Mac Mini as a Sage Client - report card

[jlindborg]

OK – Finally got the Mini running as a Sage client in XP. Here’s a short report card.

I’m running the dual core with 512 meg. I was going to get the gig but decided to try 512 first since the place I bought it from said they’d upgrade it to a gig for me with no labor charge if it didn’t work out for me so I saved the $150 and went for it. I have XP with SP2 (of course – bootcamp requires this) installed with all the patches downloaded. I added only SpeedFan (see below for more on that), the NVidia PureVideo package and the filter manager used with that. I also installed a USBUIRT unit with driver. Everything else is stock on the OS side of the house other than I’ve disabled a number of services I don’t need to speed up boot times and reduce memory usage (system memory sits around 132 meg in use before firing up Sage). I’m running Sage 4.1 beta build 11 here so that’s the version of the client I installed. Added the usual comskip, custom menu, motherboard monitor and custom aspect ratio add ons to the basic Sage interface. Nothing fancy. I connected it to a Panasonic 42” Plasma via HDMI for my video tests.

Short story – it works dandy as a Sage client. DVDs looked great, HD output (720p from an Avermedia OTA capture card) worked good in VMR9 and FSE. Without FSE I detected a slightly “jumpy” output, though very slight (and may have been a little bit too much coffee on my part). FSE is just as touchy here as on other systems – if you try and bail out and go back into full screen the client drops out – no surprises there. Overlay looked good, too. CPU usage was not bad – HD output pushed it up to around 50% on a single processor (system CPU was listed as 20 to 30 according to my CPU graphs). Temperature stayed steady (insofar as I can check that) under 50C even after playing a couple HD episodes of Conan. It’s quiet… so quiet… blows the other cube box I had off the water – not even close. The DVD is a little loud by comparison, but not bad.

I don’t have a device capable of 1080… can’t report on that. The Intel video setup wont let me configure it on output (I’m sure there’s a way I can force it) – it only shows 720 and 480 modes when connected to my screen. Memory usage does jump up there so if you’re wanting to go that route I’d recommend popping for the full gig. Seems to be smooth on my box, though.

It’s very snappy! Way faster than either of my clients built around Athlon 3200s – they were OK but the Mini is much quicker to respond. No surprised there I suppose given the dual core processor in there.

Longer story – there’s a few wrinkles. I’m sure some of these can be handled with configuration/settings I haven’t found yet but they’ve tripped me up a bit.

1. HDMI has issues when booting. This one is kinda serious. My PC unit had no trouble here, this seems specific to the Mini or the Intel drivers with XP. If you turn the unit on plugged into the Plasma via HDMI you never get any output. If you switch the connection to a VGA monitor you’re still stuck – it’s like the video is disabled or something so you have to power it down. If you plug it into a VGA output and start it up then it works fine – Once you’re up and running then you can unplug the VGA and plug in the HDMI. It detects it on the fly, flips it into the preferred resolution and all that and works great. This is annoying as I would prefer to shut the client down at night and going through this process every time will clearly not be acceptable. I’m poking around on the forums out there to see if there’s something I can do about this or if I have a bogus cable or what.

2. The power button on the mini does not nicely shut down XP when pressed. Yes, I checked the option for this behavior in XPs setup – it’s correct. Again, this is kind of annoying since I’d like to shut it down. I can get around this by installing Girder and mapping a key to shut down and such but I’d very much like to avoid using Girder on here – it’s so clean just using it straight with Sage.

3. There’s no way to eject the DVD from within Sage! At least that I can find… This never occurred to me since all my other client boxes have a snappy button on the front to eject the CD from the player… not so on the ultra-clean Mini. oops. This is a problem since bailing out of Sage to do this causes all kinds of grief with FSE so for now I’m running to my main computer and punching over via VNC and doing it. Maybe there’s a CD eject option in Sage somewhere as an option but I haven’t found it yet.

4. After watching a show for 20 minutes and not touching anything, the video just cut out and the sound went to playing only on the Mini instead of over the TV speakers. I checked (and double checked) the power settings and screen saver stuff (all are disabled) so I’m a little perplexed at this – fiddling with the remote did nothing – again I had to run to the VNC client and log in to get the interface back. Very odd – I haven’t seen this one again so I’m not sure what in the heck happened. It might be a bug in the Sage client sleep stuff I suppose (I normally have this disabled but it’s on and set to about 20 minutes so I’m suspicious of it) so I’ll keep an eye out for this.

5. temperature monitoring is just about nonexistent. That’s to be expected with the “wrapper” Apple provided to simulate the BIOS for XP. SpeedFan picked up only the temperature of the hard drive and that’s it – no fans, no CPU or MB temps to be had. That’s not the end of the world – the HD temp tells me what I need to know in such a tiny little box.

6. The options for the Intel video driver are a little thin compared with the rich options in the latest NVidia drivers – be prepared to be a little underwhelmed there. It did automatically detect all screens I hooked it up to (21” NEC CRT, 19” Samsung LCD, Dell projector and my Plasma) and worked fine with all in question. Papa likes to tweek, however, and adjusting things like overlay zoom and such are not options.

