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Cheapest/Oldest Mac Mini to stream video to my apple tv?

S

spitboy2000

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 2, 2007
51
0
I've got two TB of video i want to be able to stream to my apple tv at any time thru airplay.

What is the cheapest/oldest Mac Mini that would be able to do this acceptably?
 
If it is SD video, then a G4 or Intel Core Solo should suffice, if it is also HD video, you should look into Intel Core Duo or Intel Core 2 Duo Mac minis.
 
For streaming, the host machine doesn't have to even do any processing. The original 1.25 GHz G4 Mac mini is sufficient to stream even the highest-resolution video, since it only has to shuffle bits, not actually decode anything.

The only requirement Apple makes is iTunes 10.2 or higher. Which means you need a G4 with 512 MB of RAM running Mac OS 10.5.
 
I haven't tried it on my G4 mac mini, but I feel like streaming HD video would be possible.

As long as you don't want to view the video on that computer using the internal graphics card, a G4 should be able to stream HD video to an ATV.

As long as the computer can run the current iTunes, the computer should be fast enough. I recommend a G4 or core duo mac mini.

Again, not tested by me, so this is just a hypothesis.
 
Everyone is right, technically being a host computer only needs to be able to serve up the raw data to the Apple TV which requires little to no processing power. With that said, I would hesitate to recommend anything less than an Intel based Mac Mini IF you don't already own a G4 mini. My reasoning is two fold:

1. A G4 Mac Mini is extremely old 5+ years which means it could die soon.
2. At any point in time, Apple could stop supporting iTunes on a G4 and require a newer version of iTunes for Home Sharing to an Apple TV (i.e. new firmware requirements on the unit). Thus rendering the G4 Mac Mini useless.

However, if you go with a Core Duo based, at least you know you are covered thru Snow Leopard and thus should be able to run iTunes for a very long time on the Mac Mini.

Again it isn't the processing power of the unit I am concerned about, but G4 architecture being rendered useless by software upgrades.
 
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