You know, over the last couple of months I've been watching the price of G4 Macs come way down. It's been really very impressive to see an MDD that a few months ago would have sold for $600 start selling for $200-300, and, IMHO, about time. Picking up a dual G4 at 800MHz or faster is now actually affordable. The real question is what to do with that hardware! ;-)
I've devoted a lot of my spare CPU cycles around the house to ripping my rather sizable DVD collection to my Macs using HandBrake. That is something the MDD will be able to do handily, and it can play some nice movies on your HDTV. It'll make a decent DVD player if you so desire, or you can turn it into a home theater system if you have a large collection of ripped movies like me. I'm working on about 1TB of MP4 files split over two 1TB SATA drives on my dual 1GHz Quicksilver. I've shared out the drives by NFS so all my Macs can access the video files, and I play them back on my HDTV via iBook, PowerBook, or anything else I have on hand. Of course, you still need to calibrate your expectations: HD content (720i/p, 1080i/p) is still largely a no-go on the G4.
One day I'll build my own HTPC out of the carcass of my old Apple Set Top Box and a PowerBook G4 or something. That will be fun. I keep looking for junkparts on eBay I can bend to this use but get distracted by them and end up using them for something else (like digital picture frames) before I can actually finish this project... ;-)
Peace,
Drew
I've devoted a lot of my spare CPU cycles around the house to ripping my rather sizable DVD collection to my Macs using HandBrake. That is something the MDD will be able to do handily, and it can play some nice movies on your HDTV. It'll make a decent DVD player if you so desire, or you can turn it into a home theater system if you have a large collection of ripped movies like me. I'm working on about 1TB of MP4 files split over two 1TB SATA drives on my dual 1GHz Quicksilver. I've shared out the drives by NFS so all my Macs can access the video files, and I play them back on my HDTV via iBook, PowerBook, or anything else I have on hand. Of course, you still need to calibrate your expectations: HD content (720i/p, 1080i/p) is still largely a no-go on the G4.
One day I'll build my own HTPC out of the carcass of my old Apple Set Top Box and a PowerBook G4 or something. That will be fun. I keep looking for junkparts on eBay I can bend to this use but get distracted by them and end up using them for something else (like digital picture frames) before I can actually finish this project... ;-)
Peace,
Drew