So far that’s all I have to report – I’m leaving it on and connected for a while – at least through the weekend, and I’ll keep an eye on the temperatures and see if I can run down a few of these issues along the way.

[mayamaniac]

How are you connecting the mini via HDMI to your HDTV? You have a DVI-to-HDMI converter?

As for the booting issue, maybe there's something out there like TVtool but for Intel video cards? I have no idea, but just hoping there's something available.

It sucks that you can't eject the DVD. I know macs use F12 on the keyboard to eject, but it would've been nice to have an eject button on the mini itself. I think to make an "Eject DVD" menu item in SageTV should be quite easy, maybe someone here can make an STV imports for mini users.

Thanks for the review, please keep us updated as you use it for longer period of time.

[jlindborg]

Yes, - I have a DVI to HDMI cable (all one unit).

Turns out the video cutting out after 20 minutes is a bigger issue - I have all the screen saver timeout and sleep stuff turned off but the Mini seems to cut it off regardless after 20 minutes - so I have to keep a mouse attached and move it now and again to keep it from happening. I'll keep kicking on it but it appears to be a bug in their BIOS simulator (i.e. it's configured to "sleep" the video output at 20 minutes and it doesn't appear to be something you can disable).

[marneb17]

You can assign a remote key to the eject command in sage. It is in the commands configuration screen.

Marneb

[Joseph S]

You must have missed some checkbox somewhere. I don't have the video cutting out problem using DVI. I've left mine sitting 30+ minutes now on "Weather" page and it has Sage Screensaver up, but power to monitor is on.

If I leave it on the desktop it never goes to screensaver as set. Haven't let it go that far, but it's set to turn off the monitor after "4 hours."

Check the Power Options CP as well. Sage has a bunch of sleep options and screen saver timeout options as well to fiddle with. I'll keep it on to see what happens, but I haven't been able to repeat it.

Also note the clock issue that's documented in the bootcamp FAQs. You need to setup an internet time client solution for XP. I've found the built in time syncer in XP blows compared to all other OS on my PCs, including the Mini. Sage can set it for you as can other freeware progs.

[Polypro]

I believe that command is not functional in Windows. I use Wizmo (grc.com) with an entry in neilm's Dynamic menu, to open and close the DVD tray.

P

[jlindborg]

yeah - I'm quite certain I'm not missing a checkbox in XP - Power settings are all set to "never shut down", screen saver is off, sleep options disabled etc... however it may be that the values don't all take effect properly until after you reboot (someone on one of the Mac forums turned me on to this). I hadn't restarted by Mini (due to the pain with the HDMI montior swap-a-roo requirement) while testing. I'll shut it down and try it again tonight. Hopefully that solves that particular issue. If worse comes to worse I'll write a desktop app that starts on load-up that just sends "shift" key events into the keyboard buffer every few minutes to keep the dang thing alive. One way or another that one will be solved.

Polypro- cool - I'll go check that out tonight - that'll be handy.

someone else on the Mac forums also turned me on to slight differences in DVI connectors so I took a closer look at mine - it is slighly different than the DVI to VGA connector that Apple ships - so I'll go hunting for a different connector tonight and see if that's the problem - seems like a stretch to me but that problem is annoying enough that I'm willing to shoot in the dark...

[jlindborg]

OK - progress report.

Got the CD eject thing working (thanks Polypro!) - also used the same tool to make a snappy "shutdown" menu option which is handy. Now if I could just figure out a way to make the Mini wake up with my remote, it'd be perfect...

The hibernate thing seems to be fixed after a restart - I've been playing a movie for around 30 minutes and it's still cruising along. Good deal.

I've narrowed the HDMI output problem at boot up to a bug in the Apple boot strap stuff at startup. If I change it over to boot to OS X then it works dandy - but booting to Windows you hear the fab "bong" and the screen flashes gray like it normally does but then it's all done. Interestingly it sticks here - it does _not_ boot up at all. I had thought it was booting but not showing video, but that's not the case. Tried to VNC into it after a few minutes and nada - no HD activity or nothing. You get the same behavior if you have nothing plugged in at all for video out. Interesting... I've reported this to the proper authorities at Apple but no response yet (it's beta, after all, and I'm just guessing I'm not the only one with problems). But I guess the good news is it's just a bug and should be fixable so that's good. In the meantime I'll just have to keep it on (which I'll do for a few days anyway) or go through the steps of using the VGA to boot it and do the HDMI swap-a-roo.

On another front, an engineer at Promixis (the fine folks that make Girder) indicates it _may_ be possible to use Girder with the IR remote on the Mini while in XP - that'd be way slick... I'm sending out possitive thoughts since can't do much more to help that along.

[coppit]

I'm coming in on this thread late, but I have a question: Why the USBUIRT for a client? You don't need to send commands from the client computer to a cable box... Or is it that you couldn't get the mini's IR to recognize your remote? (Or is this a pre-IR mini?)

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by coppit

I'm coming in on this thread late, but I have a question: Why the USBUIRT for a client? You don't need to send commands from the client computer to a cable box... Or is it that you couldn't get the mini's IR to recognize your remote? (Or is this a pre-IR mini?)

Last I checked, Apple wasn't including drivers with BootCamp to make the IR work. I haven't seen that anyone has written their own either.

B