Rumour-busting: The Mac Mini as an HTPC

[Ballis]

As for your comments re 75% of Blu-ray dumps; The Men Who Stare at Goats is one such H.264 rip, and it does not run properly. I've said twice before now that it's skippy, and I've said once that the playback froze briefly after ten minutes. To iterate my above point; it's better than it was, but that doesn't mean it's up to true HTPC standard; if your DVD or Blu-ray player stuttered and jammed, would you consider that a decent viewing experience?

Do you live in PAL land? Some european BluRays are 25 fps interlaced. If you use mediainfo you can get their stats. The API doesnt support those. They are few and far between though.

In hindsight; yes, I could have asked on the Plex forums. Though, to be honest, I didn't know that they existed. I also didn't know that "there were no api released" - I'm assuming that's some Apple kinda firmware thing, is it? And this was my first Mac, so my knowledge of the landscape was very limited. Coming from my history, if I hear that a video card can do something, I don't immediately know to think, "I wonder if there's an api...?".

Application Programming Interface. A term used cross platform and not limited to Macs. If you are experienced with HTPCs you should know what this is as it is required to be availiable for any 3rd party to achieve hw acceleration in their sw. If your experience is limited to streamers, your ignorance is excused.

As for "rumour-busting"; I've shot to bits that the Mini can do what I was told it could. Certainly, back when I was advised, it couldn't do anything close to it. You'll also notice from my first post that I was asking for someone to show me where I'd gone wrong, if indeed I had done; I wouldn't call that a rant. It's not like I couldn't accept that I'd potentially done any wrong, myself, from the kick-off. And I've been perfectly polite, so it's not like I've been spewing for the sake of it and spoiling for a fight.

And we have ascertained, have we not, that the Mini has limitations that many members of this board don't know about, or understand? I've had to explain two or three times that it's possible, without entering the realms of science-fiction, to watch Blu-ray rips without using Handbrake; likewise, that it's possible for an .MKV to be bigger than 15GB; that it's possible to retain HD audio in anything you rip etc. etc. Many people around here don't know these things. It's likely that people (no disrespect intended...) with this level of knowledge are the ones telling posters, "yeah, sure, the Mini's a great 1080p HTPC", because (again, not wishing to be rude...) they don't really know what they're talking about.

What you have done is brought some limitations to light. As one who tests these rigs, Id imagine you would know pretty much any HTPC has some. Try setting up XBMC on Windows Vista or Seven and try getting a remote to work. Or linux and see if you find any issues. Could it be you are expecting to much? What other HTPCs have you tested? Can you point me to one that isnt flawed in any way? You cant really compare a HTPC to a MediaStreamer. They are not the same.

I honestly believe the poster before you (Pachang) has it right. For most people, the Mini will make the perfect HTPC. Its got a small footprint, makes virtually no noise and plays pretty much anything youll throw at it. It will however, as most HTPCs have some limitations. For your specific needs, A HTPC isnt at all what you should aim for, but rather some Bluray player with MKV streaming capabilities. Like the Samsung BD-C5500. It will also have limitations, but will still serve your use perfectly.

 

[ljonesj]

i agree with you ballis i have ripped blu ray of full metal panic that a friend gave me and the English audio will not even play there is no sound but the Japanese audio works fine and thats on my windows vista machine that has a 4850 vid card and also a dedicated audio card. for what i want a in a htpc the mini works great so maybe its him that is expecting to much i still say he needs to recode the file so it works but use a lossless program to do it so he wont loose any hd parts to it as i still think the file size is partial to blame to along with the hd audio part

 

[dh2005]

I was in a hurry this morning, so I didn't get to reply as completely as I would have liked.


