[reaven]

I want to upgrade my default HTPC in my theater,
but am concern about performance; right now am using an aTV with crystalHD in the office nice for series or low bitrate hd movies and a macbook pro(core 2 duo) in my theater for everything else mainly for HD movies.

the other day i was watching an hd movie in the macbook pro and for the first time I notice frames drop

FiLE SiZE............: 7.94 GB
ViDEO CODEC..........: x264 @ 7011kbps
AUDiO CODEC..........: DTS 1510Kbps
FRAMERATE............: 23.976fps

i dont know if it was because of the high bitrate but this is my concern about the new mini, is the mini less powerful than the macbook pro in terms of decoding and such ?

@davilla
do you recommend Linux with VDPAU if I acquired the new mini for the best performance ever..

Thanks

[davilla]

VDPAU works the best as it can handle a greater variety of encoding standards as well as handle those with wacky non-standard encoder settings.

A frame drop is nothing to worry about. Many frame drops is.

[tooshna]

I got the latest Mac Mini and it works beautifully as a HTPC, only thing I don't like about xbmc on mac mini is that there's no DRC support if you only have stereo speakers. If you have 5.1 system it may work fine im not sure.