The video hardware in the Mac Mini is capable of displaying at resolutions of 1920x1080. I know, because my Mini is displaying 1920x1080 right now on my 1080p Panasonic Plasma TV. Yes, it is beautiful.
As for video playback... it depends on the codec.
Divx works fine at 1080p. It rarely tops over 20% CPU usage on my Mini, which I upgraded to a 2.00GHz Core2Duo from a 1.66GHz Core Duo.
H.264 on the other hand drops significant sections of video at regular intervals when using 1080p recordings.
When I went from a 1.66GHz Core Duo to a 2.00GHz Core2Duo, the 1080p/H.264 video performance improved but it still drops portions of the video at regular intervals. Given that an increase in processor speed improved the video performance, the problem does not appear to be with the Intel G950 integrated video in the Mini.
Increasing my RAM from 1.0GB to 2.0GB made no difference at all. 1080p/H.264 video playback is not memory limited in any way by 1.0GB. Don't bark up that tree thinking it will improve your H.264 performance.
One day I had a look at the CPU usage when playing 1080p/H.264 video. It was there that I found my answer. H.264, be it Quicktime or VLC, only uses one core of my dual core CPU.
I believe that H.264 playback will work on the Mini if an H.264 decoder is developed which uses multithreading so that both cores of the CPU are utilized for playback.
Otherwise, I have heard that Minis with CPUs above 2.1GHz play 1080p/H.264 flawlessly, but those CPUs are so overpriced that I won't be trying it on the basis of hearsay. I'm banking on the codecs to be improved, since the whole world is moving towards multithreading.
The video hardware in the
The video hardware in the Mac Mini is capable of displaying at resolutions of 1920x1080. I know, because my Mini is displaying 1920x1080 right now on my 1080p Panasonic Plasma TV. Yes, it is beautiful.
As for video playback... it depends on the codec.
Divx works fine at 1080p. It rarely tops over 20% CPU usage on my Mini, which I upgraded to a 2.00GHz Core2Duo from a 1.66GHz Core Duo.
H.264 on the other hand drops significant sections of video at regular intervals when using 1080p recordings.
When I went from a 1.66GHz Core Duo to a 2.00GHz Core2Duo, the 1080p/H.264 video performance improved but it still drops portions of the video at regular intervals. Given that an increase in processor speed improved the video performance, the problem does not appear to be with the Intel G950 integrated video in the Mini.
Increasing my RAM from 1.0GB to 2.0GB made no difference at all. 1080p/H.264 video playback is not memory limited in any way by 1.0GB. Don't bark up that tree thinking it will improve your H.264 performance.
One day I had a look at the CPU usage when playing 1080p/H.264 video. It was there that I found my answer. H.264, be it Quicktime or VLC, only uses one core of my dual core CPU.
I believe that H.264 playback will work on the Mini if an H.264 decoder is developed which uses multithreading so that both cores of the CPU are utilized for playback.
Otherwise, I have heard that Minis with CPUs above 2.1GHz play 1080p/H.264 flawlessly, but those CPUs are so overpriced that I won't be trying it on the basis of hearsay. I'm banking on the codecs to be improved, since the whole world is moving towards multithreading.