Hey everyone,
I need some advise. I'm currently preparing to use my Macbook (2.16 C2D, 1Gb ram, 160gb HD) as my HTPC. Originally, I was going to go with a Mini but I figure this way my laptop and external drives are mobile ( i move a lot). Anyways, my question is this; I've noticed that the Mac mini and the Macbooks share the same intergrated graphics card.
Is it better to have intergated video or to go with say a mac pro tower with an actual video card? I'm of course talking in respects to using the Mac as a HTPC only (not a gaming Rig or intense graphics editing).

I'm just concerned because I eventually do want to back-up my HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs but wonder if it would be better to pipe them through an actual video card rather than a shared video memory environment. Any thoughts?

Generally speaking, a dedicated video card is always a better option from a technical perspective. If you bump the RAM on a machine with on-board graphics then you can often see similar performance to dedicated video cards (for non-gaming stuff). I haven't seen anyone else here talking about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback on a Mac (I don't think there's software for playing it from the disc anyway), but if you try some of the 1080i movie trailers from the Apple site it would give you an idea on how playback would be on your setup.