Pachang;

If by, "everyone else" you mean everyone other than me posting on this forum, you may be right. If you mean it in a pejorative sense to suggest that I'm the only person in the World with these demands, you're way off the mark. At networkedmediatank.com, the Popcorn Hour forum that I frequent, the majority of posters I converse with want their rips untouched.


ljonesj

Respectfully, you're using "lossless" incorrectly there. If I transcode, there will be data-loss. If you mean a level of loss that you consider undetectable to the human senses, that's not lossless; furthermore, appreciations of such losses vary from person to person. I'm extremely fussy about such things; I've done double-blind testing of "good quality" transcodes, and they're blindingly obvious to me. If only I were less observant, I could save myself a small fortune in hard drives.


Ballis;

Regarding the physical properties of the Mini and its suitability for being an HTPC, you couldn't be more right. It's the only computer, that I've ever seen, that doesn't look out of place next to a television. It runs quietly, it boots quickly, it's very power-conscious... all these good things about the Mini, I know. They feature among the reasons why I bought one. As I've said maybe five times; there's a lot about the Mini that I like, and I don't regret buying it.

I hope that's sufficiently clear, now.

As you ask, The Men Who Stare at Goats is indeed 25i. I have two or three others, one of which is The Reader. The Hurt Locker, which is 24p, ran just-about-watchably before the hardware accerlation binaries were added; it may work perfectly nicely, now.

I think the most important point you made there concerns my experience with streamers and HTPCs (100% and 0% respectively, before locking horns with the Mini two weeks ago). Streamers, for all the ways in which they're wonderful, do indeed have limitations of their own. I suppose the reason I reacted with such hostile surprise to the Mini is because streamers don't typically have this kind of limitation. They can truck megabits all day and all night, and not even sweat, and they shouldn't; after all, it's what they're built to do. And it never even entered my head that the hardware acceleration of the 9400M needed to be 'unlocked' with an API; hence, my "wtf?!?!" reaction when the performance was so ragged. I figured it was just there, and would work accordingly.

True, HTPCs and streamers are not the same; but they're conceived to do substantially similar jobs, so I don't think the comparison is unwarranted. It seems that you do, and I doubt there'll be any convincing the other of our respective points of view. I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this.


As I've said before, I'm not looking for any individual to shoulder any 'blame', but I would like to propose, respectfully, that members of this forum seek clarification when someone asks HTPC-related questions in future (and answer them honestly, of course; although I expect the overwhelming majority of people would do so, anyway). After all; it only takes a second to ask, and you can save yourselves two or three days of adversarial comings and goings.


EDIT: I think we've reached the closest thing yet to a point of agreement, so I suggest shouldering arms here. I've made all the points I wanted to make; I've no further axe to grind.

 

[Ballis]

allrighty then

 

[dh2005]

Great.

Thanks for the workout. You're a worthy adversary...!

 

[Phantom Gremlin]

thank you, all

I don't want to re-ignite any flame wars in this thread. I do want to thank everyone for the very spirited discussion. I now have a much much better appreciation of the capabilities and limitations of the Mac Mini.

As for the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, I haven't seen it, but it could be that the Mini is doing you a favor by not playing it. Just kidding!

 

[Restinbeast]

I just went through this same thing for like 2 weeks after installing my mini HTPC in my new house and after constant digging I got the bottom of it.

IMO the lies regard Plex as a usable front end. This software is utter crap at the moment and will remain so until they properly update it. If you go to the Plex forums you read constant posts by admins like "Elan" saying "yes, yes everything works perfectly, nothing to see here." Which is ridiculous, this guy claims that the HW acceleration update works, well guess what, it doesn't.

Here's why... 1080p MKVs only run properly at 24 hz output imo, otherwise there is a noticeable and constant "jutter" to the film and lots of dropped frames. Problem is, Plex broke itself and now won't run at 24 hz without massive audio sync problems that they have not fixed. So you might have low CPU usage but the image looks like complete crap. People like "Elan" say, just run at 60 hz, whats the prob? Then when the people point out jutter he's like oh yeah well duh it isn't going to be perfect. WTF? Isn't that the point of doing 1080p rips?

