Intel Mac Mini, Windows and CoreAVC. Enough for 1080p H.264?

I don't think it wil playback smoothly. You may get VLC errors that your computer is too slow! At least on my 1.67 Ghz mini, that's what happens. I can get them to play perfectly on my 2 Ghz MBP though.

1.83 Ghz is not too far from 2 Ghz so maybe someone with one could test it out. There is a lot of great CoreAVC stuff out there so it is very important to be able to play these back smoothly.

vertigo,

Was that on the Windows or Mac side that you had the VLC errors? What the MBP, was that Windows or Mac that you got it to work?

It was while running OS X on both MacBook Pro and Mac mini. Like I said, the 2 GHz MBP plays perfectly in OS X. I used to run Windows on the Mac mini about six months ago. HD files played smoother in Windows..I could actually playback everything in TheaterTek and VLC. For DVD's I could even push sharpening and resize on ffdshow very well. Never really understood why the codecs seem to be better in Windows.

If you plan on running Windows, the 1.83 Ghz Mac mini is more than enough I would think.

What formats were you playing 1080p without trouble? x264? XviD? MPEG2? I have a PowerMac G5 (Dual 2.5GHz, 3 Gig RAM) and it stutters considerably when I play 1080p x264 files.

It was mainly .mkv files which were x264. Transport Stream files (MPEG2) were not too bad. XVid stuff worked pretty good with no stutters at all.

The Mac mini could not playback 1080p apple trailers and short films smoothly at all. Finally, yesterday, I deciced to move my MBP to use with my Home Theater. I moved my Mac mini to my office instead. I can already tell the big difference playing back 1080p and .mkv files with no problems at all. I think the Radeon video on the MBP also helps a great deal.

Here are my specs:

Mac mini
100GB hardrive
1GB RAM

MBP
2Ghz
2GB RAM
128MB Radeon
80GB hardrive

There is some research on Anandtech about HD playback and Intel hardware and gpu's for Windows for BD and HD-DVD (they were using PowerDVD to play disks). It was very interesting--good starting point to understand the differences between the two media and formats, and intro primer on compression and its effect on cpu utilization and gpu needs. It would be nice to get that kind of analysis on the Mac side of things with the gma950 and other Mac gpu's. I think that one of the great things about Apple moving to Intel is that we can finally do some meaningful comparative analysis between the Mac and Windows platform. And seeing the differences between Windows and OS X (OS efficiency and software/hardware integration) when it comes to hardware implementation of things like HD title decoding. Maybe these sorts of comparisons can go a long ways towards motivating Apple to Do The Right Thing, and move forward aggressively in this arena.

The gist of the articles was that H.264 takes considerably more horsepower to decode than mpeg-2 and vc-1. The experiment was to find a cpu that didn't max out during a particularly tough scene, then trial different gpu's against that to see how much of a percent they knocked off of cpu utilization (i.e. how much they added to the decode process--lower cpu utilization=better gpu). The conclusion was that on Windows, you need at a minimum, an Intel E6600 (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, i believe) and some kind of gpu to be able to handle h.264 on BD, as it was the most demanding format. So it would be nice to find out, with Apple's harware config and OS X, what the minimum specs for BD h.264 decode on say, a Mini would be. So, going by this test, with Windows on the Mini, I don't think that it would pass the muster. But then again, maybe the GMA950 is specially tuned well enough that the Mini's CPU is capable of decoding h.264. It would be good to see these sorts of tests more broadly applied, so we can answer questions like gorman42's.

I've watched about 10 hours worth of various x.264 material in Mac OS X on my 2GHz MacBook and the results are stunning.

In mid-December I finally popped for a Panasonic AX100, paired with a Carada Precision 106" and I've been consuming obscene quantities of HD material ever since. Much of what I wanted to watch was available only in x.264, which my aging Avel LP2 doesn't support.

So, I decided to give the MacBook a try after discovering it has a digital audio out. I snagged a DVI to HDMI cable to ensure a pristine signal and setup the Macbook using VLC. The results have left even the wife speechless.

Video output is incredible with VLC. The scaling is butter-smooth, even on less than perfect material (sub-DVD res Xvids). The Matroska x.264 files look absolutely breathtaking: Deep color, smooth motion, a very 3D quality to the movies. The SPDIF output supports both AC3 and DTS (trust me, I was checking the face of the Onkyo each time I switch audio tracks ;-)

As part of a promotion, I received an Oppo HD981 Upscaling DVD player from Projector People (great outfit, delivered everything as promised). I understand that many will be surprised to hear this, but the Macbook/VLC combo did a noticeably better job upscaling DVDs to 720p. I hold the Farjouda brand in very high regard having employed several upscaling DVD players with my RCA DLP, but the difference was noticeable.

