[mythtv-users] Mac Mini Core Solo as FE/BE Combo?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Feb 23, 2007, at 09:31, Todd Ignasiak wrote:

> On 2/23/07, Kevin O. Lepard <kolepard002 at charter.net> wrote:
>>>> [*] Mac Mini w/Intel Core Solo @ 1.5GHz, 512M RAM
>>
>> So would the Mac Mini Core Duo (instead of Solo) have plenty of room
>> to do 1080p as a front end only then?
>
> Are you talking about displaying to a 1080p display device, or
> decoding 1080p material for playback?
>
> For the 1080p display, as mentioned earlier in the thread, there have
> been reports of problems with playback.   It's not clear why, because
> the GPU should do the necessary scaling, and it shouldn't make much
> difference for the CPU whether you're displaying at 720p or 1080p.

I have a theory on that.

>  My 1.66GHz Core Duo Mini works well for Myth HD playback to a 720p
> DLP.

I picked up a 1.66 core duo mini today, with the intention of using  
it to replace my current frontend, hooked to a 1080p display, so I'll  
letcha know how it goes... At the moment, its running OS X, and I  
have it connected to a 1680x1050 LCD. MythTV works peachy for both  
1080i and 720p playback, and the cores are barely breathing hard (max  
maybe 40% busy on both). Will also fire up Fedora on it in a little  
bit...

> For 1080p encoded content, that's another matter..   My mini can
> handle the 1080p24 video downloads from Apple.  They are H.264
> encoded, which is much more CPU demanding than MPEG2.  But, it also
> uses Apple's highly optimized H.264 code, which can take advantage of
> both CPU cores.       I doubt that you Myth could handle 1080p MPEG2
> or H.264 decoding, given the CPU usage of 1080i MPEG2 decoding.

Maybe, maybe not... There's been some good stuff going into trunk for  
h264...

Ah yes, my theory on issues outputting to a 1080p display: I think  
its likely memory pressure leading to swapping. When I moved from my  
old 1080i HDTV where I ran the GUI at 960x540p to my current 1080p  
set w/the GUI at 1920x1080p, 512MB was no longer enough to prevent  
occasional swapping. In the case of the mini, the stock config comes  
with 512MB, from which you're subtracting another 64MB for the video.  
Even at only 1680x1050, I'm seeing what appears to be quite a bit of  
swapping (under OS X, w/a few other apps also running). I plan on  
bumping up to 1GB of RAM in this thing before it supplants my current  
frontend box.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com