Mac mini HDTV Media Center

Spotted: Apple's new Mac mini HDTV media center. Much of the reporting on the new Mac minis announced by Apple on February 28 centrered on its transition from PowerPC to Intel processor. That's an important step, particularly for Apple, which has said it will move every Mac over to Intel processors by the end of 2006.

The new Intel processors are just one of the elements that make the new Mac mini interesting from an HDTV perspective, however. Also important are the new version of Front Row (Apple's Media Center style front end for iLife) which supports the Bonjour networking technology built into Mac OS X, and the info Apple has posted on its website regarding connecting the mini to a TV set.

Let's deal with the processors first. When it was launched last year, the Mac mini was very much a bare bones desktop Mac. It was aimed at PC users who wanted to dip their toes in OS X without either making a huge financial commitment or ditching their existing keyboard, mouse and display. It was the least powerful Mac desktop by a margin.

Now the mini seems to have been split into two ranges. The 1.5GHz Core Solo is very much on a par, price-wise with the previous mini range, falling somewhere between the two PowerPC Mac minis in price terms. The Core Duo version on the other hand commands a premium over the previous minis, but offers significantly improved performance.

Why's this important? Well, there is no way that you would want to use a PowerPC Mac mini to watch HDTV. You could record it, but the number crunching necessary to play it back is beyond the G4. The Core Duo on the other hand, should handle it with ease. The ability to play HDTV is critical for any machine that wants to be taken seriously as a home media center.

The mini still doesn't have a TV Tuner, but ElGato's EyeTV 500 and Miglia's TVMini HD will solve that problem.

So the Mac mini should now play HDTV happily. That on it own doesn't tell us much. But it now ships with a version of but Front Row which can detect other Macs on your network automatically and stream music, video and photos from them to the mini, and Apple's media remote control.

Finally Apple has added information to the Mac mini pages on its website that describe exactly how to connect the mini to an HDTV and how to set the resolution and other settings on the mini to optimise playback on a TV. It's also provided links to a handful of third party sites which describe how to use the mini as a media center.

On their own, none of the improvements mean a great deal in HDTV terms, but together they suggest Apple is well on its way to turning the Mac mini into a high definition media center. All it needs now is to start selling high definition movies and TV shows on iTunes. Watch this space.

UPDATE:Some readers have pointed out that Apple's minimum system requirements for playing HD movies in QuickTime call for a 1.83GHz Core Duo for 720p movies and 2GHz for 1080i. That's true. However, they are for playing back H.264 encoded content in QuickTime Player. HDTV is transmitted as MPEG-2 and played by El Gato's EyeTV software. That's a different proposition.

Currently El Gato hasn't produced a Universal Binary of EyeTV and under Rosetta (the emulation layer that allows PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs), the Dual Core iMac is only capable of playing back HDTV in EyeTV at 1/4 resolution. El Gato has only said that performance of the Universal Binary when it is released will be an improvement on that, but hasn't said that it will play at full resolution. Until the UB is released no-one knows whether it is a pipe dream or not.

As regards Apple's system specs for QT, when they were written, 1.83GHz was the slowest Dual Core chip in a Mac. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it either hadn't tested the 1.6GHz yet or if it has, hasn't yet updated the specs.

UPDATED: Read the latest news on the Intel Mac mini and its HDTV credentials here.

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