[MAC] New (March 2009+) Mac Mini with NVIDIA 9400 graphics - Good enough for 1080p?

jonm42 Wrote:How nasty would it be to make a Mac branch that used Quicktime as the playback engine, the same way there is a Linux branch to use VDPAU? Or is that getting too proprietary/closed?

Not going to work. As I've said before, the programmer APIs are not accelerated. Only Apple apps are accelerated until Apple exposes how to do this using the published APIs.

There might be some tricks possible but these will not be looked into until after 9.04 release.

Makes sense. Thanks for the info.

is it just possible to install windows on a boot camp partition, and use DXVA with Media Player Classic Home Cinema? Should play everything with that

sure, that's possible. But
a.) we are here to discuss XBMC (you could even convert your movies to a QT format and watch it on MacOS using the GPU acceleration)
b.) who would ever install Windows on the nice Mini
Even if QT would be used as an internal palyer it wouldn't be able to support the wide range of codecs XBMC is by using its internal one.
No, we need access to the GPU as VDPAU is providing it on Linux today.

I just tried that sample with the birds flying on a brand new mini with 1 gig installed (I have 4 in the post)

Suffice to say it was not a pretty sight.

Um that being said I tried this sample with 4gigs on a mini and it was choppy as hell. then I tried it on an iMac 2.8 with 4 gigs of ram and it was choppy as hell. Long and short is I think its a shit sample.

I just took stark off as well, looks nice but its like treacle.

The sample is bad, but its still a very high bitrate, I think it is like 35mbit.

I don't think memory really matters anyway, not even the additional video memory you get when you're using 2Gb or more in the Mac Mini. It's all about processing power.

Well as I say the iMac may not be the big blue but I feel confident it can handle local sourced high def material, I guess the point is to establish if the mini could handle it. If simply playing it means its handled it then the stock mini with 1 gigi of ram will do fine, and thats streamed from a NAS.

I don't understand the dropped frames thing in the info section, it says on some films dropped 3, or dropped 16 or what ever but that figure never moves, how does it know how many frames its gonna drop?

anyone else taken the plunge with this new mac mini?

yes.. I have... but not with MacOS. I tried Ubuntu 9.04. See here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=46786