gavbon86: RT ASUS Unveils Crosshair X670E Gene, Premium Micro-ATX AM5 Motherboard for Ryzen 7000.gavbon86: RT Join us tonight at 7pm ET/23:00 UTC for our live blog coverage of AMD's "together we advance_PCs" presentation.I get that you don’t make $3.25B in one quarter by giving everyone free remotes but keeping users happy should still be job-1. Older Apple remotes work just fine, and presumably the new model will too, but Apple should’ve thrown one in. The mini doesn’t ship with a remote by default, which is just absurd for a $699 computer that is just begging to be used as an HTPC. The other major complaint about the Mac mini has to do with input devices.
For ION boxes this isn’t a problem, but since we’re talking about a $699 machine with no way of enabling internal Blu-ray playback it is a definite downside. The absence of a Blu-ray drive is an issue, making the Mac mini useful for DVD playback or playing local/network HD content. The former is a limitation all ION systems have as well, you need to go to a dedicated BD player or Clarkdale based HTPC to get TrueHD/DTS-HD MA support. The only thing you’re missing is TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming and of course Blu-ray support. My Integra DTC-9.8 pre-processor detected both DD and DTS signals without any fiddling.
You get a slider to adjust the amount of overscan/underscan, and the NVIDIA drivers appear to detect and enable 24Hz support.Ģ010 Mac mini hooked up to a JVC RS2 projectorįront Row ships with OS X and acts as a decent 10-ft UI, but with XBMC, VLC or any similar 3rd party player you can bitstream 6-channel Dolby Digital or DTS audio over HDMI. The OS does surprisingly well as an HTPC. But if you can pull it off, the redesigned Mac mini does look pretty slick. Most HTPC equipment is rack sized and, well, black. The styling is really hit or miss as an HTPC.
Other users have complained about running at half frame rate with XBMC playing back full Blu-ray rips.Īs an HTPC, the Mac mini is very much an Apple ION box, just faster and more power efficient, not to mention more expensive. The 40% CPU utilization seemed a bit high but I didn't have any dropped frames.
Below you’ll see CPU utilization while playing a 1080p mkv over the network: Video playback worked right away on the Mac mini and was perfectly smooth. What you see above is the default UI, however it’s fully skinnable and there are tons of custom UIs to choose from if you want something different. I downloaded r31718 and ran it on the mini: The nightly builds however do support the API. Camelot lacks support for VDADecoder and isn’t going to do what we want. The current official build of XBMC for OS X is still Camelot, v9.11. And now you see where I’m headed with this. The one in the middle is in the Mac mini. GPUs supported by the accelerated video decode API are the GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M, and GeForce GT 330M. Using the VDADecoder API, 3rd party developers are able to send compressed video frames to a supported GPU rather than the CPU for decoding.
Unfortunately, the OS X version didn’t have the same feature.until recently that is.Ī couple of months ago Apple exposed the hooks necessary for software developers to take advantage of GPU accelerated video decode. The Linux build of XBMC was particularly great for ION machines because it took advantage of NVIDIA’s video decode engine via the Linux VDAPU API. Point it at music, pictures and movies on your hard drive or a network share and you’ve got a skinnable 10ft-UI that you can use to browse them. Think of XBMC as an open-source, play anything alternative to Windows Media Center. The big selling point for ION boxes like Zotac’s HD-ID11 is to use them with Xbox Media Center. I can’t help but think of the new Mac mini as Apple’s answer to the ION box.