Cheap Mac to play HD Quicktime

[Mr645]

Currently I am using a 466mhz G4 to feed regular DVD video, stored as hundreds of Disk Images to a projector and over a network to various Macs around the office to slow clients.

Were now shooting everything in 1080i and will generate WMV or Quicktime files. The 466 G4 valiantly gives us 3-4 fps with our test 1920x1080 Quicktime files fed to our new projector, also naitve 1920x1080.

Now, can I get by with a Mac Mini? 17" iMac 2.0 Core2Duo?

How about an older dual CPU G5? I have some dual 1.8 PM G5's in the office.

Jon

[deckeda]

Your 1.8 G5s should be fine, and since you already have them it won't cost you anything but time (maybe) to confirm it.

[MikeF]

Dual G5 should do it:


However, 1080p may not. Also depends on graphic card and memory...

[The Grim Ninja]

The CoreDuo Mac Mini is supposed to be great at HD, but the CoreSolo not so much.

Any dual G5 should be great, but I would recommend making sure it doesn't have a Geforce 5200 card as they're about worthless. A Radeon 9600 should do nicely. I used a 9600 in a MDD G4 for some HD and it worked adequately. I imagine some frames were dropped, but I didn't check.