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G4 or intel Mac Mini for watching movies

S

sas76

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 10, 2006
90
0
Australia
G'day

I have a iMac running connect 360 which works great. I would like to set up a mac mini and large screen TV upstairs to watch movies (streamed from my iMac downstairs), watch recorded TV (eye TV streamed from iMac) and surf the web.
I would not be using the mini for much more.

My question is could I do this on a G4 mini or will I need a newer intel version ?

I had a G4 ibook which would struggle to play back movies which I encoded using handbrake on the PS3 setting (2 pass encoding) which I use for my iMac and connect 360.

I thought about buying :apple:TV or another xbox but would like to be able to check email and browse the web as well.
I hope this makes sense.

Cheers
 
There are two versions of EyeTV, one is the Hybrid and the other is the 250Plus. The Hyrbid that sells for $149 U.S requires the Mac to do the HD processing and they only recommend a G5 or an Intel Mac. The 250Plus that sells for $199.00 U.S. does the HD decoding (Qam channels) on board so it frees up your Mac from having to use the CPU so you can use this model on the slower G4 Macs.
In either case unless the price difference is phenomenally lower for the G4 Mac mini I would go for the Intel mini and you can have your choice on which EyeTV to buy.
 
sas76 said:
G'day

I have a iMac running connect 360 which works great. I would like to set up a mac mini and large screen TV upstairs to watch movies (streamed from my iMac downstairs), watch recorded TV (eye TV streamed from iMac) and surf the web. I would not be using the mini for much more. My question is could I do this on a G4 mini or will I need a newer intel version ?
Click to expand...

Is your recorded TV video source analog or digital? If digital, what is its encoding scheme? In the US, all digital TV is broadcast is in low bitrate MPEG-2. In other countries it's in MPEG-4. You'll need to investigate what the G4 Mini's vid card has for hardware acceleration. The Intel Mini's gpu has MPEG-2 acceleration, thus it handles MPEG-2 decodes very well (DVDs and digital broadcasts in the US). However, MPEG-4, and one of its variations, H.264, are handled by the cpu. The Core Duos are very good at decoding these, even moderate bitrate 720 HD video. The G4 is pretty weak at these.
 
Cave Man said:
Is your recorded TV video source analog or digital? If digital, what is its encoding scheme? In the US, all digital TV is broadcast is in low bitrate MPEG-2. In other countries it's in MPEG-4. You'll need to investigate what the G4 Mini's vid card has for hardware acceleration. The Intel Mini's gpu has MPEG-2 acceleration, thus it handles MPEG-2 decodes very well (DVDs and digital broadcasts in the US). However, MPEG-4, and one of its variations, H.264, are handled by the cpu. The Core Duos are very good at decoding these, even moderate bitrate 720 HD video. The G4 is pretty weak at these.
Click to expand...

Thanks
I think this answers my question, most of my encoding is in H.264, I think I will keep any eye out for a cheap intel mac mini.
This also tells me why my ibook struggled to play back my encoded movies.

Cheers
 
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