(Edit 12 SEP 2008: Forget Front Row and Quicktime, get Plex and you'll have the best media Mac possible. It's such a great app, and it's free. The new update doesn't drop frames and handles all video and audio out there, including decrypted Blu-Ray rips with DTS-HD or True-HD audio.)
Just had an interesting hour or so testing out a 1080p Blu-Ray rip on my 2 gHz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini (3 gb RAM) using XBMC and VLC 0.8.6i. Here's the file info:
The resulting file was 22 gb in size; note, there was no transcoding of the video rip - it was simply extracted and combined with the AC3 track. It was encoded at a variable bit rate and from watching a few minutes of it, its maximum rate was about 30 mbps. Both XBMC and VLC correctly passed through the AC3 track to my Onkyo receiver by optical cable, which detected and decoded the 5.1 Dolby Digital audio correctly. (Of course, Quicktime cannot open m2ts files, but even if it could it would probably drop every other frame since it's so poorly coded.
)
The results:
VLC choked. Lots of dropped frames for the video, although the audio had no problems at all.
XBMC ran like a champ. No dropped frames in 30 minutes of viewing and audio was nice and clear. XBMC can send analog audio by optical cable, so even if you don't have a Dolby Digital capable receiver you can still get audio out of it. I don't know if it's in Dolby Pro Logic II (5-channel), but it does get passed through. All and all, XBMC is a beautiful experience.
So, there is no hardware limitation of the Mini for playing Blu-Ray content (the 2 gHz model, at least) with the right software. Of course, this does not address other limitations, principally HDCP (which is removed by AnyDVD HD). But it is clear that the Core 2 Duo has the muscle to decode 1080p H.264 video and the GMA950 of the Mini can do the 24 fps 1920x1080 video, and all the while pass through Dolby Digital to a receiver.
Just had an interesting hour or so testing out a 1080p Blu-Ray rip on my 2 gHz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini (3 gb RAM) using XBMC and VLC 0.8.6i. Here's the file info:
- I, Robot, Blu-Ray rip using AnyDVD HD
- AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital audio track (converted from DTS-HD using eac3to on Windows XP under Fusion)
- Video (H.264) and AC3 tracks were muxed as an m2ts file with tsMuxeR 1.8.4b on Win XP
The resulting file was 22 gb in size; note, there was no transcoding of the video rip - it was simply extracted and combined with the AC3 track. It was encoded at a variable bit rate and from watching a few minutes of it, its maximum rate was about 30 mbps. Both XBMC and VLC correctly passed through the AC3 track to my Onkyo receiver by optical cable, which detected and decoded the 5.1 Dolby Digital audio correctly. (Of course, Quicktime cannot open m2ts files, but even if it could it would probably drop every other frame since it's so poorly coded.
)The results:
VLC choked. Lots of dropped frames for the video, although the audio had no problems at all.
XBMC ran like a champ. No dropped frames in 30 minutes of viewing and audio was nice and clear. XBMC can send analog audio by optical cable, so even if you don't have a Dolby Digital capable receiver you can still get audio out of it. I don't know if it's in Dolby Pro Logic II (5-channel), but it does get passed through. All and all, XBMC is a beautiful experience.
So, there is no hardware limitation of the Mini for playing Blu-Ray content (the 2 gHz model, at least) with the right software. Of course, this does not address other limitations, principally HDCP (which is removed by AnyDVD HD). But it is clear that the Core 2 Duo has the muscle to decode 1080p H.264 video and the GMA950 of the Mini can do the 24 fps 1920x1080 video, and all the while pass through Dolby Digital to a receiver.
