Apple's new Mini reviewed

The big questions in this review deal with playing (and streaming) HD video through the Mini. It sounds just a tad under-powered.

"There was also the little problem of the Mac mini being slightly underpowered for playing high resolution HD streams at an acceptable frame rate. To see just how much better the new mini is at rendering HD streams, we've taken some HD movie trailers from the Apple website and run them through QuickTime. We monitored the frame rate and took note of dropped frames. The trailers we used were the IMAX Deep Sea and IMAX Magnificent Desolation. Each of these were available from Apple in 480p, 720p, and 1080p resolutions. We ran all six trailers on each machine in QuickTime and monitored the Window > Movie Info palette while the video played. These two movies were carefully selected because each exhibited a different type of motion throughout. The Deep Sea video featured some medium-paced action interspersed with some heavy, quick-moving scenes. These are important to test, because they're generally more taxing on a system's ability to decode the stream in real-time. The second video, Magnificent Desolation was chosen because it is slow-paced with relatively few scenes with any action and is full of slow moving characters and slow scene fades.

"Playing the Deep Sea trailer on the Mac mini Core Solo had interesting results. It played the 480p version flawlessly with a constant frame rate of 24 fps. The 720p formatted film was a slightly different story. The video played very well, but when the video had quick-moving segments (schools of fish moving and changing direction quickly) the frame rate would dip slightly into the 18-20 fps region. The 1080p version was simply unplayable. There were frequent skips and jumps in the video playback and the actual frame rate hovered somewhere around 10-13 fps. By way of contrast, a dual 2.5GHz PowerMacintosh G5 with an ATI Radeon 9800 handled the 1080p video very well, with the frame rate dropping below 23.5 on three occasions. A 1.83GHz iMac Core Duo did better than the G5 on the 1080p video. Both the PowerMac G5 and Core Duo iMac played the 720p version without dropping a frame."