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Playback help on G5, MKV, FrontRow and VLC

E

ekimseekem

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 6, 2009
15
0
Downtown Canada
Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to brew this set up for awhile. What I have is this:

LG 240Hz HDTV 47”
Audio Receiver + speakers
Power Mac G5 dual 2.0 Ghz
- 4 GB Ram
- 2x 1TB SATA drives
- ATI x850 graphics card
HDMI -> DVI cable and an Optical Audio cable to the receiver
Remote system compatible with FrontRow

The first issue I’ve got is to get various movie formats to work on my G5, I have mostly .mp4 and .mkv videos with mixed quality, 720p seems to play fine no matter the format or player, but 1080p seems to be very hit or miss, especially if the file is over 5 GB and is MKV, video is choppy. Obviously FrontRow uses QT (I’ll get to that later), so I used VLC to play my high quality stuff, but 1080p MKV files play horribly, I’ve tried to convert these to mp4, but the quality seems to go down (with handbreak or MKVTools), I’ve resorted to converting them to AVI but I’ve heard this destroys audio quality.

I guess my question with that is; is my hardware too underpowered to handle MKV or is the file container/codec/encoder just that buggy?

My second question is with FrontRow, I’ve heard about some app that allows it to use VLC as a media player instead of Quicktime, but any search that I’ve done hasn’t turned up anything. I like the interface UI of FrontRow, just I’d rather use VLC then QuickTime to view videos.

If this can’t work, it’ll mean I’ll have to better equip Quicktime to play videos, would you guys recommend Perian or find and install codecs separately?
 
VLC isn't terribly well-optimized. It even has trouble with 1080p playback on my C2D iMac. Plex works perfectly on the same video, with no dropped frames. Unfortunately, it's Intel-only.

I'd stick with Perian. I don't know if you can add MKV support to QuickTime, though.
 
BlueRevolution said:
I'd stick with Perian. I don't know if you can add MKV support to QuickTime, though.
Click to expand...
Perian adds full MKV support to Quicktime, including soft subtitles.

That said, in my experience with such files the performance is worse under QT/Perian than VLC. Can't hurt to try, though.

I agree, in general, that the problem is more than likely that your computer just can't handle the very high bitrate files. At >5GB for, I assume, a 2-hour movie, you must be dealing with huge bitrates, and since it gets worse with the bigger ones, that points pretty clearly to the CPU being the issue.
 
Ooh, I didn't realize XMBC was available for PPC--the last time I looked they hadn't added any PPC support. I'll definitely be filing that bit of info mentally for future use.

Given that as an option I agree--the decoding engine that Plex and XMBC use seems to be particularly efficient (though as BlueRevolution says, there are situations where that's not the case), so it would be your best bet.

They're all free, of course, so downloading all of the above won't hurt, either.
 
I hadn't thought about XBMC, isn't it called Plex now?

I do think the problem is coming down into 2 catagories, firstly the MKV container isn't very good, from what I've read... simply spending the time to convert/mux/transcode it to either avi or mp4 improves playback performance.

Secondly my G5 is aging, I'm basically looking for things to use it for since I'm not using it for gaming anymore, I was hoping it could be a good Media Center.

What I might do is load it up with server, get a Mac Mini and use that as a Media Center and use the G5 to hold media and provide network services... how are Mac Minis doing as Media Centers?
 
ekimseekem said:
I hadn't thought about XBMC, isn't it called Plex now?
Click to expand...

Plex is descendent of XBMC, but they are maintained by two separate groups. XBMC is both Intel and PPC, while Plex is Intel only.

I do think the problem is coming down into 2 catagories, firstly the MKV container isn't very good, from what I've read... simply spending the time to convert/mux/transcode it to either avi or mp4 improves playback performance.
Click to expand...

I don't know of any issues with MKV, but I only used Plex for those and they play fine. All my videos are either straight Blu-ray rips (m2ts container), MKVs from Blu-ray rips (1080p or 720p h.264 with DTS or AC3 audio using Handbrake and no more than 10 mbps video), or M4V for DVDs (using the Apple TV Preset in Handbrake). I have no problems with those files on my 1.66 gHz Core Duo Mini.

how are Mac Minis doing as Media Centers?
Click to expand...

The current Mini is pretty good from what I hear, so long as you don't multitask them.
 
Cave Man said:
The current Mini is pretty good from what I hear, so long as you don't multitask them.
Click to expand...

