The Mac mini as a Media Computer
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 16, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Apple’s DVD Problems Continue
As you can see from the screenshots below, Apple's DVD decoder is clearly not of the same quality as ATI's DVD decoder on the PC - despite the fact that the hardware is the same across the two platforms. One very likely possibility is that Apple handles the DVD decoder development, rather than letting ATI and NVIDIA provide separate DVD decoders for their GPUs. Historically, Apple has done their best to make sure that the user experience (outside of 3D games) was identical between ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards, which is part of the reason for Apple-bundled video cards not exposing vendor-specific control panels like under Windows.
There's no indication that Apple will fix their de-interlacing algorithms in the next version of OS X, but if Apple is to be taken seriously as a player in the digital convergence world, they need to start with the basics, including fixing their DVD player. The bar is relatively high for Apple, their users expect perfection, and there's no reason for what we've seen here.
As if the image quality issues weren't bad enough, there's another problem with Apple's DVD player - CPU utilization. It appears that Apple's DVD player has no support for the Radeon 9200's hardware-assisted DVD decoding, including motion compensation and iDCT support. The result is that playing a DVD eats up between 40% - 60% of the 1.25GHz G4 in the Mac mini, which is fine for playback, but unacceptable if you plan on doing anything else while playing a DVD.
The other issue that we had was the noise of the slot-loading DVD drive in the mini. During normal DVD playback, it was a bit too noisy for our tastes, but out of the issues, this one is far less important.
So, it looks like Apple has two things on their DVD player to-do list: improve de-interlacing quality and take advantage of the years of innovation that ATI has built into their GPUs to reduce CPU utilization when playing DVDs.
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unithom - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
In case my profile doesn't show my link, my diagram of my setup is at: http://www.unithom.com/avstuff/Apparently Apple has access to the hardware based MPEG decoding routines in the GPU but doesn't make those publicly available to folks like ElGato. So their DVD player works smoothly but EyeTV hits the CPU pretty hard. Note: it uses /tmp to store the cache as it processes, so keeping your EyeTV library on an external drive should help; less conflicting read/writes when on two separate disks.
I borrowed a friend's 1.25 Mac mini to try out with my EyeTV 200 (analog) and EyeTV 500 (digital). The 200 worked fine. The 500 recorded okay, and played back 'fullscreen' (my 37" Sharp Aquos is at something like 1344 x 768 via DVI, dot for dot mode) pretty well .. maybe a dropped frame here or there, but nothing that made me freak out. Even if I wasn't happy with playback I could always use the Virtual DVHS app mentioned in the article; it played back the LOTR clip available on BitTorrent just fine, recorded and played back fine, and I also recorded from the EyeTV 500, edited out commercials, and played back the stream via VDVHS. All worked fine.
I too was bummed that Apple didn't think to include a digital out like they did on their AirTunes-enabled Airport Express. But for now, I'm ordering the M-Audio Sonica Theatre with coax 7.1 output.
re: storage space, my solution is fairly simple. Two 400 GB firewire drives. (One backs the other one up periodically, straight mirroring - but only once a day or whatever). I'm paranoid about losing data ever since I dropped a 250 GB external and DriveSavers pronounced it DOA...
Re: remote controls. Watching live TV, even HD TV using EyeTV is a real pleasure. It has an IR remote. It lets you do 7 second instant replay and 30 second commercial skip just like TiVo, timeshifting your TV. People like myself are petitioning ElGato to include access to IR codes received via the SDK, e.g. the ability to map specific signals to run applescripts, shell scripts, and so forth. One guy on AVSForum wants to use an IR remote to output serial commands to his tuner and TV. There is already the IRTrans and iRed software available to do this as well.
More eyeTV goodness: You can watch and record at the same time. There is an easy to use editor for removing commercials and then you can 'compact' your show (typically 1 hr -> 42 mins) to save space and junk the commercials. EyeTV 500 doesn't respect broadcast flag as long as you buy before June whatever-it-is. (And good thing, too. Screw them.)
Originally I used the EyeHome, which is a sort of thin client; it browses pages served by a (sadly, closed) Tomcat server running on the Mac. It serves eyeTV recordings, ripped movies, iPhoto Library slide shows, iTunes songs/playlists, and lets you browse webpages on screen. But network latency makes it fall off. No on-screen 'time elapsed/remaining'. Can't get back to where you were easily if a program dies (happens WAY too often especially when trying to ffwd/rew, then hit play again... zoop, dies.) The interface is fairly hard to navigate.
