Mac mini All About Movies? 787
bikerguy99 writes "Robert X. Cringely, who had a good nose for the Mac mini from the very beginning, has published another bit of his thoughts on PBS. This time he speculates that Mac mini is all about movies - his thoughts on the subject are quite logical and provide intriguing insights into Apple's interest in producing a cheap headless Mac in the first place."
they don't market it for the movies. (Score:3, Interesting)
of normal joe's that is. for others it's a good start for a small computer if you either want it to be a mac or don't care about the os(but it's just a start still, if you just want to view movies on the tv you're better off buying a stand alone player or heck, even xbox.. and most people won't ever edit movies).
Re:they don't market it for the movies. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:they don't market it for the movies. (Score:1, Interesting)
Dead on (Score:5, Interesting)
My mini arrived at my office via FedEx on Thrusday, and I've been setting it up for exactly the same purpose as almost everybody else I've heard from who's buying one: It's going into the media room.
A $300 digital tuner called the EyeTV gives me PVR features, and a $60 USB break-out box gives me DTS sound for DVD's. (The G4 solution can't quite do 1080i in full-screen mode, but I only need 720p anyway...) The DVI port is compatible with the wide-screen projector I'm planning on buying next month. In spite of the relatively light-weight video card, it plays World of Warcraft nearly as well as my AMD Frankenstein box with a 256 MB GeForce card.
So this thing is already serving up movies, TV, music, and games, and will be just about the only media device in the room (I might consider moving the X-Box into whatever room my old TV goes to.)
However, like many geeks, I also sometimes watch downloaded materials. I'm not as big on bootleg DivX's as some folks, but the occasional anime "fan-sub" has found its way onto my HD, and there's also plenty of legit stuff out there, such as "Red vs. Blue."
If it was possible to click on a movie or classic TV show in the iTMS, and download it as an MPEG2 stream for a reasonable price, even if it took overnight to get it, I would probably snap it up.
I passed on the DVD burner option for the mini. I figure I can get a better & faster double-density burner sometime down the road as an external firewire option. If this movies-on-demand feature of iTMS actually comes to pass, I might find myself buying a burner sooner rather than later.
Mini's not for Movies (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, maybe it's just me, but doesn't 40 GB or 80 GB seem awfully small for the storage of feature-length HD video? We're talking what, 10-20 movies at best?
For there to be a true digital DVD library device, hard disk storage prices are going to have to come down to a fraction of what they are now. Time will provide this, but right now, it doesn't seem like the hardcore movie buffs -- who seem like the target market for something like a digital DVD library -- would be satisfied with the comparatively tiny amount of storage available in the 2.5" hard disk form factor. A Mini with an external terabyte of storage would be better, but that's going to more than double its price.
Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I really think Cringely missed the boat on this one.
p
May be not for movies (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, the movies have to be purchased ($10 per download, for example) and stored on the HDD. The HDD is either 40 or 80 GB, making it capable of storing anywhere from 20 to 60 movies. What the customer should do after the disk is full?
There are solutions to both problems, though. The bandwidth can be spread between users using BitTorrent, and the customer can be allowed to re-download the same movie at a later time, as long as he presents the same key to the web store.
But for an average user a DVD player and a DVD store and/or rental place work just as well, and with much less hassle. iTunes works because it is easy. But downloading of a movie is anything but easy, at least so far.
Possibly, though, Apple looks far ahead. But if they just wanted to set up a video distribution business they could have released some iFlicks software for Windows, this results in an instantaneous user base, no need to wait for anything built or sold, and they can have the video store running within days.
Re:Interesting Bio (Score:5, Interesting)
In case the sentence, "... he taught for several years at Stanford University..." leads anyone to believe that Cringely was on the Stanford faculty.
Cringely was a graduate student at Stanford, during which time, he TA'ed a few classes. He never finished graduate school. Since then he has claimed (and then retracted) that he had a Ph.D. and had been an Assistant Professor at Stanford. When confronted, with the truth, he first opined that he thought being a TA was the same as being an Assistant Professor, and then removed the Assistant Professor and Ph.D. bit from his official bio.
Caused more than a little stir in academic circles in 1998. Here's the link [stanford.org] from the Stanford Daily online from 1998.
Re:Unlikely (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a I have a 800mhz G4 with 1gb ram and the same video card.
It plays all file formats at full screen quite happily while doing a bunch of things in the background. A mplayer playing a mpg stretched to full screen is only 25% cpu usage. An Avi about 30%, A WMV is about 35%. The worst seems to be a real player (.rm) video which can be up to 45%-50% (but how many of them would you play).
In short I agree the spec's are lower than x86, but it's certainly NOT bad.
Get one of these put a larger disk and more memory in it and you'd have quite a serviceable desktop (with screen keyboard etc.
Yes it could do with 5.1 sound, and a better video card.
Alternatively at 6.5" square and 2" high you could fit a bunch of these in 1U of colo space.
Re:Unlikely (Score:3, Interesting)
I still don't know what they would do about the drive although many people seem to be just fine with a 40 gig tivo.
Anyway Jobs doesn't seem too interested in television. Music?, movies? yes! TV? not so much.
Re:Mini's not for Movies (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think so ... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. both models of the mac mini are currently shipping without support for either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Cringely glosses over this stating that the mini will exclusively be for delivering online HD content.
2. there is no IR/remote support on the mac mini, so no remote control. this is kind of a big and small deal at the same time. it would not have cost much for them to add support for this, yet it is a feature essential to media centers.
3. the current mac mini models are simply not powerful enough to decode HD video compressed with modern MPEG-4, WMA9-level codecs.
