Old Slow Mac Minis that are or can be made equivalent of Apple TV 1 + CrystalHD? XBMC

[crashnburn]

Old Slow Mac Minis that are or can be made equivalent of Apple TV 1 + Crystal HD?

I love my ATV1 + Crystal HD XBMC setup. A Mac Mini that can be made or is equivalent of ATV1 + Crystal HD?

I am wondering which Mac Mini (how old or new of a Mac Mini Model) could do the same / be equivalent with or without the Crystal HD?

Which of the older Mac Minis (with or without Crystal HD) can work as well as at HTPC Group 3 EQUIVALENT as per Eskro's rating system i.e. ATV1+Crystal HD Card?

Something less powerful or not as new but EQUIVALENT to play the Group 3 stuff would be good enough. So which MacMini hardware can it go down to?

How far down the Mac Mini line can we go?

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Group #3
* HDTV possess HDMI ports
* wants to play SD movies (DivX, XviD)
* wants to play DVD movies
* wants to play 720P movies
* wants to play 1080P movies
* wants to stream 1080P Hulu content

Best Served By?
* AppleTV1 + Broadcom Crystal HD
(sole way for playing 1080P via purely Component HDTV's)
(Hulu requires Bluecop's XBMC Hulu add-on or the use of a Linux distro)

HTPC / MEDIA PLAYING - GROUP CATEGORIES as per ESKRO
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=843683#post843683

The objective is to be as powerful as this for playing movies from a NAS.

 

[dylin]

The oldest mac mini model that i can think of that can do 1080p playback pretty well with no stuttering would start at the core 2 duo with a 9400m. Which mac mini model are you currently looking at?

My late 09 macbook plays 1080p no problem and i hook it up to an external monitor using a minidisplay port to DVI to my 24 inch monitor running at 1920 by 1200.

 

[Cave Man]

With the exception of very high bit rate movies, such as the Borne series, the Core Duo 1.66 Minis can play most 1080p Blu-rays just fine so long as you have DTS or DD AC3 audio in the file and you're using an efficient playback app, such as Plex. The principal cause of stuttering is the on-the-fly transcoding necessary for extracting the DTS or AC3 cores from the DTS-MA or True-HD audio tracks of Blu-ray discs.

Hulu's another story. It's not the video that would be the problem, but your bandwidth and the software for playback. YMMV.

 

[crashnburn]

With the exception of very high bit rate movies, such as the Borne series, the Core Duo 1.66 Minis can play most 1080p Blu-rays just fine so long as you have DTS or DD AC3 audio in the file and you're using an efficient playback app, such as Plex. The principal cause of stuttering is the on-the-fly transcoding necessary for extracting the DTS or AC3 cores from the DTS-MA or True-HD audio tracks of Blu-ray discs.

Hulu's another story. It's not the video that would be the problem, but your bandwidth and the software for playback. YMMV.

I am guessing for an older Mac Mini that can do so much, adding a Crystal HD card can help augment it for all media I guess. Especially even better with CrystalBuntu?