I also have no luck on VLC, Mplayer, or anything I've tried other than.. XBMC. Don't let people tell you its the same thing. What ever the Plex people did to the platform royally effed it up. XBMC on its own is amazing. I am running 1080p MKVs with no problems, no stutter, no jutter, synced audio, and as low as 5 dropped frames a movie. IT WORKS GREAT! Take it from someone who has spent weeks tweaking these things.

 

[Cave Man]

IMO the lies regard Plex as a usable front end. This software is utter crap at the moment and will remain so until they properly update it.

Plex has been great for me for a couple of years. No problems with my setups.

 

[Puddinman]

I feel a little like Marty DiBergi confronting Nigel Tufnel about amplifier knobs here, but please, consider this a sincere question.

If you insist on 100% lossless Blu-Ray playback, why not watch a Blu-Ray Disc straight from a Blu-Ray player? It seems like an awful lot of effort to rip things just right and then find just the right way to watch it on your TV when a perfect solution already exists. Why complicate the matter?

Yes, I understand the convenience that would come from having your whole collection on a hard drive and software that organizes and plays it back for you. However, I also understand that, in almost every case, convenience requires compromise. Even in the music realm, which is much simpler to encode and playback losslessly, one must compromise perfection for convenience.

I think that the bottom line is that if you have very exacting standards of perfection, then you are bound to be disappointed by anything other than the source. You should also understand that 99.9% of the population do not share your need for perfection and accordingly, very few people know much about how to achieve it. Asking a general mac forum like this one for advice about a niche hobby like pristine Blu Ray transfer and playback is a recipe for disaster . . . as this thread illustrates.

 

[Tilmitt]

I'd like to thank the OP for raising this issue clearly. I had assumed from all the HTPC talk that the Mac Mini was able to play uncompressed blu-ray rips. I was considering getting a Mac Mini but will now not be getting one as I need it to be able to do that.

 

[ljonesj]

well then no computer will then make it for you for that reason

 

[Tilmitt]

well then no computer will then make it for you for that reason

What do you mean by this? There are plenty of computers with powerful enough hardware to play uncompressed blu-ray rips, I have one at the moment that I built myself.

 

[Nahmeanz]

Is the new Mac Mini up to the OP's standards as an HTPC? I'd like to get the new Mac Mini to play straight Blu-Ray rips without encoding to lower quality also.

 

[Pachang]

Is the new Mac Mini up to the OP's standards as an HTPC? I'd like to get the new Mac Mini to play straight Blu-Ray rips without encoding to lower quality also.

You can encode it so the mac mini can play it without losing quality....

 

[pj-]

I just went through this same thing for like 2 weeks after installing my mini HTPC in my new house and after constant digging I got the bottom of it.

IMO the lies regard Plex as a usable front end. This software is utter crap at the moment and will remain so until they properly update it. If you go to the Plex forums you read constant posts by admins like "Elan" saying "yes, yes everything works perfectly, nothing to see here." Which is ridiculous, this guy claims that the HW acceleration update works, well guess what, it doesn't.

Here's why... 1080p MKVs only run properly at 24 hz output imo, otherwise there is a noticeable and constant "jutter" to the film and lots of dropped frames. Problem is, Plex broke itself and now won't run at 24 hz without massive audio sync problems that they have not fixed. So you might have low CPU usage but the image looks like complete crap. People like "Elan" say, just run at 60 hz, whats the prob? Then when the people point out jutter he's like oh yeah well duh it isn't going to be perfect. WTF? Isn't that the point of doing 1080p rips?

I also have no luck on VLC, Mplayer, or anything I've tried other than.. XBMC. Don't let people tell you its the same thing. What ever the Plex people did to the platform royally effed it up. XBMC on its own is amazing. I am running 1080p MKVs with no problems, no stutter, no jutter, synced audio, and as low as 5 dropped frames a movie. IT WORKS GREAT! Take it from someone who has spent weeks tweaking these things.