One notable observation: Video output looks noticeably better in Mac OS X when compared to VLC in Windows. I installed WinXP using Boot Camp and viewed several different videos, ranging from VGA xvids to 1080p AVC and the Mac version of VLC provides a consistiently superior image in every case. I can only speculate that optimizations to either VLC or Mac OS X is playing some part here. Again, my completely unbiased spouse agrees here as well.

I'm was in the process of finalizing a HTPC config that supported HDCP, but I'm suddenly reconsidering. The additional cost associated with an HDCP-compliant video card, and an HD-DVD drive is becoming very difficult to justify. I just might end up purchasing a Mac Mini for HT duties as my experience seems to indicate it's more than up to the task (lower CPU speed withstanding).

my 1.83 mac mini will play 1080P apple trailers like butter.
I've never seen them stutter.

Boy - it was really hard getting the pic small enough to post it. ;-(

I once went into an Apple Store and found a 1.83 mini hooked up to a 23" Cinema. I shut down all unnecessary apps and tried running some 1080p Quicktime movie trailers. I brought up the QT frame rate meter and watched it. It would not stay pinned at 24 fps as it did with the 720p trailers. In some really complex scenes with lots of changing bits the frame rate was sinking down in the range of 15 fps. That still looked pretty smooth, but it definitely wasn't maintaining 24 fps in all cases.

Was it running the stock 512MB RAM? I've wondered if the base RAM config on the Mini took a hit on the video.

That's a fair question. I didn't think to check that. But somehow I don't think that would factor in relative to what I saw. If the mini was going into swap space on the HDD vs. RAM read/writes, I think the frame rate would have been much more severely impacted and would not have just dropped by a factor of 2. It looked more processor bound to me. Furthermore, I don't believe decompressing a serialized data stream is all that RAM intensive because there isn't much caching going on. But still, I can't be sure, and it's a good question. Maybe someone else can answer it more definitely.

I have a 1024MB Ram.
I was running bits on wheels.
Mail
and Safary.
My mac mini is three months old.
This morning I tried to get it to drop frames by moving the Quicktime window around but it did not.
Can't wait to see what a core2 will do.

Tried two 1080p trailers at the same time
fantastic 4 and harry potter


With a single trailer (pic 1)
the cpus run at 40% to 60%
and it does not drop frames.
Not Bad - infact - amazingly good for a tiny mac mini - hard to believe.

Two trailers is to much for the poor little thing (pic 2)
It tried hard to keep the frame rate up

Bachiano,

One thing I notice is the trailers you are running are not 16:9 1080p. At 1920 x 816, those trailers you are showing are about 75% the size of 1920 x 1080. That could account for the difference in what we observed for frame rates.

Were the files QT files cached locally? I wonder if streaming these rather high bitrate files had any effect on framerates?

Also, I've completely retired QT for watching anything, as it's no where near as smooth as VLC.

Even low-res streams (like Steve Jobs iPhone keynote) stutter over my 8Mb cable connection.

It's something of a bummer, as Front Row relies on QT for video rendering.

Combine VLC with a wireless keyboard and mouse (which I already had before using the MacBook for HT duties), re-map VLC hot keys and your left with a pretty powerful HD video solution that's ridiculously easy to use.

Now, if only HDCP were supported :-(

Well, Apple sends the trailers, which are 2.35:1 aspect scope images in a true 1920x816 pixel dimension, instead of inserting black letterboxes to form the 1920x1080, 16x9 aspect. Compressing and decompressing black letterboxes should theoretically make little difference in playback needs. Now take the 2.35: image and crop it via pan and scan, or whatever, to 16:9, and then scaling it up to 1920x1080 will give you a larger pixel size. And it will take more processing power to decompress the image, as the data rate is most likely limited. Lower data rate + higher compression = more processing needs (or dropped frames). So, what do you want? A cropped, over-compressed image, or the original format and aspect? It's fair ro run both comparisons, and ideally we want a computer that can process and display all formats seemlessly.

Without getting into the philosophy of scope and CIH viewing vs. 16:9 (film-origin material), I find the fact that Apple sends trailers in 1920x816 to be a very good thing, as it is more efficient, and potentially yields a better image and playability than overly processed 16:9. Just my 2 cents here.