I'm basically using it for media playback, before we were just using the XBox 360 and its glorious media browsing and playback (often times requiring a codec that you already downloaded and having to be signed in to XBox live just to play back certain formats). The Mac was in an office sharing a folder/itunes via Connect 360.

The Mini would be a bonus too... would fit right in with the rest of the concoles and recievers next to the TV... all I'm worried about is performance... not a fan of laggy frames!

I'd give you guys more figures for files, but I'm currently at work, away from my media collection.

Thx for the replies so far tho.
 
ekimseekem said:
how are Mac Minis doing as Media Centers?
Click to expand...
I'm using current-gen mini (lower-end model but with maxed RAM) and an external FW800 hard drive as a combo media center/file server, and it works fantastically well.

That said, I've never tried to play anything higher def than about 720p on it, so I can't say for certain that it'll play extreme-bitrate files smoothly. No issues upscaling smaller content smoothly for my 1080p TV, at least.

(Relevant warning, if you end up with one: Plex doesn't currently run well under Snow Leopard; it works, but the video suffers from tearing. I mostly use VLC, but were I reliant on Plex I wouldn't yet upgrade to 10.6.)

Another advantage of using a mini as a server over a G5 tower is that the noise level and power consumption are WAY lower.
 
Makosuke said:
(Relevant warning, if you end up with one: Plex doesn't currently run well under Snow Leopard; it works, but the video suffers from tearing. I mostly use VLC, but were I reliant on Plex I wouldn't yet upgrade to 10.6.)
Click to expand...

I don't think I was planning on using Plex anyways... but that sorta brings me back to one of my other questions; if I use Frontrow as a Media Center 'program', can I use VLC as the default player instead of Quicktime?

Makosuke said:
Another advantage of using a mini as a server over a G5 tower is that the noise level and power consumption are WAY lower.
Click to expand...

I think u mean using the Mini as a Media box right and have the G5 as a server in a closet somewhere?

I don't actually hear too much fan noise from the G5... Apple was right, its pretty quiet with 9-10 fans.

Another question I have is how would you connect the Mini to the sound reciever?
 
G5s are really slow for h264. Try Mplayer Extended multithreaded on and see if that helps. Otherwise, it's probably too slow for the 1080p mkvs.
 
ekimseekem said:
I think u mean using the Mini as a Media box right and have the G5 as a server in a closet somewhere?
Click to expand...
Well, in my case, there's a closet relatively close to the TV, so the mini is indeed both--I just run a 20' DVI-HDMI cable and optical audio cable out of the closet and over to the home theater receiver.

And actually, the mini is so darned quiet it wouldn't be an issue even if it wasn't in the closet--I frequently don't bother to close the door. Makes way, WAY less noise than my PS3 even when that isn't cranking the fans up to ridiculous.

Depending on your needs a 2009 mini plus a 1-2TB FW800 external drive (hardware mirrored, if you like) can serve quite sufficiently as a server/mediacenter combo. The FW800 drive is fast enough to functionally saturate a gigabit ethernet link, which is as fast as anything is going to be capable of pulling data off a server anyway.

The only limitation in my mind is if you have other computers wired to your router (as opposed to pure wireless), then you're going to want an ethernet cable between the mini and the router, whereas with a separate setup you can have the router and server be somewhere entirely separate from the TV. Then again, ethernet cable is cheap, so I'd probably still go with this setup even if I didn't have a tiny house where everything is pretty close together. And compared to going pure-wireless on the media center you're going to get significantly more responsive playback when scrubbing or opening files that need to be pre-processed a bit (like MKVs with a subtitle track or WMVs with Flip4Mac).
 
Makosuke said:
Well, in my case, there's a closet relatively close to the TV, so the mini is indeed both--I just run a 20' DVI-HDMI cable and optical audio cable out of the closet and over to the home theater receiver.

And actually, the mini is so darned quiet it wouldn't be an issue even if it wasn't in the closet--I frequently don't bother to close the door. Makes way, WAY less noise than my PS3 even when that isn't cranking the fans up to ridiculous.

Depending on your needs a 2009 mini plus a 1-2TB FW800 external drive (hardware mirrored, if you like) can serve quite sufficiently as a server/mediacenter combo. The FW800 drive is fast enough to functionally saturate a gigabit ethernet link, which is as fast as anything is going to be capable of pulling data off a server anyway.

