[mythtvnz] New Mac Mini maybe a good VDPAU frontend?

[Nick Rout]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Neil Bertram <neil at fishy.net.nz> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Apple just released a new iteration of the Mac Mini -
> http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html
>
> It has an nVidia 9400M, so good for VDPAU. It has DVI (not HDMI) but an
> adapter solves that, and SPDIF out. Maybe it can somehow embed HDMI audio
> with the appropriate Apple dongle, but no mention of it...
>
> And they claim it idles at 13 watts, which isn't too bad.
>
> I guess it's quite pricey for something you'll just put Linux on, but it's a
> nice neat option to get a SFF low-power machine to run myth...
>

Yes, expensive and if you look carefully the version with 1G RAM only
seems to only allocate 128M to the video card, the one with 2G seems
to allocate 256.

VDPAU at higher resolutions seems to need 512M. Will this apple work?

I like Cecil (from knoppmyth)'s atomic ant spec:

http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19476

For a front end only (ie without the capture card, and using the same
size hard drive as the higher spec mac mini) I specced this out this
afternoon [2] as:

case $180
MB $180
2G RAM $140
320G hard drive $130 [1]
subtotal $630

Then you have to find the Sparkle video card he mentions, not easy in
NZ!!! [3] Assuming you could get something for around $150 then you
have a machine that is a helluva lot cheaper than the Apple 2G
machine, which is $1849 here. Granted you end up with bigger and
slightly noisier.

[1] actually for a frontend you could ditch this altogether or use
something much smaller.

[2] I didn't go for the absolutely chapest parts, I just googled the
part numbers in NZ and used the first site that google listed,
obviously one may be able to do better.

[3] $61US incl shipping on newegg who ship to US only. If you have a
friend there who will post it on for, say US$20 its $150 NZ in round
terms.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814187042