On Tuesday 26 April 2005 06:53 pm, Donavan Stanley wrote to Jeff Simpson: > > The mac mini operates at 1.2 or 1.4 ghz. Not to say that processor > > frequency is the only factor in the speed of a computer, but when it's > > THAT large a difference, I can't imagine it can just make up for it with > > optimizations. > > You can't even BEGIN to compare performance based on clock speed when > comparing completly different instruction sets. �Regardless all it > would take is for their video hardware to support HD size MPEG2 > acceleration and for Myth to be able to leverage that. > > > That being said, it's HIGHLY doubtful that out of the box a max mini > is going to work as an HDTV frontend for Myth. �Buying one for that > purpose alone is a mistake IMO.
As an original Mac user, now running Yellow Dog Linux on an old G3 iMac and fooling with Mandrake and Fedora Core on Intel-type hardware, I have to agree about "completely different instruction sets." The G4 Macs have what is variously called a "velocity engine" and "Altivec" in addition to the G3 instruction set. I note that some of the video4linux libraries have Altivec code in the ppc versions, which for appropriate purposes could better than double the effective speed. The velocity engine is in fact intended to do the sort of vector processing that video and audio use heavily. iMovie and iDVD on the G4 are very easy to use. If Apple had captured anything like half the Windows market, our software geniuses in GNU and Linux probably wouldn't give the Pentium a second thought. But Donavan's final paragraph is probably true. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
