[jness421]

I plan on buying a new mac mini soon to use it for xbmc and for serving Itunes.
My movie library is all m2ts w/ 5.1 audio for DVD and Blu-ray rips.
I have been playing these movies with a popcorn hour for a few years and everything plays good. I decided to get a apple tv 2 for my other TV and put xbmc on that that plays great also.
Know I just need to know which Mac mini to buy the base with Intel HD Graphics 3000 or step up to the AMD Radeon HD 6630M.
Like I said I will only be using the mini for m2ts movie play back and Itunes server. The m2ts are 1080p w/ 5.1 audio.


Thanks Jason

[voip-ninja]

I plan on buying a new mac mini soon to use it for xbmc and for serving Itunes.
My movie library is all m2ts w/ 5.1 audio for DVD and Blu-ray rips.
I have been playing these movies with a popcorn hour for a few years and everything plays good. I decided to get a apple tv 2 for my other TV and put xbmc on that that plays great also.
Know I just need to know which Mac mini to buy the base with Intel HD Graphics 3000 or step up to the AMD Radeon HD 6630M.
Like I said I will only be using the mini for m2ts movie play back and Itunes server. The m2ts are 1080p w/ 5.1 audio.


Thanks Jason

What kind of rips do you have? If they are 1:1 rips of blu-rays I can't believe the ATV is playing them. Are the rips re-encoded with Handbrake?

The biggest problem with the base level mini is that the integrated Intel graphics are not capable of proper display of blu-ray sources at 23.976 fps. Which means if you output to your display at 1080p/24 you will have frame drops.

If you are willing to have XBMC do 60fps conversion this really should not be a problem, although you will have 24->60fps judder.

Also, while the hardware on the new Minis should be capable of doing high def audio, OS X cannot handle it, so that's out at the moment too.

[jness421]

I use RipBot264 v1.16.5 to do all my rips. I bring them down to 4 gb so they are ps3 friendly. I store all my movies on a freenas server. The apple tv 2 plays these rips just fine.
In ripbot I can change the output 23.976 fps to 24.

[Ned Scott]

The biggest problem with the base level mini is that the integrated Intel graphics are not capable of proper display of blu-ray sources at 23.976 fps. Which means if you output to your display at 1080p/24 you will have frame drops.

The CPU can handle it. Just turn off hardware decoding.

[jness421]

Ok thanks will get the base unit and give it a go

[voip-ninja]

The CPU can handle it. Just turn off hardware decoding.

Thanks Ned. What will XBMC under OS X do with a THD 5.1 audio track currently? Anything?