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Apple TV or Mac Mini?

gugy said:
I would buy the new ones.
They have a much better graphics card and much better wattage consumption. If you have it as HTPC you will probably leave it almost always on, so you will save some $ on electric bills.
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I'm already going $200 over budget, I don't wanna go over another $100.

Plus, the computer won't be very bloated, so I'll leave it off and turn it on in 20 seconds.
 
Jeez I hate Micro Center so much. I used to live in Chicago and go there periodically. The people there are bunch of rude morons. That place should just be wiped off the face of the planet.

Just an opinion, no offense to anyone who has relatives or loved ones that work there

Mo
 
I'm not a huge fan of the place either, but a good price is a good price.

Tell me what you guys think:

1.83ghz Mac Mini for $459 flat

OR

2.0ghz Mac Mini for $499+tax

Is the processor bump, hard drive upgrade, and superdrive upgrade worth it?

I'm not gonna be burning DVDs on it so I don't need the DVD writer.
I can always get a cheap firewire external for 50 bucks in the near future.

Processor bump worth it?
 
Cave Man said:
If you're planning to play Blu-ray rips or other high bit rate 1080p content, then yes. For 720p and below the 1.83 will be fine.
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Hey Cave Man,

Since I have you here, I want to start now ripping and trans-coding standard DVDs on my MacPro to play with Plex on a MacMini once I buy it this upcoming summer.
What presets would you use to active the best image quality almost like DVDs and saving some file size space in Handbrake?

Thanks and sorry if this is a bit off topic. ;)
 
mohanman said:
Really not interested in using my Ps3 as my movie player. For the following reasons

1) No IR support, why the heck would I want to use a gamepad to control it? No girl finds that awesome.. trust me. Also, I don't want to add another bluetooth remote that I would have to use.. one remote, does the job for my entire system

2) No cover art? I think.. I saw some pictures posted with coverart, but definately doesn't have the beauty of appletv. What about metadata?

3) Blue-ray?? Why the heck would I want to pay 25.00-30.00 on a movie?? Just to have yet another format available in 2-3 years. Also I hate collecting physical discs.. takes up too much room, only one person can watch the movie at the same time (in different rooms), and people are always borrowing my crap and never brining them back. Not to mention i had to wait freaking 5 minutes for the stupid FBi warning, and dumb menus to start before I could even watch the freaking movie.

4) A little off topic.. The PS3 sucks as a game console too.. I have both this and Xbox 360.. the 360 online community is far better

5) What about music? Is it easy as the appletv? What about podcasts? Boxee? XBMC?

6) It consumes tons and tons of energy.. I think I read somewhere.. more than a freaking fridge??

7) Always have to update.. always. I bought that Killzone 2 game, and I had to update so many freaking patches before I could play the game! It pissed me off! Connect controller.. download.. update.. connect controller.. download another update!.. update.. connect controller??

Who designed this idiotic device?

So convince me further?? Because right now I really do wish I never even bought my ps3.. what a waste of money.. the only good thing about it was that game Drakes Fortune.. thats it.

Mo
Click to expand...

So I only have had a little exposure to the PS3, and the little I did, I have to admit I wasn't too impressed. Well, I was impressed by the h/w specs on paper but not by the interface. It always seems to take minutes to get a game setup and going (like Rockband) and even then it always took the "expert" to help figure things out. Not intuitive at all. And I saw the interface to the movies and pictures once and what immediately came to mind was "DOS" for a GUI. I almost started laughing. How could a company as rich as Sony come up with that crap?

On a sidenote, I read that the ATV's GPU is actually capable of playing 1080p, when and if Apple ever wants to turn it on (like they did for 720p). I've also heard the XBMC dev's are working to get XBMC to use the GPU like the "XBMC for Linux VDPAU" project which has hardware acceleration working for some Nvidia products. I'm only bringing this up as there might be (could be?) new life breathed into this old baby some day. But then of course, they might not do anything, and the Mac mini is still a more powerful solution today (and has Open CL coming).
 
