Mac mini Media Centre
Haven't posted a lot recently, here's what I've been up to (in between changing jobs and a few other things...)
I picked up an ex demo Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 GHz with 1.25GB RAM and 80GB HDD for $850, I then added an Elgato EyeTV DTT USB tuner for $200 and plugged the whole lot into my LCD TV.
For just over $1k, I've now got an 80GB High-def HDD recorder, High-def tuner with DVI outputs (not dodgy HDMI with it's integrated copy protection) a media centre via Front Row and the EyeTV software, 1-click program recording, even remote scheduling of recordings via the IceTV website, all the MP3s I can deal with on tap via the optical digital output to my stereo and all in a funky little package that the wife can easily deal with having in the loungeroom. Oh, and I was able to program my Yamaha stereo's remote to learn the supplied Apple Remote codes so I can control the thing from the other side of the room.
I've added a FireWire 250GB Hard drive for storage of media, so can leave the thing on for as long as I need to to catch up on a few TV shows via demonoid and it's just generally a funky little thing to have...
Now, Equinux's MediaCentral doesn't support my tuner yet, so I don't have an all-in-one Media Centre and TV application, but other than that it's all good - it's just a matter of time before it's all supported.
Add in a bit of Delicious Library action to catalogue my CDs, DVDs and Books, and there's not much more I could want it to do...
3 Comments:
I've got an iMac G3 in the bedroom to play DVDs on.
There are some .avi movie files on there, some it can play no problem, others it chokes on. Not exactly what you'd call a media centre.
Maybe I should convert the AVIs to Quicktime?
Here's the things I'd recommend, in no particular order.
I think it's probably CPU usage that's killing your playback, so we need to ensure that we optimise what's there.
I couldn't play back (for instance) high-def QuickTime stuff on the PowerBook G4 1.5GHz, it was around 10% too slow to handle it. The new MacBook Pro 2.16, however, comes through with flying colours... as does the Mac mini 1.66 core duo...
VLC - www.videolan.org - plays most AVIs without any external codecs. Pretty good for CPU usage.
Flip4Mac - Windows Media codecs for QuickTime. Once these appeared on the scene, Microsoft were very quick to discontinue Windows Media Player for Mac OS X and threw some information at the Flip4Mac guys to make it the official way to do WMV on OS X.
Spotlight probably isn't a problem while it's not doing anything, same with Dashboard if you've not launched it since logging in. I don't really use Dashboard, so I disabled it on my PBG4. I don't worry about it on the MBP, I just make sure I don't activate it.
Use Activity Monitor (or, in the terminal run the command top -us3) to check your CPU utilisation.
You can suspend other processes, either via GUI apps, or from the command-line, but if they're idle, you're not gaining much.
Here's what top shows on my machine:
(all messed up because I can't format it here!)
Processes: 72 total, 2 running, 70 sleeping... 282 threads 14:09:56
Load Avg: 0.26, 0.35, 0.35 CPU usage: 11.4% user, 7.2% sys, 81.4% idle
SharedLibs: num = 0, resident = 0B code, 0B data, 0B LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 0, resident = 0B + 0B private, 0B shared
PhysMem: 810M wired, 775M active, 395M inactive, 1.94G used, 66.1M free
VM: 12.7G + 0B 236215(0) pageins, 152788(0) pageouts
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
16305 Parallels 12.9% 43:29.71 8 112 0 0B 0B 250M 2.00G
20940 Adobe Phot 2.8% 3:59.20 8 155 0 0B 0B 145M 892M
60 WindowServ 2.4% 25:04.87 3 531 0 0B 0B 93.9M+ 469M+
16389 FileMaker 1.6% 5:45.18 14 138 0 0B 0B 90.5M 488M
217 pmTool 1.1% 13:40.20 1 22 0 0B 0B 736K 36.5M
0 kernel_tas 1.0% 21:28.71 50 2 0 0B 0B 208M 1.21G
21688 top 0.8% 0:00.17 1 18 0 0B 0B 1.01M 26.9M
215 Activity M 0.6% 8:43.27 2 74 0 0B 0B 3.45M 234M
216 Terminal 0.4% 0:21.56 4 97 0 0B 0B 5.48M+ 231M
14813 iTunes 0.2% 2:38.08 8 233 0 0B 0B 29.4M 289M
150 nudcd 0.0% 0:25.18 1 17 0 0B 0B 828K 27.2M
16623 Now Up-To- 0.0% 1:08.79 10 107 0 0B 0B 18.5M 255M
38 configd 0.0% 0:35.14 3 231 0 0B 0B 1.65M 29.6M
185 pvsnatd 0.0% 0:22.53 3 23 0 0B 0B 604K 29.1M
221 Safari 0.0% 30:18.08 12 397 0 0B 0B 288M 1.01G
16079 lookupd 0.0% 0:04.29 2 36 0 0B 0B 1.39M 28.5M
Points of note are: PhysMem: Wired – this is memory that can't be swapped to Virtual Memory
I'm not sure where the VML 12.7G comes from, as if I check in /var/vm there's only a gig or so swapfiles used.
%CPU is the average CPU usage of the relevant task over the past three seconds - even though I've got 72 processes running, only the top 5-6 are taking any more than 1% CPU. It's probably not worth killing tasks that are using less CPU than this
the HDD might be a bottleneck as well, but it shouldn't be a problem at the kinds of data rates you're dealing with for AVIs...
Update to the latest version of 10.4 (which I assume you've already done)
Thanks kai...I totally forgot this iMac used to be my backup server... it was running OSXVNC, as well as some Retrospect stuff as well. That might help free up some CPU cycles.
I was using VLC, its quite good. Sometimes MPlayer is better at some decoding, but there are no G3-specific builds and compiling from source is way more painful than it should be.
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