Atkins Meyer

HDTV’s are awesome. Watching HD video on HDTVs is even more awesome. Playing HD mkv files with anything other than a home theater pc (htpc) is not awesome. About a month ago I moved my desktop PC in to my living room and gave it HTPC duties. It served it’s purpose well but I’d like to reclaim it so I can do some after hours coding on a side project. Apple recently released an upgraded Mac Mini and it appears to be quite a capable HD media center device. The entry price for a Mac Mini is $599 and before I purchased one I decided it was due diligence to see what the same $599 could get me on the PC side. Here is what I was able to put together.

hec Black 7K09 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case $48.99

GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H Micro ATX Intel Motherboard $119.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor $164.99

CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 $44.99

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000333AS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $89.99

SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model SH-S223Q $24.99

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner / Encoder 1229 $109.99

The total here is $603.93 and includes everything needed to build a complete HTPC. Below is a comparison of this machine and a Mac Mini.

VS

Analysis: The Mac Mini lacks HDMI output. You would need to run a DVI cable to your TV and an optical audio cable to your amplifier. This requires a separate optical TOSLink cable. With this cable the Mac Mini outputs 5.1 surround sound but is unable to do 7.1 or DTS audio.

Another concern with the Mini is the cpu speed. The 2.0GHz Cure 2 Duo chip will not be able to decode Blu-ray and high bitrate h.264 video without dropping a significant number of frames. There are ways to make HD playback work. The 9400M gpu can easily handle HD video decoding but you need to have the proper software. In Windows, you need NVIDIA’s pure video HD package installed for gpu acceleration in windows media player. You could also pick up PowerDVD which does very nice gpu accelerated playback of all video except mkv files. Seriously PowerDVD what the fuck. Unfortunately, the Windows version of XBMC (my personal favorite htpc application) does not support gpu accelerated playback at this time.

In Linux the VDPAU libraries recently released by NVIDIA do a good job of gpu HD video decoding. Most of the major Linux apps, VLC, MythTV, Xine, MPlayer and XBMC have preliminary support for VDPAU now. A Mac Mini running Ubuntu, via Boot Camp, would be a good choice to take full advantage of the Mini’s hardware.

I’m not an OS X expert but I’m going to assume that the Apple engineers have enabled gpu video acceleration within OS X. Long story short, If the Mini can use its gpu for video playback, it’s in the clear. If not, then 1080p video and Blu-ray is going to look shitty. The 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo chip in the PC box is fast enough to decode Blu-ray video along with other high bitrate h.264 videos. The faster cpu gives you a lot more flexibility when you choose your OS and media playing applications.

The PC also has a TV tuner card so you can use MythTV or MediaPortal to turn your box in to a fully featured digital video recorder.

If you’re interested in saving money you could save about $100 on the PC cpu and get Core 2 Duo at around 2.0GHz. You could also lose the TV tuner for another $100 of savings. Finally you could save an additional $50 by getting a 250G hard drive instead of a terabyte hard drive. This would put the total cost of the PC around $350 and would still be a little better hardware than the Mac Mini.

When it comes down to it, you pay Apple for the OS and the form factor. The Mac Mini looks pretty sweet. It’s quiet and uses less power than a PC build. OS X is a solid operating system with some very nice features. For me, virtualization on OS X is amazing. In a perfect world, I’d surround myself with Macs running VMWare Fusion 2.0 and I’d be knee deep in OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04. In this world, I need HDMI output, DTS sound, Blu-ray and h.264 decoding so I’ll stick with the PC hardware.