So I'm eschewing the eyeHome for a Mac mini. With a bluetooth module, and a wireless keyboard/mouse bundle, that's a far better remote IMO for doing other stuff besides EyeTV playback.
(I already have wireless mouse/kbd and BT for an iMac G5 and though there is a slight wake-up delay and slight mouse-moving delay -- can't be helped, it's still really nice for a more clutter-free experience. For the living room, it'll be essential.)
I found myself missing iTunes for playing music, iPhoto for doing slide shows, Safari for web browsing -- you get the point. So, having an actual computer in place of eyeHome will be nice.
People keep saying that some kind of breakout box for the Mac mini needs to happen. IMO it's already here, it's the EyeTV. That plus external drives, and i.Link support -- just make sure all your devices have two ports (eyeTV does; other world computing sells the Mercury external enclosures with 2) or that you have a firewire hub, etc.
Happy HTPCing!
mlittl3 - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
Thanks #20. That would work perfectly and not take up too much space or add more noise.I was thinking about harddrive space with regards to size and noise. I guess you could buy a 100 GB 2.5" drive from a third party and install it. That would be pretty cool.
T8000 - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
When viewing interlaced content on a PC, I usually do not use de-interlacing, as the slight resolution improvement is not worth the artefacts.Can the Mac also play DVD's without de-interlacing? And does that solve all artefacts?
Also, with mpeg4, you are not unlikely to fit over 100 movies in VHS quality on a 80 GB PC/MAC.
sprockkets - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
Interesting. I didn't know HD recording was possible. You can get an HD tuner card for a computer, but is limited to over the air broadcasts, so big deal.It seeems that there is a way then to record from firewire, but then again, with bull encryption. Like someone is going to pirate a 10 GIGABYTE recording over the internet!
HardwareD00d - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
So what kind of software is available to let me record video through my cable box's firewire connector for the PC? Anyone?How much disk space will a 2 hr HD video stream take up? I'm guessing around 8-16 GB?
Doormat - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
My thoughts:-as poseted by #20, use m-audio USB TOSLINK out to surround sound reciever. Works fine with the Apple DVD player.
-Wait until video core upgrade comes along in v2. I wont buy it unless it handles 1920x1080P/30 flawlessly (yes, 1080P will be available on HDTVs this year, no content available but available as an input). That would require something like a 9600 with 64MB vram.
-use the Mac Mini as a HTPC client box, having a server someone else in the house with many video capture cards and some sort of remote scheduling front end (doesnt MythTV or one of those have a OSX front end available?). Also, the large server could also handle the massive storage requirements needed for HD.
I personally want to use it as a client for a Kalidescape-style system, plus to surf the web and play MP3s on my 61" DLP TV. I'm hoping apple does a refresh for the Fall/back-to-school time (with more video horsepower, even if I have to pay extra for it).
paulbeers - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
bob661 -Yes true you can get an external hd. One can also get external TV Tuners. One can also get...yadda yadda...but all of these devises require more space and will generate more noise and more cables and more plug ins...etc. I even own an external drive enclosure. What Myth TV now will do for you is allow you to set a box wherever (close or office or bathroom if you would like) and that will do all the recording and can have all the loud 7200 rpm hard drives spinning away and it will never interfere with your enjoyment (if you have ever had an htpc in your living room that isn't virtually silent which I have) you know how annoying that proc fan can get reaallllyyy annoying.
michael2k - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
You want something like this, mlittl3?http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/SonicaTheate...
mlittl3 - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
Since the Mac Mini has USB 2.0, are there any external USB audio solutions from any of the sound card manufacturers like Creative that supports Mac OS X? If so, this would be a way to get 5.1 and 7.1 audio onto the Mac Mini. However, this would require a little more space. You would have to stack the device on top of the mini.I can't possible see hard drive space being a problem. Just get an external firewire or USB 2.0 drive like #18 said.
Lastly, Anand, it would be cool if you could make a section on your website for people to send in photos and solutions on how they set up their Mac Mini as an HTPC. There are a lot of combinations and externals that could be used and it would be interesting to see what people come up with. The comments section to these reviews is just not enough.
bob661 - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
#14Since the mini has USB ports just connect an external hard drive to the ports. You can get hard drive enclosures for $30-$40 and install any hard drive you want in there. No need for a server.