Re: Mac Mini Media Center?

Jolly Roger <jollyroger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1img5zi.1j7d9nbdisufxN%dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson) wrote:

Clark Martin <cmnews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have a G4 Mac Mini connected as a media center to my HDTV. It has an
EyeTV receiver connected to it. It doesn't have enough scrunch to
handle HD. But it does a good job of recording TV and if I drop the
resolution to 1280x720 it plays full screen without a glitch. At
1920x1080 it gets a bit choppy.

I have a 2 GHz Core2 Duo Mini doing the same thing. It is fast enough to
handle HD with the latest update of the EyeTV software (3.0.3), but I
would expect a Core Solo mini to NOT be fast enough, as my Mini has to
use most of both CPU cores to keep up with decoding H.264 high
definition video in real time.

Keep in mind that some of the Elgato EyeTV devices can encode on their
own, without utilizing the CPU of the computer to which they are
connected. For such devices, just about any recent computer will do.

It depends what sort of video you are talking about, and whether you
want to be able to watch it on the same computer.

For analog TV, some EyeTV devices encode the video in real time, e.g.
the EyeTV 250 Plus outputs MPEG-2 video which is captured by the
computer and written to disk. If your computer is fast enough to be able
to play a DVD with software decoding then it can work with one of these.
That should include models right back to a 400 MHz iMac G3 (if you had
an older Firewire model of the EyeTV - the 250 Plus requires USB 2.0).

Other EyeTV models such as the Hybrid do a simple analog to digital
conversion and spit uncompressed (or only lightly compressed) digital
video at the computer. The computer then has to do MPEG-2 encoding and
write it to disk in real time, as well as decoding the resulting MPEG-2
video at the same time if you want to watch it. This is nowhere near as
easy as MPEG-2 decoding, so you need at least a fast G4 to be able to
use this sort of EyeTV model with analog TV.

For digital TV, all EyeTV models just act as a tuner and output a
digital stream of data as it is broadcast (typically an MPEG-2 transport
stream, containing multiple program streams, one per channel supplied by
that broadcaster). The computer captures the MPEG transport stream
(possibly filtered by hardware and/or software to only include the
desired program stream, rather than all the channels in the transport
stream). This is typically dumped straight to disk, in the format
supplied by the broadcaster (which varies between countries). In
countries which have had digital TV for a while, this might be MPEG-2,
but latecomers like New Zealand are using MPEG-4 (specifically H.264)
which allows higher resolution, higher quality and/or lower data rates,
but decoding is much more processor intensive.

No matter what format the digital broadcast video is in, most computers
with USB 2.0 should be able to receive the digital video and write it to
disk.

The problem comes when you want to watch TV or play back what you
recorded.

MPEG-2 playback is relatively easy.

MPEG-4 (H.264) playback at standard definition is achievable on any
Intel Mac, a G5, and probably a high end G4.

H.264 playback at high definition requires too much work on the part of
the CPU for anything short of a dual core Intel Mac (or possibly a high
end G5). A slower computer would have to artificially reduce the quality
and/or drop frames in order to keep up.

(Hardware assistance from a video card could change this equation in
favour of models with slower CPUs.)
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

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