Mac Mini powerful enough for Boxee?

[Arno]

Hi All,

I have been testing boxee aplha on my macbook the past week or so and I absolutely love it. I am thinking about getting a (second hand maybe) Mac Mini to put next to my TV and have it run Boxee, streaming content from a NAS.

Are there any users out there that can share their experiences with Boxee on Mac Mini? Especially with HD content streaming? Is Mac Mini powerful enough to deal with HD content? I have most HD stuff in Matroska format.

Regards,
Arno

[mra]

I'm running on a mac mini (1.66ghz 2gb ram) going to an LCD screen (dvi to hdmi). Handles matroska files smoothly.

[Tom Dibble]

Hi All,

I have been testing boxee aplha on my macbook the past week or so and I absolutely love it. I am thinking about getting a (second hand maybe) Mac Mini to put next to my TV and have it run Boxee, streaming content from a NAS.

Are there any users out there that can share their experiences with Boxee on Mac Mini? Especially with HD content streaming? Is Mac Mini powerful enough to deal with HD content? I have most HD stuff in Matroska format.

Regards,
Arno

There are quite a few users out here with Mac minis and great results. They show up to make fun of us suffering through the (significantly underpowered) AppleTVs :)

Seriously, though. Boxee is borderline on the 1GHz Pentium-Mobile and 256 MB RAM AppleTV, with FrontRow running in the background. An Intel Mac mini has WAY more than enough horsepower to keep Boxee happy!

[SpaceBass]

Is Mac Mini powerful enough to deal with HD content? I have most HD stuff in Matroska format.


Oh boy is it!
The mini, even a 1.66 with 512mb + Boxee is a very capable media center device. We have not problem watching 1080p content with ours (one on each TV in the house in fact) with digital audio ...and streaming the content from a media server via ethernet.

You'll be very happy with a mini for Boxee

[mswbull]

Check out the following thread:

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=612

[Arno]

Thanks so much for the replies guys! I will keep my eye out on a Mac Mini then :-) Now only if I could intergrate easy-to-use way for ripping my CDs and DVDs automatically, so I can save the space in my livingroom and have it all available all the time :-) (nice winter project coming up I guess)

[Arno]

Oh, and one more question:
With the mini, I saw the sound output is a mini-jack plug, but also optical out? Does that mean I can plug in a toslink cablerunning to my receiver so that it will play 5.1 sound (which boxee supports I assume?)

[peterc]

Oh, and one more question:
With the mini, I saw the sound output is a mini-jack plug, but also optical out? Does that mean I can plug in a toslink cablerunning to my receiver so that it will play 5.1 sound (which boxee supports I assume?)
yup, make sure you enable it in the boxee sound prefs though.

[Arno]

Wow, awesome. You know, my mom always told me, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is... but with Boxee it really is that good :-)

[xain09]

Got an Apple MacMini 1.6 and all works smooth! Even mkv files :)