The only limitation in my mind is if you have other computers wired to your router (as opposed to pure wireless), then you're going to want an ethernet cable between the mini and the router, whereas with a separate setup you can have the router and server be somewhere entirely separate from the TV. Then again, ethernet cable is cheap, so I'd probably still go with this setup even if I didn't have a tiny house where everything is pretty close together. And compared to going pure-wireless on the media center you're going to get significantly more responsive playback when scrubbing or opening files that need to be pre-processed a bit (like MKVs with a subtitle track or WMVs with Flip4Mac).
Click to expand...

I went to my mothers this past weekend, she has a 1.83 Ghz Mini with 1GB of RAM, after some modifications in VLC a 1080p MKV sample file played fine where as it wouldn't have on the G5.

The problem I have with the Mini is the storage... I'm stuck between having an external drive on the Mini (which is limited to Firewire/USB2) or having a server (the G5, which already has all the media). The network is already all Gigabit ethernet. I'm leaning more towards making the G5 a server because I also need to have a web server going on the network at the same time and giving the mini too much to do would bog it down maybe.

The rough network layout would be a OpenBSD firewall with 3 interfaces (one for LAN, another for WAN and the last one for open wireless), a Windows 7 desktop, the G5 server, a Mac Mini media center and a couple notebooks of mixed OSs. I have 1 CentOS server currently for storage... but I'm thinking of retiring that. All the switches (2 of them, to provide connections to 2 parts of the residence) are gigabit switches.
 
Cave Man said:
I wouldn't worry about FW. It has plenty of bandwidth for media distribution. I wouldn't go with USB, though.
Click to expand...

Yea I know, tends to do the burst thing and doesn't provide constant bandwidth. FW would be the way to go... but I'll go with the G5 server route, see how that goes, if not I'll go to the external HD.
 
Don't forget you can upgrade the drive inside the Mini too. You can get 2.5" hard drives up to 750 GB now.

The G5 will draw much much (much much much) more power than an external hard drive, and pump out proportionately more heat. Don't forget that there was never a PowerBook G5 because the processor was too hot and too power-hungry to even fit into a laptop.

There is absolutely no reason that a Mini couldn't run a web server at the same time. I assume you're just planning to run an intranet? The processor use by running a home intranet will be negligible, even if you're running big MySQL queries and all sorts of other things.
 
BlueRevolution said:
Don't forget you can upgrade the drive inside the Mini too. You can get 2.5" hard drives up to 750 GB now.

The G5 will draw much much (much much much) more power than an external hard drive, and pump out proportionately more heat. Don't forget that there was never a PowerBook G5 because the processor was too hot and too power-hungry to even fit into a laptop.

There is absolutely no reason that a Mini couldn't run a web server at the same time. I assume you're just planning to run an intranet? The processor use by running a home intranet will be negligible, even if you're running big MySQL queries and all sorts of other things.
Click to expand...


Yea, its a good point... i might opt for a 2 TB external drive connected via firewire and sell the G5... as nice as it is to have.

And by the time I get it, i might not need a web server (i'm building a company website in my spare time, nothing huge, but they have access to it thu the OpenBSD firewall)
 
So you're using it as a testing server? Whatever, your Mini can probably handle a pretty respectable amount of traffic without interrupting video playback. Based on my experience with running web servers, a dedicated server with the specs of the current revision Mac Mini would be able to handle ~15 hits per second with no trouble. A testing server might average a couple of hits per hour, and of course you're unlikely to be using your own web server while watching video.

Don't sweat it.
 
BlueRevolution said:
So you're using it as a testing server? Whatever, your Mini can probably handle a pretty respectable amount of traffic without interrupting video playback. Based on my experience with running web servers, a dedicated server with the specs of the current revision Mac Mini would be able to handle ~15 hits per second with no trouble. A testing server might average a couple of hits per hour, and of course you're unlikely to be using your own web server while watching video.

Don't sweat it.
Click to expand...

I've decided that I'm going to sell my G5 and get the new Mac Mini. I plan to buy an external RAID device to hold storage... i noticed i'm limited to firewire 800 as the Mini no longer has Firewire 400 and I don't want to use USB,
looking at this

Only 1 real thing I need to look at with this is; connecting the Mini to the sound reciever. I guess I need to go from a mini jack to optical audio (or some other input that would be in the reciever that supports 5.1 audio). Any suggestions on bringing audio from the Mac Mini to the reciever?

I guess I have to get a Mini-DVI --> DVI cable to connect to my existing DVI --> HDMI adapter I have already.
 
I just had a better idea; can I take the Minis' optical drive out (and the 2.5" SATA hard drive) and plug in a 3.5" drive (obviously with a large capacity) instead?

I'm semi-sure this can be done, just wanted to ask here.
 
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