and the local PBS (both channels) with crystal clarity even without an antenna (hey, it replaces Discovery HD pretty well!). A side note of interest is that reception of HD signals seems to work just as well in my basement (with the antenna near the ceiling) as it did in the top floor of my house. How odd...
As for an antenna I bought a large squarish grey antenna at Best Buy. I bought two different ones to try them out, but the other model (that I think was smaller) did not work as well, so I'd reccomend whatever it was I bought. When I'm at home later I'll send a second response to your post with the model though it was a year or so back that I bought it and there might be better ones by now.
Another side note, you know what is cool about using the mini with an HD receiver? Enabling remote desktop and using VNC on a laptop, I can fiddle with an external antenna while monitoring signal strength on the mini itself. Just popped into my head as I was thinking about mounting the antenna on the outside of my house.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This always riles me up. iTunes and apple are such great products except they miss fundamental point. Like the Register article said, (paraphrased), "Apple doesn't necessarily do hard things. They just do easy, obvious things that others don't want to do. Things like providing an mp3 player with simple controls and a music store with simple pricing." But they don't seem to be willing to provide a data stream usable on other devices reguardless of if you buy their software or hardware. The fact of the matter is I am not going to open WMP to play windows files, iTunes to play Apple files and Winamp to play Ogg files on my TV. I am going to have a single, unified user interface and anything that can't supply data to that UI, I am not going to purchase.
I do security
Hmm, I had not checked other places for memory. I have to say though I have had bad luck in the past with memory, and so being gun-shy I tend to use Crucial or nothing at all.
However, that price difference does give one pause... if I'd thought about it I probably would have risked that as $170 really is a lot better (for Samsung RAM too, so at least you get a good name). Thanks for pointing that out, even if it's too late for me perhaps someone else can save a bit of money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Revisions will come, but in the meantime it has all the parts it needs - as far as I am concerned it's only software issues at this point.
As you say FrontRoom is somewhat raw right now but basically a good idea. It just needs a little smoothing out, for instance to know to direct VIDEO_TS feeds to DVDPlayer instead of Quicktime (and perhaps other kinds of files to other apps as well).
For me it already works much better that either Myth or WMC, because I can use ITMS video on it (to me the quality is OK on my projector, no worse than my analog cable), I can use my ITMS music on it, it's really, really small and quiet and the remote is pretty good for what works with it.
Apples plan is basically to ignore tuners altogether, I am sure they are planning on selling HD video soon. I don't watch that much TV so for me buying a few HD shows here or there is way better than any cable subscription at all (I am dropping it in favor of buying videos on ITMS and using OTA HD reception, poor as that is where I live).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am running a G4 mini with front row on it and if you download and install the divx and xvid codecs (simple process), you absolutely can view these formats in front row and/or quicktime. I access my collection of xvid tv shows across a wired network straight out of front row. The quality and ease of use is great. I haven't upgraded to front row with bonjour so right now I just use an alias (shortcut) to link to the movies folder on my server.
Here are the links you would need:
divx: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/download/
xvid: http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/
To view xvid files, you need to have both above codecs installed - not sure if this is the same on the PC.
-matt
Tablets are very popular in some niche applications, as they always have been and they always will be. But they've never really expanded that niche. I have a lot of pretty technical Windows friends and no-one I know has even thought of buying a tablet.
There's no question they are useful for some people. It's just that the market doesn't like them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA
(In Homer voice)
It's funny because it's true...
(Wipes eyes).
I must have msised the other company you are thinking of that has 80%+ of online music sales and MP3 players.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most PCs are unsuited to the entertainment center because they lack the
basic amenities (silence, remote control, low power consumption, firewire).
The Mac Mini doesn't suck. It IS suited to this location, and it's available
now. Heck, it was available last year, and the year before that...
Most is the key word. People buying the standard PC from the shelfs of Bestbuy are not buying them to primarily being media center PC now or in a few years. You can by a quite, small, low power PC with firewire and a remote. Just because most people do not buy one of those has nothing to do with the state of the "PC" at all. With the exception of the Mini, are there any other Apple computers that are suited to be an entertainment system based on all of your own listed requirements?
To take a page from the bad analogy guy...
Most cars can not go 150MPH either, that does not mean all cars are slow. There are cars that can go that fast just that most people do not have them.
Does your WAP broadcast the SSID? If not there is a known problem with Windows Wireless Zero Configuration where it will not connect at all if the WAP does not broadcast the SSID, even if you manually configure the wireless settings.
I had this problem with the Apple Airport and the only way to fix it was to disable the Wireless Zero Configuration service.
1)Attach component adapter to DVI port.
2)Plug in TV.
3)Change channel on TV to component input.
How could they f*** that up? Mind you, things used to be a real chore about 10 years ago. I haven't run into a modern driver suite, that doesn't "just work".
