Resolved Mini Stopped Handling 47" TV After Update to Mavericks

Vandal. said:

Hey guys,

to speed up my old Mac mini 3,1 (late 2009) I installed an additional 40GB SSD (replaced the SuperDrive) and upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mavericks. I now run OSX from the SSD and moved Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Movies, Pictures and Music to the mini's original hard drive via symlinks. While boot and application launch time improved a lot, the Mac mini seems to have problems with the screen resolution and my 47" LG LH3010 TV:

In Snow Leopard the resolution was set to 1080p, I could play 1080p Matroska files without any issues whatsoever, the Mini ran all apps just fine.

In Mavericks I can only set the resolution to 1080i (after alt-clicking 'scaled'), 1080p video stutters and the whole system is getting really slow and sluggish.

I did read about people's problems setting their proper resolution in Mavericks, possible due to aftermarket VGA/Displayport adapters, but this can't be the reason for an almost identical hardware to stop being able to handle the same display as before, can it?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
V

Click to expand...

That is a really small SSD, so it probably doesn't have great write/read speeds. On top of that, you may have RAM issues if it worked in SL but not Mavericks. You can get a 256GB SSD for about $110 on Amazon, which would reduce issues with paging. If you have 2GB RAM or less, in combination with what is most likely a pretty slow SSD, your programs are going to really bottleneck. Upgrading either the SSD or the RAM will help.

Matt

Vandal. said:

Thanks for your reply.

I agree, the SSD is pretty small, but there's still 20GB of space available on it, which in theory should make OSX happy, no? It's an Intel 320 Series and only SATA II with 200/45 MB/s read/write speed, not sure if that's fast enough tbh. I also understand Mavericks does need more RAM than SL, but I've had 4GB of RAM installed for quite a while now, so that shouldn't be a real issue either.

The whole system runs smooth at 720p…

Click to expand...

45MB/s write is significantly worse than a platter hard drive. Your HDD probably got at least 100 MB/s. Some SD cards have double that speed. SSD speed is hugely dependent upon the size of the drive. SATA 2 can get up to a theoretical 300MB/s. This drive here is technically 10x faster than your SSD. On SATA 2 it should be about 7x faster.

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX100-adapter-Internal-CT256MX100SSD1/dp/B00KFAGCWK

A 2 GHz Mac Mini is early 2009, not late 2009.

What program are you using to playback the video files? That can make a difference in playback tearing as well.

For example on my Media Server which is also used to playback on my main TV. VLC gets a lot of choppy playback. That's on a Core 2 Quad with a Radeon 4650 connected via HDMI port at 1080p. The same video will play perfectly smooth via Plex.

In any 1080i playback is always choppy looking, same with 480i for that matter. My guess is the computer doesn't sync it correctly with the TV. So I use deinterlace to correct this but it isn't an option for you. Since you are outputting in 1080i.

I assume that the SSD is not the problem as I doubt you are using it for video storage. You have a larger hard drive for that right?

I'd say the first thing you need to do is rule out the adapter and get a good HDMI adapter.

As for the speed of your computer. High bitrate video files may be a problem. Resolution shouldn't matter much. As the processing power needed is all about bitrate. The only factor resolution plays is for the same quality of video a higher resolution needs a higher bitrate. But you can keep the bitrate the same, increase resolution and increase artifacts.

My media server couldn't cut it with a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo and integrated graphics on high bitrate video. Luckily I had the Core 2 Quad and Radeon GPU lying around. I was just trying to save energy.