Nice storie!! thanks for the tip.
This thing worried me a bit. Why didnt he use 10.3.8 with EyeTV, i cant imagine that Anandtech is not smart enough to test this. Or would it be to big even for EyetTV?
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The problem, however, is that we haven't been able to find any applications that offer hardware accelerated MPEG-2 transport stream playback. It seems that the best application for playing back these transport streams natively is VLC (also available for the PC), which doesn't have any sort of hardware decode acceleration support. The end result is that anything above a 13Mbps stream ends up dropping frames on the 1.25GHz Mac mini, meaning that basically all HD streams are unplayable on the mini even though they record fine. The only solution here is to transcode the transport stream to something playable (e.g. DivX) before using your mini as a playback device, which is obviously a lot more work. Another option is to use only the mini as a capture device, and send the transport stream to a fileserver elsewhere in your house for playback or transcoding. The ideal solution would be to have a player that properly took advantage of the hardware, as the 1.25GHz G4 should be enough to playback the MPEG-2 transport stream. Currently, such a solution doesn¡Çt exist for OS X.
This thing worried me a bit. Why didnt he use 10.3.8 with EyeTV, i cant imagine that Anandtech is not smart enough to test this. Or would it be to big even for EyetTV?
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The problem, however, is that we haven't been able to find any applications that offer hardware accelerated MPEG-2 transport stream playback. It seems that the best application for playing back these transport streams natively is VLC (also available for the PC), which doesn't have any sort of hardware decode acceleration support. The end result is that anything above a 13Mbps stream ends up dropping frames on the 1.25GHz Mac mini, meaning that basically all HD streams are unplayable on the mini even though they record fine. The only solution here is to transcode the transport stream to something playable (e.g. DivX) before using your mini as a playback device, which is obviously a lot more work. Another option is to use only the mini as a capture device, and send the transport stream to a fileserver elsewhere in your house for playback or transcoding. The ideal solution would be to have a player that properly took advantage of the hardware, as the 1.25GHz G4 should be enough to playback the MPEG-2 transport stream. Currently, such a solution doesn¡Çt exist for OS X.