Well, I got an ATI Radeon board with S-video out, about 2 or 3 months ago. I tried plugging it into the TV, and changing the TV input to the S-video input. Nothing. I fiddled with drivers and utility programs for half an hour, then gave up. (FWIW, I've used the S-video input on this TV with my Powerbook for years, with no problems.)
It's great that yours worked fine. I'm happy for you. But that doesn't say anything about the general case. One piece of hardware worked, therefore all similar ones do -- WTF? You can't criticize CNet for using only one data point, and then turn around and present only one data point!
I month ago I bought a G5 iMac (iSight). A few weeks later I picked up an eyeTV 200 and an external hard drive.
Having once owned a TiVo, I can say that TiVo does not need to worry about any possible competition from el Gato. The software is so much crap as to be ridiculous. The inability to set up a "Season Pass" (where the software will record all episodes of a show on a certain channel) tops the list, but there are many other deficiencies.
Some other problems:
1) The lack of integration with Front Row.
2) The lack of an on-screen display to choose programs via the remote.
3) The inability to edit out commercial breaks automatically.
4) Complete lack of tools to manage hard drive space (ability to say "Just record four of these", and so on)
I have thought about setting up an AppleScript solution that would take the recordings from eyeTV and get them into a form where I can view them with Front Row, but I feel like I should not have to do that.
I have thought about picking up an Intel Mac mini to keep near my television to stream to, but I want to get everything working well before I consider that.
No, Front Row is not ready to replace MythTV or TiVo, but it is a nice solution, nice enough that I miss it when I am working with the eyeTV software.
A Mac mini + Front Row is getting there, but is just not just there yet.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I think they've got the OEMs pushing Media Center, because in 6-12 months whenever 'Vista Cruiser' (TM) actually comes out, they're going to want to push people to get the 'premium' version which has all the media center crap-ola built in. They're just getting pepole used to the price premium now to they're ready when the cruiser hits the streets.
I see you have been modded troll, TWICE, for two insightfully interesting and informative posts..
/., where there are more Apple whores. At least 5 times more than real whores in real life on the streets.
Do you wonder why? Because you said " sucks". And because this is
I had the opposite experience.
I bought a Netgear wifi card, because I heard that it had better Linux compatibility (though it cost a little more).
I turn my computer off, plugged in the card, and turned my computer back on. I googled, and found a HOWTO that said how to set up wifi on Debian: edit some file (/etc/network/interfaces, or something like that). The format of the file was fairly simple, and I just copied the example and replaced my IP address, network name, and so forth. It worked, first try. Never had a problem with it.
I also have a hard disk with Windows XP. I figured since the wifi card has "Designed for Windows XP" stamped all over the box, maybe I could get it working there, too. I followed the instructions on the sheet that came with the card. No go. I tried navigating the confusing maze of "Wizards" that Windows XP showed me. No go. I tried calling tech support for help. No go. (They wanted to replace the card, even though it was working fine under Linux.) I checked to make sure I had the latest Microsoft-approved drivers -- yup. I tried downloading the latest drivers from the web, just to make sure. No go. I tried comparing my setup to other working Windows XP boxes on the same network -- looked the same, but theirs worked and mine didn't. So I gave up.
This is the same Windows XP that, when I installed it, found a 100Mbps ethernet card and a Firewire card, and decided to make the Firewire card my default internet connection, despite having nothing plugged in to it. Great idea, Bill.
I later heard from a coworker who uses Windows that the correct procedure may be to ignore the instructions, and install the driver with the card removed from the computer, then shutdown, install the card, and reboot. But by that point, I didn't care. If I have to *remove* a PCI card from my computer to get Windows to see it, well, screw them. I don't use Windows that much, and it's just not worth all the trouble.
P.S., yes, my Macs have always connected perfectly with no fuss.
P.P.S., I keep seeing articles that ask if Linux is "ready". I don't know if it is or not, but it's certainly no less "ready" than Windows XP.
> That said, PVR'ing content of that kind of resolution, which essentially involves constant recording to disk, is enormously more demanding on any PC.
Recording an MPEG2 stream is amazingly NOT CPU intensive. The old G3 iMacs with Firewire are more than capable of recording an HD MPEG2 stream to disk. The reason, of course, is that no encoding is required to PVR the data, since it is received as a MPEG2 transport stream in the first place. Playback is another problem, and something that a G3 cannot decode, but is more than happy to send back out the Firewire port to be decoded by whatever tuner you pulled the stream from (assuming it has the play-from-firewire capability). This is the same when pulling a stream in from an ATSC tuner card, except for the firewire part. No encoding needed. A DE-coder would be nice on the card, for systems whose main CPU is not up to the task of 1080i playback, but for newer computers, not strictly a necessity.
I am a full blown apple fan and I would want to buy a mini, hook it up to a tv and do fun things.
