I actually posted this as a response in another thread, but thought I'd post it in here...

I was in an Apple store yesterday, all set to buy a mac mini (1.83 GHz C2D).

From reading up on all the previous posts, it seemed that the new batch of Mac Minis could pump out 1080P with no problem. Just out of curiosity I went to one of the display Minis (it was a 2.0 GHz C2D) that was hooked up to a 20" Cinema Display @ 1680 x 1050.

I ran the BBC sample movie that's found in the apple home user directory in both large and medium.

To me it seemed that the large (1080P) file was a little bit jittery (the apple store clerk and a friend of mine both confirmed this). It was apparent in the panning shots (if I remember there was one scene with streamers connected to temples which looked to be in thailand) and you could also tell in the last segment with the flowers opening up, etc.

The 720P file was a smoother, and the playback didn't bother me at all. I quickly rethought my position and didn't get the machine as I want to hook this up to a 1080P TV set as an HTPC and play streamed high-def content from my NAS.

I was also curious to see what the hi-res clip would look like on an iMac so I went to a 24" iMac and played the clip and it was SMOOTH as butter (which help to convince me that the Mini was CLOSE (very very close) but not quite up to snuff to playing 1080P content as smoothly as possible.

Can anyone back this theory up, confirm what I saw, or just plain tell me I'm an idiot? I really want to pick up a Mac Mini for this purpose but I couldn't justify it to myself after "seeing with my own eyes" that it wasn't doing what I expected it to do.

Comments?

Comments?Um, you're cross-posting (but you're a newbie, so I'll leave it at that ;)). In any case, here are my comments from the MCE on Mac thread:

"The 24" iMac, while definitely having a superior video card also has a 1920x1200 rez display. So it doesn't have to downscale the 1080p like the Mini driving a 20" CD would. I don't know if it would make a difference, but you might want to try the same experiment with the Mini hooked to a 24" Cinema Display. Let us know if it show anything different."

Can anyone back this theory up, confirm what I saw, or just plain tell me I'm an idiot? I really want to pick up a Mac Mini for this purpose but I couldn't justify it to myself after "seeing with my own eyes" that it wasn't doing what I expected it to do.

Comments?

It's been discussed here. Basically what you're seeing is that the mini cannot keep up decoding the H264 at 1080p in the BBC trailer. The MacBookPro (at least 2.33Ghz) can do it. The mini will stutter at scenes where there's too much motion (i.e. too high a bit rate to decode without hardware H264 decoding).
However, the mini does perfectly fine with mpeg2 at 1080p (like all the stuff being broadcasted etc).
You might wanna rethink exactly what it is that you want: replay H264 (at very high bitrates such as HD-DVD and Bluray - that's a no-go) or playing "regular", broadcast HDTV (=mpeg2 here in the US) at 1080i or some 1080p stuff... There's many people here on the forum (myself included) who use a mini and output at 1920x1080p.

On a similar note, has anybody any experience with the new MacBook and the gma 3000 decoding h.264 1080p? When/if the Mini ever went to the Santa Rosa chipset, then it should have similar performance.

I'm wondering if the cheapest iMac will fit the bill? I know this is a long shot...but does anyone out there have a 20" iMac (2.0 Ghz, ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT) connected to an external monitor / TV @ 1080P?