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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.'"
..... 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."
I upgraded the HD on my G4 mini last year. It's a simple laptop drive and fairly easy to swap out if you know what you're doing. Obviously, you can also use external drives using Firewire or USB2.
For DVD & Media file archives, you could also store things on an external server. The Ethernet port is easilly fast enough to play DVD images off network drives.
The Integrated video makes it kind of a dud for gaming, but from all reports the Dual Core can handle full-scale HDTV fine, and if you haven't jumped on the HD bandwagon yet, the cheaper model would do the job. So at least it's a good machine for PVR stuff, if computer gaming is not a priority.
(Exception: WoW scales down beautifully. I've even played it on a G4 iBook.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
At least one f***up is that the ATI Radeon's DVI to Component adapter will not display DVD movies at a resolution higher than 640x480 (although all other video content is fine at HD resolutions). So if you want to use your Media Center PC to play DVDs and not change have to change the resolution beforehand, you'll need to ditch that useless component adapter from ATI. Of course, it's not like the mini has component out either; the best option for both is a direct DVI connection between computer and HDTV.
I've got XBMC running too. Cool things that It can do.
Grab music from a share
Grab streaming music
Grab video from a share
Play Tivo recorded programsif you have a tivo with HMO or a hacked directv tivo
Play emulators
Play your XBOX games
I never use the regular XBOX console. I find my self playing mostly old NES and N64 games on the XBOX.
I don't own a Mac Mini. However, I don't see why you can not do the same and maybe more with the Mini's extra memory, CPU and Firewire/USB2 capabilities.
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)
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.
So for you, with your leet hacking skills, a modded Xbox is best.
:)
For the rest of the world, a Mac Mini that just works when you plug it into your TV is best. That "rest of the world" demographic is what the C-net article is targeting.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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
That's for decompressing H.264 on the fly with Quicktime.
HDTV signals are typically basic MPEG streams, which requires less CPU power.
EyeTV reccomends any dual-CPU Mac for 1080 HDTV.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
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?
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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Just daisy-chain some external drives off the back. I do this for video editting (under Linux, but same applies elsewhere) and it's really the way to go. When not editing, they are off, and when I need them, I fire them up. Lacie makes a nice 500G unit in an aluminum case that matches the Mac mini (fits underneath like a matching coaster), and they also have very nice external drives ranging from 250GB to 2TB (a bargain at $1900 MSRP).
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.
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!
You can thank the lovely dvd licensors for that, they are contractularly bound to now allow anything with macrovision output rez higher than 480p out. What one can do is run it through something else to remove the encoding and then you can uprez it to your hearts content.
I had a mini running my HDTV projector for almost a year (before I got a sweet deal on a dual-G5 tower.)
Let's look at your complaints, one by one:
First headache was hooking it up to the TV. No computer does completely well with overscan, but at least the Windows rig I built had nVidia drivers where I could tweak the exact resolution I wanted. On Mac I got a single checkbox that said "Overscan" (didn't do the trick) and I couldn't get DisplayX, ResX, etc to properly change the resolution.
Plugging the DVI cable right into the HDMI input on my projector was easy enough.
On my projector, I lose about 12 vertical pixels at 720p. (Fewer in 1080i, but 720 is the native resolution for my projector.)
Tweaked my view to lose them mostly from the bottom rather than the top... Put the dock on the side of the screen... Got on with my life.
Watching shows, I lose less of the screen image than people with ordinary HDTV sets do. Watching movies I usually lose nothing, since the aspect ratio is usually even wider than 16:9. Done.
It refused to play VIDEO_TS folders (my Media Center box does). I won't fault it for that, but I will fault it for having no kind of zoom feature for 4:3/16:9.
The Mac has this very obscure application called "DVD Player" which plays VIDEO_TS folders just fine, and also has the zoom feature you are so depressed about missing. Best of all, I am able to use my universal remote to browse through my entire DVD library on my firewire drives, select the one I want, and watch it in full-screen 16:9 mode. This is all just from the basic OS with a cheap Keyspan IR sensor, mind you. No need for fancy apps.
And don't get me started with the 3rd-party TV recording app. Having to use 2 remotes defeats the purpose of Apple's "simple" design.
My EyeTV remote hasn't come out of the kitchen drawer since the week that I bought it. Nor do I use the Keyspan remote for my Mac.
I do everything with the programmable remote that came with my Amp. Have you never heard of universal remotes?
But as a media center, it absolutely sucks. I ended up returning it.
You're nuts. I would NEVER part with my Mac in favor of a Windows-based media center.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I have version 7.0.4. I gave in and grabbed a serial number to "upgrade" to Pro so it does fullscreen and whatever else "pro" gives you, so I guess that took care of the nagware problem.
You're clearly not listening. The "nagware problem" DOES NOT EXIST with any recent version of Quicktime.
Neither to most of the other playback problems you are citing, at least not in my experience. I don't know what it is that you are doing wrong, but it seems you almost gotta be deliberately making things hard on yourself to be having half as much trouble as you claim.
For one thing, you are mostly using the Quicktime Player app, which is really only there as an ultra-simple playback and conversion tool, as if it was the only option available to Macs, or even the only available option for playack with Quicktime!
You want playlists? Use iTunes! (which plays back via Quicktime, by the way.)
Your whole post reads like those old "it took me 4 hours to copy a file" trolls.
Seriously, you are either making shit up or you're not ready to use computers yet.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Seriously, I don't understand all of this pissing and moaning. Since Flip4mac came out, I've been able to play 99% of media files with no problem whatsoever. Although I prefer VLC for most everything and only use Quicktime player for a couple of formats. So maybe that explains my superior experience :)