The Mac mini as a Media Computer

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.

The problem with the default OS X DVD decoder extends far beyond the very specific cases that we used in our PureVideo review. In fact, DVD playback under OS X exhibited combing artifacts just about everywhere, not just in our specific tests. The issues were very well pronounced on the Friends disc, which indicates that Apple could be relying completely on encoding flags to determine what methods of de-interlacing to apply to the source content. With the Friends DVDs, that means that although the original content is 24 fps film source, it is flagged and treated as, when played using Apple's DVD player, 30 fps material. The problem is far from just isolated to Friends DVDs, as flags on DVDs are far from perfect.

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.