Something must be broken with your plex installation because I have no problems playing 20+GB mkvs with plex. I haven't checked the actual # of dropped frames after a movie, but I'm sure its in the single digits. The fact that the problem extends to vlc and mplayer make me think it's not a plex issue.

Unless you mean you're setting your display output to 24fps in which case I have no experience. Although, unless your tv operates at a refresh rate which is a multiple of 24, you won't be getting any benefit from outputting at 24fps.

 

[Cave Man]

Something must be broken with your plex installation because I have no problems playing 20+GB mkvs with plex.

I bet those files don't have True-HD or DTS-HD audio.

 

[darkplanets]

TBH, my iMac 8,1 from '08 appears to have similar stats to the new mini.

2.66 GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, 256 MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro.

I have no problems playing .mkvs through VLC with 10.6.4, but my usage of course should be noted:

-I don't have any 20+ GB movie files; all of them are 5-15 GB, with many of them supporting 5.1 (but me not using it)

-Rapid scanning through larger files sometimes crashes VLC

-Sometimes rapid scanning creates video artifacts when resuming, but this fixes itself after ~5 seconds

All in all im perfectly okay with it, it outputs 1080p content quite well, but probably isn't ideal for high end usage.

 

[pj-]

I bet those files don't have True-HD or DTS-HD audio.

Well yes, that's because my mac mini can't support those formats, so there is no need to waste space on them.

The person I was replying to didn't say or imply that he was trying to play HD audio formats.

 

[dh2005]

I don't want to re-ignite any flame wars in this thread. I do want to thank everyone for the very spirited discussion. I now have a much much better appreciation of the capabilities and limitations of the Mac Mini.

As for the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, I haven't seen it, but it could be that the Mini is doing you a favor by not playing it. Just kidding!

No need to kid. Having now watched it, I'm rather wishing that I hadn't bothered.

Glad that you got something out of this.

I'd like to thank the OP for raising this issue clearly. I had assumed from all the HTPC talk that the Mac Mini was able to play uncompressed blu-ray rips. I was considering getting a Mac Mini but will now not be getting one as I need it to be able to do that.

Thanks, man. Glad it's not just me.

well then no computer will then make it for you for that reason

Woahwoahwoah...!!!

Sorry, what?! That, sir, is BS.

How the Hell can my posts receive such resounding criticism, yet this crap can stand for over a week with only a single, uncorroborated disagreement...?

Shame on this forum. Seriously.

You can encode it so the mac mini can play it without losing quality....

Dude... please... I'm trying to be polite, but enough of this nonsense.

If ripped media is transcoded, quality is lost. If you personally can't see/hear it, that's your own business. But please don't tell the World that there's no loss; where the Hell do you think 50%+ of the file-size goes? That lost data wasn't in there for no damned reason; if it didn't need to be there, the movie studio wouldn't waste disc-space on it.

This is a really poisonous, biased, Macrumour that I'd like to see the back of... "if the Mini can't play it, it doesn't need to be there".


Can we at least entertain the idea that the Mini could benefit from some video-spec improvement? I believe Apple themselves embraced this idea 48 hours ago...

 

[pj-]

If ripped media is transcoded, quality is lost. If you personally can't see/hear it, that's your own business. But please don't tell the World that there's no loss; where the Hell do you think 50%+ of the file-size goes? That lost data wasn't in there for no damned reason; if it didn't need to be there, the movie studio wouldn't waste disc-space on it.

This is a really poisonous, biased, Macrumour that I'd like to see the back of... "if the Mini can't play it, it doesn't need to be there".


Can we at least entertain the idea that the Mini could benefit from some video-spec improvement? I believe Apple themselves embraced this idea 48 hours ago...

If you want to store lossless BR rips, that's your perogative, but I sincerely doubt you could tell the difference between a 20gb 1080p rip and a lossless one. Just like how I believe you couldn't tell the difference between a flac and a 320kbps mp3.

