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

[Todd Ignasiak]

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

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.