Alright, hopefully someone has some help for me or at least can tell me that I'm crazy.

I love the idea of the Mini and how quiet it is and how much less heat it gives off than my little Windows Shuttle PC.

Anyways, I've got the Mini hooked up to the VGA port on my Samsung 61" DLP (1080p). I can see the screen fine and the resolution is around 1920x1080 coming out of the mini.

The problem I'm having is that the ripped DVD's that I'm playing back don't seem as nice under the Mini than in Windows media Center.

There are two things that I can think of that would be causing the difference
1) I'm using the onboard video on the Mini rather than the Radeon 9700 Pro (even though the 9700 Pro is a couple of years old).

2) I was using FFDshow under Windows Media Center to upscale the resolution.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks

Josh

Are you running Leopard on the Mini? If it is an Intel Mini, and you are still on Tiger, upgrade to Leopard -- your quality should improve.

I'm running on Leopard. I upgraded last Friday.. I did a complete erase and install..

Josh

If you are using DVD Player, try using VLC for playback. Even though the new Leopard DVD Player is said to have improved, I've yet to see a comparison of it with VLC--which was superior to Tiger's DVD Player.

The problem I'm having is that the ripped DVD's that I'm playing back don't seem as nice under the Mini than in Windows Media Center.

And I don't think they ever will. I've been a very vocal critic of the Appledvdplayer.app under Tiger, now that I'm on Leopard there's no doubt dvdplayer is better, noticeably so. It's not an embarrassment anymore. However, if you're an advanced MCE/FFdshow/TheaterTek/Zoomplayer type, don't mind running Windows on your Shuttle, tweaking this and that, you're gonna find the Leopard dvd player, especially over VGA from a mini, a notch below.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Suggestions?

Are you the type that can't see the forest for the trees? (I don't mean that in any negative way--you know yourself best.)

If you are, it's really quite simple. There isn't much you can do to improve dvd video quality on the OS X side--it's as true in Leopard as it was in Tiger. Maybe try a digital connection rather than VGA. Either live with it, or stay with FFdshow/Windows, with all that entails.

Fortunately, for many of us, there are other factors and priorities to consider when making home theater decisions--it isn't always do what gives you incrementally better video quality. There are always downsides to any decision and other factors to consider, like your time and budget, how that one choice also impacts other aspects of your home theater, plus the noise, heat and form factor that you already mentioned.

Personally, I'm tickled pink with dvd player under Leopard so far after a few hours of use and plan to use it often (Macbook, DVI-HDMI to a 47" display) yet I know full well it is still a step below the performance of my upscaling standalone dvd players. I can live with that, because there's too much else about Leopard that I like, and in the HT I'm about equally split between high def QAM and Apple lossless in addition to ripped dvds.

Thanks for the reply. .Makes much sense.. :D

Josh

How does the macbook look going into the display for web surfing? What kind of display is it? Thanks