[dannybullit]

Thanks for all input

[chuuey]

well i did try xbmc with 1080p content unfortunately some movies are choppy, great alternative is to use Windows and CoreAVC, enable CUDA acceleration and it will play everything you throw at it, i hope when Snow Leopard is here with OpenCL maybe it will be finally possible to use the graphics acceleration so I can dump Windows

[reaven]

well am on the same boat I am currently running XBMC in a macbook pro 2.16 intel core2duo with 3gb RAM and no problems but I want a dedicate HTMac ! and the mini looks perfect.

can the people that test 1080p source on the mac mini post the result with the processor speed and memory along with the source material bitrate, that would be a lot of help, just saying 1080p its working in my new mini its not enough!



BTW did someone test 1080p material in a 120hz display, is the same as a bluray disc ?

[phi2039]

My Mini (2Ghz c2d, 4GB RAM) is on the fence with raw BluRay content. Up to about 25MB/s it does OK, after that it slows down a bit. Running Linux with VDPAU on the same hardware, CPU never goes above 10%.

[reaven]

by RAW bluray content you mean BDMV format? if so, then playing 720p or 1080p mkv its not a big deal for the mini ?

you are running linux on the mini, you replace the OS?

[garyi]

I would be interested in experimenting with linux on the mini, can someone point me at a decent walk through, I have been googling but its all rather scarey!

[Z3rO]

I got my early 09 Mac Mini (2GHZ, 1Gig Ram, Geforce 9400M) yesterday and I was a bit surprised.

I tested quiet a lot of movies, mostly 1080p content with bitrates averaging at 12-15Mb/sec peaking up to 25-30Mb/sec. I got lots of dropped frames, so I decided to give Plex a shot. Guess what, the frame drops significantly decreased.

I dont know how the plex programmers do it, but since I prefer xbmc over plex, it would be nice to know.

It seems to me that the cores are more equally used in plex than in xbmc.

Another issue could be the ram. I'm going to buy a 4gig upgrade today to see if that makes a difference. Since 1gig is a bit to little.

[davilla]

using "dropped frames" as a metric for performance is not really recommended. It requires both apps to use the same methods for counting and indicating dropped frame. There was an update many svn revs ago that fixed an inaccurate frame dropped counter. Did plex devs include this code, who knows

[Z3rO]

Even when not using the dropped frame counter, there is serious visible stuttering in xbmc vs. smooth playback in plex.

Could the little amount of ram be a bottleneck here?

[davilla]

Even when not using the dropped frame counter, there is serious visible stuttering in xbmc vs. smooth playback in plex.

Could the little amount of ram be a bottleneck here?

Which version of xbmc?

Which version of plex?

What's the video content ?(mediainfo it and pastebin the report).

[Z3rO]

XBMC SVN 21379
Plex 0.8.1

Movie Nr. 1:
http://pastebin.com/m73fc8cfd

Movie Nr. 2:

http://pastebin.com/m420b52fc

[jmarshall]

Probably different deblocking settings would be my guess. Plex has some deblocking settings available in the UI I believe, whereas our settings default deblocking to off, and are only available via advancedsettings.xml. It probably isn't trivial to translate between the two.

Other differences, is that I suspect they're not using quite the same version of ffmpeg as we are (I think they're on 0.5 though, but the VC1 stuff was reverted differently, but that shouldn't apply here), so differences may occur there, but for h264 I doubt there'd be much, unless they have quite a newer version.

We really should check whether ffmpeg needs an upgrade - I believe there's been some h264 improvements since v0.5?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[davilla]

They pulled our ffmpeg so I'm pretty sure it's very similar. Same with VC1 revert, we are similar. Deblocking setting is possible. Z3rO would have to check that. Also any upscaling should be off. And vsync should be enabled, not sure if our definitions of "visible stuttering" are the same.

We could stand updating ffmpeg to pick up some h264 fixes/updates as well as fixes/updates with other codecs, but we need to watch VC1, in current svn ffmpeg, it's still very cpu intensive.

[Z3rO]

I cleaned the Application support folder for xbmc and plex was a freash install. So I was at default settings for both. I just fullscreened with cmd+F and started to play the movies.

With visible stuttering I mean e.g. the first scene in Iron Man where the military cars drive through the desert. In xbmc they "jump" heavily, in plex they drive as they should.

I'll check the deblocking settings and report back.

Thanks for your help so far.

Edit: OK I just saw that advancedsettings has to be created on xbmc. I'll check the settings in plex after returning from byuing my ram upgrade.

[davilla]

I cleaned the Application support folder for xbmc and plex was a freash install. So I was at default settings for both. I just fullscreened with cmd+F and started to play the movies.

With visible stuttering I mean e.g. the first scene in Iron Man where the military cars drive through the desert. In xbmc they "jump" heavily, in plex they drive as they should.

I'll check the deblocking settings and report back.

Thanks for your help so far.

Edit: OK I just saw that advancedsettings has to be created on xbmc. I'll check the settings in plex after returning from byuing my ram upgrade.

also double check vsync in settings -> appearence. xbmc default this to off (silly), it would be set to "vsync always". plex default this on.