If you would be up for a test, I suggest making or acquiring a 15-20gb 1080p rip of a movie for which you also have a lossless rip. Have someone change the file names so only they know which is which, then play them back as much as you like and see if you can see any difference. You don't have to worry about the audio, because the high def audio formats in your br rips are worthless on a mac mini and you're getting the same DTS or DD track as the lossy rip. You could maybe see the difference if you did an up close frame to frame comparison, but from a normal viewing distance I highly doubt you'd be able to identify which movie was lossless. If you can, then you should probably sell your mac mini and buy something more powerful.

I also believe that movie studios will put excessively high bitrates on their blurays. Why wouldn't they? It doesn't cost them any more to fill up the disc. If bluray was 500gb and movies were 250mbps, would you still only play lossless rips?

I have a pretty serious home theater system and I think bluray is more about the piece of mind you get from knowing you're playing the absolute best. I have downloaded compressed br rips and later purchased the real thing and I've never seen or heard a difference.

 

[Yanwoo]

The mac mini is a fine HTPC for many but you may have problems with uncompressed HD if you're not an expert.

But please don't tell the World that there's no loss; where the Hell do you think 50%+ of the file-size goes? That lost data wasn't in there for no damned reason; if it didn't need to be there, the movie studio wouldn't waste disc-space on it.

.

I understand your frustration with this thread, and don't disagree with your perspective, but this assumption doesn't necessarily hold. Using space efficiently is typically very hard work, so if you don't need to do it, you don't.

Software is a great example: very few pieces of software are well optimized because they just don't need to with the latest spec machines. I'm sure the same is with video.

 

[dh2005]

If you want to store lossless BR rips, that's your perogative, but I sincerely doubt you could tell the difference between a 20gb 1080p rip and a lossless one. Just like how I believe you couldn't tell the difference between a flac and a 320kbps mp3.

If you would be up for a test, I suggest making or acquiring a 15-20gb 1080p rip of a movie for which you also have a lossless rip. Have someone change the file names so only they know which is which, then play them back as much as you like and see if you can see any difference.

I have done, dude. And I can tell the difference. I had a disagreement with a friend over this very matter a couple of years ago, and we arranged for some double-blind testing; the extent to which the differences were visible varied from rip to rip, but I didn't miss a single one of the transcodes. No word of a lie.


Also, I wish to make it clear that I'm not reopening any wounds, here. The points I wanted to make, I've already made. No need to tread the same ground all over again.

I understand your frustration with this thread, and don't disagree with your perspective, but this assumption doesn't necessarily hold. Using space efficiently is typically very hard work, so if you don't need to do it, you don't.

Software is a great example: very few pieces of software are well optimized because they just don't need to with the latest spec machines. I'm sure the same is with video.

Point taken. And I'm not saying that the audio-visual experience is 50% worse if the file is 50% of the size. I'm perfectly aware that 1080p transcodes can look great - they just don't look as good as the source, and I'm very fussy about that.

Many people are not and, for those people, the 2009 Mini might be an ideal HTPC. I understand and accept this.

 

[pj-]

I have done, dude. And I can tell the difference. I had a disagreement with a friend over this very matter a couple of years ago, and we arranged for some double-blind testing; the extent to which the differences were visible varied from rip to rip, but I didn't miss a single one of the transcodes. No word of a lie.


Also, I wish to make it clear that I'm not reopening any wounds, here. The points I wanted to make, I've already made. No need to tread the same ground all over again.

Well I guess you could try again, since things may have improved in the last couple years. Or just stop using the mini as an htpc and move on.

 

[dh2005]

I have 'moved on'. No need to be pissy.

The key purpose of this thread has been to highlight the limitations of the 2009 Mini as an HTPC. I've long since given-up on it being useful to me, in that role.

Hopefully, however, Apple will continue the extremely pleasing trend of improving the video hardware in the Mini, and the people at Plex will continue to improve the hardware codec support.

The Mini may yet become my dream machine. I'm increasingly optimistic.

 

[pj-]

Does the new one pass through the HD audio formats? If not, it will probably have the same problems as the old one