4. no component video out on the mini. Cringely once again glosses over this, stating that DVI is sufficient. while DVI does seem to generally work on DVI/HDMI and DVI/HDCP televisions, there are cases where it does not, and it is certainly not officially supported by most vendors. remember this is Apple, they're not going to push technologies that aren't officially supported. there is no evidence of HDMI/HDCP support on the mac mini.
A lot of these could be fixed in the future, with an "upgraded" mac mini. but i just don't think it adds up. the mini doesn't even look like a home theater component. Cringely seems to be basing his entire theory on the Quicktime trailers site being down for an evening
I do hope one day Apple releases a media center solution. They are one company who could really shake things up and bring some attention to the media center concept, which I am totally into after installing Xbox Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com) on my modded Xbox. I just don't see this happening anytime soon, and in particular not with the mac mini. I sure hope I'm wrong!
Re:they don't market it for the movies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apple need no R&D (Score:3, Interesting)
the iPod was never marketed for the iTMS either. It was quite some time before iTMS came out.
Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC? (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't a Mac mini be a 'real computer'? If your wife (a 'real' computer user...?) can do what she wants on it, what's not 'real' about it? I mean, if she wants to play a bunch of games.. well okay. But.. is she a programmer? 3D artist maybe? What is a 'real computer'? Is it something where the keyboard only has a 1 and a 0?
Re:I don't think so ... (Score:2, Interesting)
2. Bluetooth.
3. Wrongo. My Mac is only a 1 GHz G4, slower than a mini, and it plays back AVC-encoded HD content just fine with the Tiger developer preview. (WMA-9? Silly rabbit. It's not 1999 any more. The world has moved on.)
4. Yeah, there is. It's called DVI-I. DVI-I to component analog adapters are about $40.
Of course the mini is not a "media center solution" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean). It's a computer. But your objections are still just a lot of hot air.
That codec they showed off looked cool... H.264? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC? (Score:2, Interesting)
Your opinion. The point is that there is at least SOME market for OSX on other architectures (including myself), and that we can recognize good (OSX) and bad (PPC) things when we see them. Feel free to turn a blind eye to how much PPC sucks compared to AMD64, but don't blame us for your ignorance.
You have a very curious definition of "price/performance value." You seem to think that something you get for free that desperately, desperately sucks is better than something wonderful sold for a reasonable price. I think there's a "division by zero" error in your arithmetic somewhere.
I believe he was aggregating the cost of hardware+software. But FWIW, I paid for it [gentoo.org], and am glad to have done so.
Um. You see the irony, right? "[Brand] invented [Brand], so [Brand] and I call [Brand] [Brand]."
Way to prove the point.
I'm addressing this last because it is the least relevant issue... look dude, it's just an architecture name. Our operating system [gentoo.org] happens to call it AMD64, so that is what I choose to call it as well. I actually just read up on the subject and it seems Linus has established "x86-64" as the official kernel name. EMT64 and ia-32e of course are names that _ONLY_ Intel uses, for purely PR reasons.
I do not have brand loyalty to AMD either but I too am definately a fan of the new architecture.
Can you just plug any USB audio card? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a simple question, but since I am completely Apple-illiterate I'd like to know for sure. Can I plug a nice USB audio card on the mini? Will it work? An Audigy NX would be a nice choice for games, a firewire m-audio would be nice for recording. Generally speaking, do PC USB peripherals work with apple computers or do I need "special" expensive Mac versions?
P.
Re:Really (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct, except for the fact that that "tinkering" with Linux involves getting software that should work to actually work. Naturally, this is distinct from software being 100% incompatible to begin with (i.e. win32 apps that won't run on their Linux or OSX)
Re:Will not be able to record HDTV (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:mac mini server (Score:5, Interesting)
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server.
Because there is far more to OS X than merely a pretty GUI. The entire underlying kernel is an excellent POSIX-compliant UNIX implementation, arguably better than Solaris. I've been using my PowerMac as a pseudo-media server for about a year now, and it's been rock solid and a pleasure to work with via ssh. With Linux I was frequently (sometimes constantly) having to fight with various installers, configuration management, etc. That is far less of an issue under OS X, and it has freed up my time to do other more intersting things.
Besides, even on a headless server you can access the GUI remotely. You want to see something strange, do a VNC connection to OS X via Solaris. :) There's something not quite right about seeing the dock inside of a Gnome window.
Re:s/Pixlet/h.264 (Score:3, Interesting)
Pixlet is not lossless. It's a high quality wavelet based lossy codec; sort of like JPEG2000, but with a bunch of optimisations for video.
What makes pixlet suitable for editing is that it has only I frames (i.e. each frame of the video is a complete entity in itself, not refrencing data in any other frame), thus it can be scrubbed quickly and accurately, and cut cleanly at any point (unlike the various MPEG1/2/4 and MPEG-4-derrived codecs, which decrease file size by refrencing information in other frames, thus sacrificing that editing functionality).
But you were right in that, if Apple were to launch a Video Store in the next few years, it would probably use MPEG-4-AVC (h.264) and AAC audio (perhaps even AAC-HC aka aacPlus, by then). Those codecs are much more suited to delivering media to consumers (i.e. they have much higher quality at lower bitrates, but less easy editing functionality).
Re:Or... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Tiger will include something similar. Most American households have a cell phone. Many (though still a minority) have Bluetooth. If this is a media center, imagine that you don't have to buy a remote control for it BECAUSE YOU ALREADY HAVE ONE in your cell phone. Maybe that explains the recent coziness between Apple and Motorola, whose most recently successful phones have Bluetooth in them.
Pulled all that out of my ass, but if I'm right I will still take 100% credit.