Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Mac Mini as a DVI DVD player...

OK, I'm drinking the kool aid and considering getting back into the Mac Pool after a 15 year hiatus.

Seems the Mac Mini has a DVI dvd player. Could anyone venture a guess as to whether this would be a viable alternate as a DVI DVD player, on par w/ the newer Samsung and Denon's w/ DVI? Then I could use this w/ my plasma via DVI.

Then it would be a $500 ($600+ maybe since I'd go w/ the faster CPU) DVD player w/ a computer thrown in for free...

It's hard to say. You have to remember that the machine will be using a laptop DVD drive, which has the potential to be somewhat noisy (although the iMac G5 uses a similar unit and is just fine noise-wise). Also, I have heard people complain that Apple's DVD player is not all that good, but I've never had a problem with it. I would expect that an all digital path from DVD to DVI would be fine as far as PQ.

There, is that confusing enough?

Just read an interesting article on wired.com about the Mac Mini and its potential as a HTPC.

In particular, check out the "MacMerc" and "kitchen" links near the beginning of the article.

This site also looks promising:

Mac Media Center Project

Cool! Bummer that my HD Tivo doesn't support HMO or Tivo2Go. Just got my Treo600 phone configured to play converted DVDs. It would be nice to take some of my Tivo shows on the road w/ me.

I wonder... Does the Mini have a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder? Is it done in software? Is the sound done in software or hardware? Not a lot of room in that wee box for extra chips. Is there a remote for Macs that can be keymapped to whatever DVD app it uses? I have a Keyspan remote left over from a Linux-based streaming MP3 project. Neat little gadget, wonder if they have the same sort of thing for a Mac? Does the Mini's audio controller do 5.1? Have a DA out? (looking it up on Apple website) Nope, looks like just 1/8" mini headphone/speaker out. Hmm... It WOULD be cool. Let us know if you give it a shot!

OK, one of the sites Peter listed answered the 5.1/hardware audio decoding question. A Firewire sound "card" would do the trick. Another $99. Still looking into the MPEG decoding question. Although if this would be a dedicated "player," playing one type of media at a time, software decoding would work just fine. The G4 is a hell of an efficent chip. We prototyped set-top boxes using everything from a cache-less x86 chip at 266Mhz to Celeron 800's for STB's a few years ago. The (what the heck was the name of the chip? I can't remember the manufacturer) 266 really redlined trying to do software decoding even in Linux with no extraneous apps or services running. But it was just fine with the C800 in Linux AND winXP. Ran around 50% in Windows and 30% in Linux. I would guess the 1.25Mhz G4 would run this no problem. Could be fun!

BlueStater, the next version of MacOS X (10.4 - due out by this summer) features built-in support for HD video. With that OS, the Mac Mini will support full-screen resolution playback of HD content via QuickTime 7 software and the new H.264 codec.

Are you talk about Broadcom's STB chips?

OK, cool. So software decoding. It should work fine on that platform. but upgrade that RAM! If you go to http://slashdot.org, there are a couple of posts on disassembling the Mini for upgrade purposes. If you want to go that route. As far as specific chips, we used many different chips while developing the platform. Broadcom, Hauppage, what were they? Hollywood something?, Via made a couple, Crystal Semi, a few others. Got some prototype ATI stuff. Had to use a bizarre frame-buffer driver that tied into the i810 graphics chip on that one. They were having huge problems getting that driver to work, which is about normal for ATI. We were pulling tips directly from ATI's CVS repository and compiling them on a daily basis. This was about 4 years ago now. We ended up with an early Hauppage ATSC (HDTV) card which also did MPEG-2 decoding. Wrote the Linux drivers ourselves. Had a Broadcom ATSC chip, forget which MPEG-2 chip it had. Working for a Monolithic Chip Manufacturer (at the time) opens a lot of doors when it comes to getting prototype products and driver design information from other companies.