I am putting together a mac htpc and I already have 5 macs in my house, but the one that I don't really use that much is a G5 Dual 2.0ghz, non intel. I have already purchased 6 TB eSATA HD's and have them in a hot swappable enclosure that I plan to have connected to my 8 Core 3.0ghz Mac Pro that is back in my office. I would like to have the Dual 2 Ghz connected to my home theater and would like to stream all of my movies and music using my airport extreme. I would also eventually like to be able to record some hd material on my mac. What I am not sure of is if the Dual 2.0ghz will be able to play back hd material or if I may be limiting myself to the software I would be able to use on a non intel mac?
Thanks,
Steve

I would also eventually like to be able to record some hd material on my mac.

What kind of "hd material" and how would you "record" it?

And when you say "do 1080p" what do you mean? Are you ripping HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs in Windows or downloading 1080p mkv?

What I am not sure of is if the Dual 2.0ghz will be able to play back hd material or if I may be limiting myself to the software I would be able to use on a non intel mac?

Well, a dual 2.0 G5 couldn't really handle MPEG-2 1080i ATSC or QAM recordings without dropping frames at EyeTV's best deinterlacing setting. A current 2.0 C2D can just barely do it seamlessly.

Check how your dual G5 does with this H.264 stuff:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/

If it chokes, you'd be better off selling the G5 on Craigslist and getting a quiet C2D to function as your player/extender instead. You won't really benefit from the size or storage space of the G5 in your HT, since you have plenty of Macs and storage elsewhere.

HD is almost all CPU on a Mac, PPC is already limited, and it's doubtful any future improvements in software or offloading to the graphics card will extend back to PPC.

i agree - sell the g5. I just sold one on ebay (dual 1.8) and got almost $700. So if you sold yours, theoretically you could get a mini & max out the ram (buy the ram from a 3rd party reseller). I have an older intel mini connected to my Panasonic Plasma (TH-C42FD18). After tinkering around with it, I got the desktop at the full 1080p and things look great.

The upsides for a mini are the G5 uses a LOT more power then the mini, so it will save you on your electric bill. Not to mention the size is far better to be put near a tv. Also, all of the G5's i had were notoriously noisy. The chipset would get hot & what sounded like industrial fans would come on to cool it down. The mini doesn't have this problem. Finally, you also get a mac that is designed to work with a remote, which really would help.

The downside to the mini, is it really limits the types of add-on devices you can hook up to it. You are basically limited to 3 things: usb, firewire or across the network.

For my scenario, I have a mini hooked up to our family room TV and one in my bedroom. Since we have a home business and I already have an xserve, it doubles as the repository to hold all of the media and the mini's stream it all across the network. But, the box that you are streaming from does not have to be a mac, or very fast. A G3 with a gigabit card would be fine as a simple file server. Your other options for back end could be a linux box (maybe freenas) or a simple nas device. This could then serve up movies to other Macs or appleTVs.

Your Mac Pro would also make a great device to hold everything, though it does always have to be on. So if you are looking at your houses power consumption, that may be a sore thumb. If you are going to do it wirelessly, make sure that you are using 802.11n (not in compatibility more either). It has been my experience that anything less will either get you dropped frames when you try to stream 1080p or the video may outpace the network speed. Really, if you can do it wired, it would be better in the long run - although I understand that this is not always possible.