Comments on: The Ultimate Mac Mini HTPC – Part 2: Installing MediaPortal using Apple Boot Camp

By: Mattias Hansson

Mattias Hansson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:25:14 +0000

Unfortunately, I have not had a chance to measure the power consumption but according to this article

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468

it should be 13-23W on idle and up to 110W on full load depending on your system model. Now sure how well the machines follow the specs though…

By: Lars

Lars — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:56:19 +0000

Hi,
I use a PS3 remote to control the media protal. A good solution and it is using bluetooth

This link is for a program the needs to be install on the PS/MAC to convert the signal to keystrokes
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/60376.aspx

Mattias, did you measure the power consumption of the MAC mini? Both idle and full load.

Thanks for a great article. I think I will use a MAC mini for the next Media Portal setup.

By: Pascal

Pascal — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:08:51 +0000

Hi Matt,

I’ve been on the same quest as you for 1,5 years now. I also want the central media server and light-weight (good looking) clients to sit near my tv’s. The most important reason for me not to choose the Mac Mini (currently) is blu-ray. I’m considering putting a blu-ray drive in my server, so that I can watch those movies on every client. That will not be simple, as there are some “digital rights restrictions” that obscure the path (as always). iSCSI might be the answer to this. Now, assuming that I’ll get blu-ray to work on my client, there’s the next nasty thing: blu-ray digital audio (DTS-HD and TrueHD, if I’m not mistaking). In a normal player, this signal gets transmitted over HDMI 1.3. But in pc’s it almost never does (again for “digital rights” issues). There are 2 dedicted video cards that enable this nowadays. But the thing I’m looking at now is the Nvidia ION platform. That *does* support these HD-audio formats over HDMI (as far as I’ve read). And the boxes are small and not too bad looking (e.g. the Acer AspireRevo).

Finally, with regards to ffdshow: I’ve experimented a lot with different AV decoders in MediaPortal. I must say that by far the best experience for me is with PowerDVD, especially because of the GPU hardware acceleration. With ffdshow all decoding is done by the CPU, which is often too limited to really do 1080p decoding.

Which brings me to the question: how does the Mac Mini handle 1080p in your setup?

Cheers,

Pascal.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:43:51 +0000

Hi Andreas, thanks for the feedback, my quick replies:
1) I have not got the built in IR reciever to work yet (working on it, it reacts to the Apple remote in iTunes). I use an MCE remote that works great using an external USB IR receiver (it came with the remote)
2) HD live TV is yet to be tested, will update post when done
3) .mkv works great, Mac Mini runs HD smoothly also in XP. I use CoreAVC codec for viewing HD content as it is supposed to provide the best performance
4) Currenly, I’m on analogue audio out that goes trough the TV to my (always on) surround system to mute the sound when someone only closes the TV and leaves the Mac Mini running live TV (needs to be simple for the rest of the family . I can run a SPDIF test within the next few days…

I’ll update the post with the details when tested

By: Andreas

Andreas — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:46:45 +0000

It’s very interesting to read your posts about the Mini as Mediaportal-computer. I have some question though:
1. Do you know if the MCE remote will work?
2. How does HD-channels works?
3. How does HD-videos (mkv) works inside Mediaportal?
4. I’ve read that some people have problems with the spdif-out when using Mini with Windows, have you noticed any problem?

That was probably it for now, I’m looking forward to your post about upscaling with ffdshow!