Cave Man said:
I always use the Apple TV preset for DVDs. I'm using the SVN builds, though, which have a bit better settings (currently using SVN 2316 64-bit).
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Would that preserve the best image quality from the DVDs? I am just wondering since I have a 60" plasma HDTV. I want to make sure I am not losing much once I transcoding it to play on the Mac Mini.
Thanks
 
gugy said:
Would that preserve the best image quality from the DVDs? I am just wondering since I have a 60" plasma HDTV. I want to make sure I am not losing much once I transcoding it to play on the Mac Mini.
Thanks
Click to expand...

Well, the HB dev team and others have extensively tested things, so I suspect it's about as good as it gets. I mean, its set for 58.82% constant quality. I can't imagine someone just pulled that number out of the air.
 
Cave Man said:
Well, the HB dev team and others have extensively tested things, so I suspect it's about as good as it gets. I mean, its set for 58.82% constant quality. I can't imagine someone just pulled that number out of the air.
Click to expand...

OK, Cool Thanks!

Cave Man,
By the way, what is SVN builds?
 
Cave Man said:
If you're planning to play Blu-ray rips or other high bit rate 1080p content, then yes. For 720p and below the 1.83 will be fine.
Click to expand...

Just my take on increasing CPU speed before increasing memory.

I'm of the opinion it is more cost effective to max. out the physical memory of a system before increasing the CPU speed. The reason is CPU speeds are much faster than memory speeds and often time a very fast CPU with a low amount of memory will be starved waiting to the memory to catch up.

An analogy would be a car that can go very fast(CPU speed), but it needs to stop at lights every so often(amount of memory). If you are going 200 MPH but hit a stop light every quarter mile, you would be better off finding a road with fewer stop lights (more memory) before getting a faster car.

So, I'd spend that extra money on increasing the memory to 4GB, before going to the faster CPU.
 
TuckBodi said:
So I only have had a little exposure to the PS3, and the little I did, I have to admit I wasn't too impressed. Well, I was impressed by the h/w specs on paper but not by the interface. It always seems to take minutes to get a game setup and going (like Rockband) and even then it always took the "expert" to help figure things out. Not intuitive at all. And I saw the interface to the movies and pictures once and what immediately came to mind was "DOS" for a GUI. I almost started laughing. How could a company as rich as Sony come up with that crap?

On a sidenote, I read that the ATV's GPU is actually capable of playing 1080p, when and if Apple ever wants to turn it on (like they did for 720p). I've also heard the XBMC dev's are working to get XBMC to use the GPU like the "XBMC for Linux VDPAU" project which has hardware acceleration working for some Nvidia products. I'm only bringing this up as there might be (could be?) new life breathed into this old baby some day. But then of course, they might not do anything, and the Mac mini is still a more powerful solution today (and has Open CL coming).
Click to expand...

I don't really understand why people complain about the PS3 interface. Sure, it's not the best if you have a huge library of movies, but it is very simple to understand. You go left and right to choose between TV, Movies, Music, Games, Network, Friends and Settings, and up and down when you reach them. You can organise files into a single layer of folders beneath this, and I personally find this to be just fine.

For example, I have:
Movies -> The Office -> All of my Office episodes.

I don't see what is so bad about this?
 
neiltc13 said:
I don't really understand why people complain about the PS3 interface. Sure, it's not the best if you have a huge library of movies, but it is very simple to understand. You go left and right to choose between TV, Movies, Music, Games, Network, Friends and Settings, and up and down when you reach them. You can organise files into a single layer of folders beneath this, and I personally find this to be just fine.

For example, I have:
Movies -> The Office -> All of my Office episodes.

I don't see what is so bad about this?
Click to expand...

Because I like to have a graphical interface? Like this:

aeon_newlist6.jpg


Or this:

aeon_newlist7.jpg
 
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