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.

Last summer I started down the dark and confusing path of high definition media when I bought a Samsung 52LNA650. I’m very happy with my TV and I’d recommend Samsung sets to anyone interested in getting a 32-52 inch LCD display. About an hour after I had it out of the box, I realized that I needed a new video playback device. I’d been using an original Xbox with a mod chip for all my media playback. An original Xbox running XBMC was an amazing combo of hardware and software that played any low definition content that I’d throw at it. Have an xvid movie on a cdr? no problem. How about a set of 50 rar files, containing an iso image of a dvd9 in a shared folder on my desktop pc? Again, no problem, everything played seamlessly.

XBMC was so good I worried that by getting a PS3 or a Xbox 360, I’d be getting a much worse media center device. The problem was that I needed more up to date hardware to play HD video. The original Xbox can output at 720p and 1080i; however its hardware does not have enough power to decode HD video at those resolutions. The 733mhz custom Intel cpu and 233mhz Nvidia gpu was very outdated.

My first solution was to get a Xbox 360. I bought it as a media center controller and the fact that it plays games was just a bonus. At first things looked ok with the 360. The 1080p output was nice. The 360 interface looked sharp and seemed pretty feature full. The up-scaling DVD player looked pretty good. All of my xvid movies played back very well. Things seemed great until I downloaded a 720p mkv video.

The Xbox 360 will not play mkv files. If you’ve never used a mkv file, it’s a great format. The mkv file is a container which holds video, audio, subtitles and other dvd menu like features. This means you can have a movie with English and Spanish audio, subtitles in German, Swedish, Japanese and Korean… all in a single file. This is awesome and will be the format of the people for the HD era. The Xbox 360 can play h.264 video which is the most common video type in mkv files. Most mkv files contain 5.1 or 7.1 Dolby encoded audio streams and the Xbox 360 is only able to play 2.1 AAC audio.

There is no easy way to get the Xbox 360 to play these files but there are a few options. First, re-encode the mkv in to a wmv file or a mp4 less than 4GB. The end result here is pretty good. You get a slight loss in quality and a single file that makes the 360 happy. The bad news is that it takes 10-20 hours on my desktop pc to re-encode a single 2 hour movie. The second option is to use a tool like XenonMKV to convert the file. XenonMKV takes the mkv, and repackages the h.264 video in to an mp4 file. It also down samples the audio stream to a 2.1 channel stream. This process takes about 20 mins per video. The big drawback is that is uses an mp4 container which must be smaller than 4GB for the 360 to play it. This is a pain, most 720p mkv files are about 4.5GB so that they will fit on a DVDR. You now either have to split the file in to two parts or try to drop the quality of your audio stream to get the end result under 4GB. Having two parts of a movie is terrible since the 360 does not have a video queue and you need to manually start the second part of your video. The PS3 is very similar to the 360 in terms of video playback: no mkv, only mp4.

Long story short, the 360 and PS3, blows for playing mkv files and all I want to do is download and watch mkv movies and television shows.

I eventually became so frustrated that I grabbed my desktop pc and hooked it up behind my entertainment center. I installed the Windows version of XBMC and was blown away. My ATI Radeon 4850 decoded video much better than the 360. Playback was smoother and there was noticeably less jitter. The MediaStream skin included in XBMC looks amazing and downloads full 1080p images and metadata for your movies and television shows. The library in XBMC is much improved and does a fantastic job of organizing and presenting your media. I’m very happy, again, with XBMC. My only complaint is that I tried a bunch of other shit before I realized that XBMC has completely spoiled me and that there is nothing better out there. I am keeping my eye on Boxee which is a modified version of XBMC that includes a lot of online media and social networking features. I’ve played with the Linux alpha and I’m patiently waiting for the Windows alpha to be released.

Finally, the last bonus of having a media center pc is that pc games look amazing at 1920×1080. A newer video card looks noticeably better than a 360 or PS3.