[mythtv-users] 2010 Mac Mini?

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday, July 22, 2010 07:19:34 pm Nick F wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 4:25 PM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 02:29:31PM -0500, Nick F wrote:
> >> On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> >> > On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 5:09 PM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
> >> >>    Interestingly enough, trying to run Hulu Desktop doesn't seem to
> >> >> cause it to draw a great deal of power despite using up every spare
> >> >> CPU cycle. Nor does divx decoding.
> >> > 
> >> > All the atom freq scaling and power savings functionality is reserved
> >> > for the netbook-targeted atom. The desktop ones don't do much of
> >> > anything in the way of power savings, don't do any freq scaling, etc.
> >> > Because, you know, who wants power savings when you're plugged into
> >> > the wall all the time? (Intel missed the boat on this one, imo, but
> >> > maybe they'll wise up eventually).
> >> 
> >> Talking about Hulu.  Is anyone successfully playing Hulu / BBC iPlayer
> >> / flash video on an Atom/ION?  I have a Zotac (330 dual core with ION)
> >> and it struggles really badly.  Is there a trick to getting flash to
> > 
> >     I have tried it on my Asrock 330 boxes and it's pretty unusable.
> 
> Yeah - I guess this is the main reason for sticking with a Mac Mini,
> rather than going the ION/ION2 route.  I have an older mac-mini (CD
> upgraded to a C2D with intel graphics).  It plays back flash just
> great, but can't deal with h.264 material and hi-def mpeg2 (running
> OSX).  And my ION plays back h.264 great, but chokes on flash.

Does anyone have an idea what the minimum CPU spec might be to play back flash glitch-free?

Can the existing flash decoders take advantage of multiple cores?

No hardware acceleration for flash kind of sucks, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for the promises to be fulfilled.

I know there are on-the-fly transcoding solutions, they take a fairly beefy (Windows) machine (ca. a 3.2Ghz. core), but I 
guess you don't have to run it 24/7, just when you need it, or use a VM.