But ah, um, I wouldn't be able to replace any of my other gear. Not really. So media center? I don't know. Not that I'd buy a PC to try and do that. I'm just not the kind of guy who'd replace my easy gear to do it all painfully. And that's what it seems to be with some people I know. It works. Sort of. Most of the time. For most things. Come to think of it, they didn't throw away anything either. Apart from one person who seems to have gotten it right. But he's not into games. Ah well.
Maybe media extension or something. Another appliance. Not a replacement. Not by far.
Although it could be worth it to digitize all my audio (would need some serious disk space for that). I'll probably just wait for the next great thing, or the next. Ah, coveting shiny white boxes... Nerd or fashion victim?
Whoah, it's late.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Using the Maria Taylor trailer as an example, 720p requires about 3.1GB per hour. 1080p requires about 4.0GB per hour. On a 60GB hard drive, that's about 10 two-hour 720p movies or about 7 1080p movies with no room for anything else (OS X, apps, other data files). An HD movie won't fit on an SL DVD.
BTW, Apple recommends a 1.83GHz Core Duo for h.264 720p playback.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
I think you'll find the Mac Mini has a single core Intel chip, not a core duo.
Ah, seems there is a dual core Mini - didn't spot that.
Even with the calculations you gave, that sounds pretty reasonable - 10 two-hour 720p movies is actually quite a lot of content. If you think in terms of downloading content it's not that bad, especially if you are able to archive shows off to some other medium. And standard definition stuff it obviously would hold quite a lot of.
Also the 80GB is just a base and if you fint it cramps your style you can opt for up to 120GB.
As for the reccomendations, I have seen them but I've also seen 1080p video on my Mac mini with dropping frames - and there have been other people reporting the same thing. Apple estimates may be a little conservative or not upated to reflect improved codecs or video drivers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here in the real world:
Vista Media Center is not going ot run on an UMPC
UMPC's are slated to have a battery life of THREE HOURS.
Hi-Def who with the what now? What does "Hi-Def Docking station" even mean. I'll just sit here with the mini and download HD content already thanks. When are you going to get that magic dock?
Priced at $500, if you ship without RAM or a case. Don't you recall the base was $600, and a "stripped down" version possibly could be $500? I'm sure that will make an AWESOME media center, yessir.
The funny thing is that everything you mentioned will probably be coming out for the iPod shortly - and it'll get fifteen hours of battery life. UMPC vs iPod, here we go!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ddin't you see the video or the pictures? The UMPCs are not really like a paperback. And iBooks are no EB's. Heck even the powerbooks are like carrying a slim hardback.
Even if I am carrying a real paperback with me, travelling or elsewhere it's in a backpack. If it can't fit in a pcket then just give me a real screen and a real keyboard please.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I didn't realize you were talking that big. While that might do the trick I'm sure my HOA would be outside my door with pitchforks and torches if I tried putting up something that large... perhaps if it were in the attic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just checked and the antenna is a Samsung. Now to hook up the HDTV receiver to the mini...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can not bitch about Apple on /., irrespective of how much they suck, and how truthful your post is.
(Now, if this post is marked as a troll, it proves my point. If it is not, it proves again! Beat that, Apple whores!)
Hardware decoder would also be very useful in a PVR situation, since many people do watch live TV with it. Which means encoding and decoding happens simultaneously.
As you say, probably irrelevant with today's hardware. And irrelevant if the source, as you wisely point out, is already MPEG-2, and with no transcoding necessary. Was your G3 deinterlacing?
Still, that resolution's a real kicker. And storage is an important factor. Probably at that resolution, disk I/O will be a real issue with the Mini's HDD; although, I don't know for certain, they probably upped the RPM for the Intel Minis. Certainly, storage space will be an issue. But since a Mini PVR will already be utilizing an external tuner, it might as well use a few external hard drives (or a file server)...hard drives designed to look nice in the entertainment center. Apple could set up a bunch of nice peripherals for it.
Going back to the article, I'm curious what the compared XP HTPCs were like. My Athlon XP-based MythTV box, in an nMedia 200SA microATX case, is as quiet as my G4 Mini ever was.
I have been using Mac Mini for media centre since it first launched .... Who needs dual core intel? Paired with EyeTV, 1 TB of storage, Surround Amp and Mission speakers and a 42 inch high def Hitachi Plasma, I have perfection in my lounge. Little effort was expended in setup. PVR works a treat and I can program it from anywhere in the world via VPN. Small Silent and wayyyy sexy. If you want bright bling bling lights though you'll have to buy the USB plug in ones.
Control via Logitech BT Mouse and Mac BT Keyboard.
Writing an interface to assume all Remote control functions now... Little learning Remote for OSX, Widget!! USB IR module and shazzam it's done :)
I read the review and scanned the specs for the HDTV receiver (Miglia TVMini HD) they used for viewing free-to-air digital TV broadcasts. The spec sheet for the Miglia device claims it records digital streams direct to disc w/o modification, claiming that full quality is kept.
The question is -- does it heed the broadcast flag and refuse to record shows so flagged? I could not find an answer to this question