Mac Mini External Blu-ray

[wassupdoc]

I want to use the mini as a media center and was wondering if people have had success using an external blu-ray drive with it..

How is the quality. Is the mini able to handle 1080p without issues?

thanks

 

[Hellhammer]

Mini will handle 1080p flawlessly. If you are going to watch Blu-Rays, you have to use Windows because OS X doesn't support BR playback (yet) AFAIK.

 

[panzer06]

Mini will handle 1080p flawlessly. If you are going to watch Blu-Rays, you have to use Windows because OS X doesn't support BR playback (yet) AFAIK.

This is correct, I have Vista working fine under Bootcamp with an external BR drive.

Cheers,

 

[Cave Man]

I want to use the mini as a media center and was wondering if people have had success using an external blu-ray drive with it..

Yes, it works fine with any Blu-ray drive that can can write to something, even if it's a CD burner. You have to rip with MakeMKV to your hard drive, thus removing encryption and DHCP, then play with Plex or XBMC.

How is the quality. Is the mini able to handle 1080p without issues?

All the current Minis will handle 90% of Blu-ray movies without a problem. Most of the others are fine for 90% of their playback - the exception are the parts that have very high bit rates (Blu-ray videos often have variable bit rates). A few VC-1 encoded videos (such as the Planet Earth series) are extremely problematic, even for those with quad-core Macs. The way around these problems is to use the latest Handbrake SVN to transcode to mkv (for DTS or AC3) or m4v (AC3 only) containers with H.264 encoding.