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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 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."
Hey, come on now... They tried connecting the Mac Mini to an LCD, and it worked! Then they went on to connecting some USB tuner card to the Mini, and it worked as well! Surely, there's a lot of useful info in this article, and it's not bad for a weeks work, don't you agree?
Yeah, me neither... Must be a slow newsweek or something...
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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).
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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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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.
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.
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!