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.'"

Comments

mythtv

[willieray]

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/

Where's the insight?

[Kaellenn]

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."

It works pretty well and supports 1080p

[SuperKendall]

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.