[mythtv-users] HD content playback on Mac Mini OS X

Fox Hole foxstore at excite.com
Tue Jun 7 02:24:30 UTC 2005


I've been "doing" MythTV (frontend) on a Shuttle XPC (P4 2.4G) running Linux RH FC3 for the past 6-7 months.  The backend also runs FC3 on a Athlon XP 2000 (or something close to it) and holds a pcHDTV 3000 tuner and Hauppauge PVR-250.  As you can imagine, the pcHDTV is used for my HD recordings and the PVR-250 does the analog recordings.

I've had ups & downs getting everything to work as my dreams have laid out, but it does work quite well overall, with a few minor irritations.  I decided 2 weeks ago it was time to give a Mac Mini (1.42G version) a fair shot at running a MythTV frontend, so I bought one.  Also bought a M-Audio Transit USB device for AC3 output and upgraded the system to 1GB of memory.

First of all, thanks to the guys who have put together the Mac OS X port.  It runs my analog recordings quite well, even though skipping and jumping is painfully slow.  I could bare that, as I can imagine that will only improve.  My biggest concern is HD playback, and I'm sure this has been discussed thousands of times already.  I am unable to playback HD content of any size, as the poor mini can't seem to keep up.  In many cases, the content will not even display a single frame.  Sometimes I'll hit bits and pieces of the audio.

I bought the Mini as a frontend playback device.  Should I hold onto the Mini in the hopes that it will be able to playback 1080i content smoothly, or is the Mini unpowered?  Will MythTV ever be able to take advantage of the MPEG-2 hardware decoding offered by the video interface?  For me, PVR is the sole purpose of this Mini and most of my recordings are HD.

Have others had any luck with acceptable HD content playback?  For the authors of the OS X port, is there a timeline for such capability or am I living in a pipedream?

Thanks and good to see so many MythTV users,
Tom


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