mini mac and 1080p?

[reven]

was just wonder if the latest mac minis (2.26Ghz) would playback 1080p mkvs without any issues? will it do the video rendering through the graphics card/chip (nvidia 9400 M) or the cpu? wondering if the 2.53GHz would be worth the extra price tag (about 35% more)

i want to get rid of my ubuntu box and replace it with a mac mini, and want to run tiger on it so can run atv4mac (is this also possible? can you uninstall snow leopard and put tiger on a new mac mini?) for itunes hd movies.

also how many remote buttons will work using my logitech harmony one? would it just receive the basic button commands the small mac remote has, or will fastfoward etc also work?

i want the appletv functionality (hd movies, really want this, the reason i want a mac) but also want enough power to playback 1080p mkvs. i dont want to have 2 machines.

TIA

[geoffmacintosh]

As I understand it, Boxee doesn't use the graphics processors in anything that isn't Windows — yet, anyway. So the processor's speed is a little important in decoding 1080p content.

I have the same question as you actually, as I'm also planning on getting a Mac Mini for Boxee quite soon.

[Dubhead]

I have the latest gen Mac Mini that I run Boxee, XBMC and Plex on. It actually plays 1080p content fine. I have had some hiccups with certain .mkv files which may have more to do with how they were originally encoded but for the most part they play fine. It wasn't always the case though, Boxee had trouble more than Plex and XBMC playing this content. Not sure what changed with updates, but it now seems to play the 1080p Bluray content I have downloaded just fine. I have to say watching the flawless playback of the first scene in Casino Royale made my evening the other day. My Bluray player sits idle most of the time now. I should sell it and invest the money in another couple of TB of storage ;)

Haven't used the Harmony remote yet (need one as I have 6 separate remotes!) so if anyone can answer that, I'm all ears.

Cheers

[reven]

i was hoping it would use the gfx for acceleration, like xbmc does with a nvidia card and linux.

im currently running xbmc on ubuntu and it works flawlessly, playback is amazing, just want to switch to a mac for the movie rentals through itunes, but dont want to lose playback quality (the reason i switched from windows was playback quality). and want to start using boxee more when the beta comes out (now movies look more organised etc).

also anyone had any success installing tiger on a the latest mac minis? i want to run ATV4Mac on it so can buy/rent movies through a remote and a htpc type interface.

TIA