I prefer 2.35 AR - so it is great to have 1920 x 816.
But here is the mac mini with 1920 X 1080.
CPU went up to 70-80% but no frames drop.
I think basically the mac mini will drop frames once it maxes out the cpu.
So as long as you are under 90% it should be ok.

Bachiano, what are you using in the pics on your Mini to display cpu utilization? Nice overlay.

Wildrock
Thanks for the compliment.
Here you go:

Go To : Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.
Go to : Window.
Go to : Show Floating CPU Window.
Choose your preferred orientation.
Drag anywhere you want.

Amazing how you can use an OS for years and still discover a cool new built in goo gaw. Thanks

Not all Apple HD trailers are 2.35:1. The true 1920X1080 16:9 movies will bring some CPUs to their knees.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/pictur...slabyrinth/hd/


The above trailer is a benchmark to see if your CPU is capable of 1080P.

Sure. I didn't mean to assume that all Apple trailers were 2.35:1. I'll test a few 16:9 out.


Thanks for the pointer to the test clip. One of the points that I mentioned above in the cpu studies is that you need to find challenging material to test cpu ability. And then realize that in the future there will be more challenging material.

Interesting that Apple states the following in the system requirements on the download page:

QuickTime 7 for Mac OS X:

* Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer; 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster
* At least 512MB of RAM
* 128MB or greater video card

Especially the video card spec, as it doesn't seem to include the Mini or MB, which only have 64MB RAM, which is shared out of the main system RAM pool, leaving the OS with only 448MB RAM in the barebones setup. My MB has 1GB.

So even many early and bottom line Core Duo machines, like my MB, don't meet the requirements. My 1.83 Core Duo dropped down to 17fps (noticeable) during some motion sequences, and cpu was in the 50-80% range, constantly. So this clip did tax it beyond what I would like. And I don't think that this clip was anywhere near a worst case, as it had very little motion (comparatively) and the data rate was limited to under 10mbits/sec.

I compared that to Eragon's 1080p trailer which is 1920x816 at a data rate of 10.83mbits/s. It has a lot of motion, compared to the Pan's Labyrinth trailer. But it played a rock solid 24fps and cpu was 40-70%--about 10% lower than Pan. So there is definitely something going on here other than data rate. The frame size of the 1920x1080 most likely is eating up more cpu/gpu, even at a lower data rate, though the lower data rate(higher compression) can suggest more cpu procesing is needed to decompress it.

I think that Apple's recommendation is a good starting point for Mac OS requirements. The Windows Core requirements were a C2D at 2.4Ghz with a dedicated gpu (not a GMA950 like the Mini and MB), minimum. Can the Mac OS X be that much more efficient at HD playback? I'd still like to see a new Mini upgrade to at least a 2.0 C2D with 128MB video RAM before i'd consider buying one. Maybe even a bit higher.

Right now there is no hardware decoding of H.264 for the Mac. Hopefully in the future when it's build into the GPU. Until then one needs a very faster CPU to do all the decoding, especially if anyone wanted true 1080P.

Yes, a 2Ghz C2D would be a minimum. My current 1.8 G5 dual just can't keep up with a true 1080P trailer.

But what's the point of 1080p in the real world? Just to watch trailers?

Real world HD is 720p or 1080i. I suppose this may change if HD DVD encryption is well and truly broken, but I haven't been interested enough in that story to know the latest developments.

One would hope it would become the standard--a way to differentiate from cable and satellite. As to Apple offering trailers at 1080p, as much as anything it is a way to assure that their systems of production and delivery and computers can handle it. A work out for the iTS to offer full movies in the future in 1080p, I would hope (though pretty far off with movie downloads at 10GB+). They also provide a way for customers to differentiate the quality of their computer/display systems. I know that I download the trailers to test my system and use them to compare with what I see via DVD and cable HD--the ooh ahh factor pre-BD or HDDVD.

Though, if Apple is using 1080p trailers to sell 720p downloads, a lot of people are going to be very upset and protest loudly. Who wants to watch a second-generation, photocopy-esque version of the original, pristine 1080p content? Discriminating viewers (of which AVS overflows) will not accept anything but the real McCoy for long. And I think that ultimately Apple would want to go that way. After all, Steve Jobs does sit on the board of Disney, and owned and ran Pixar for years. I'm sure that when he and his buddies sit around the big screen at home or in the boardroom, that they know what we know--that 1080p is the holy grail, until QuadHD comes around, that is.

"Hey Stevie-boy, whazzup with the 720p limit at the iTS?" Big Al wonders. "I didn't invent the Internet for these piddling-sized downloads. Crank it up. I want to see them hooters."