So we know that the humble Mac Mini can drive a SD TV just fine, but what about driving an HD TV? This guy played 1080p video with no dropped frames on a core duo Mac mini with only 512MB RAM. (Safari, Quicktime Pro and Activity Monitor were running.) Not bad for a machine with shared graphics memory.

There’s also his interesting comments on DivX versus H.264 codecs:
> you’re bound to hear a lot about DivX being better than h.264, some reasons are valid,
but for content providers (i do pro video work), h. 264 is preferred for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that its an open standard and the licensing fees are reasonable, and there is pro mac software for it. There is a ton of hardware that does broadcast quality h.264 encoding realtime – its what the pros are moving to for content distro. It streams better than anything else in its range (WM9, Real).
This is why DirecTV, Apple, Verizon, T-Mobile, Orange, Thales, and a ton of actual content makers are using h.264 rather than DivX….

This dude also uses his mini as a media centre running Vista so that he can use Microsoft’s latest Media Centre software and a remote control with more features than the Apple remote. This results in a richer TV interface than running a Mac OS X / Elgato solution but you do have to run windows.

Infinite Loop have a mini setup more as a media jukebox and less as a personal video recorder (PVR) (i.e there’s no Elgato digital TV receiver). There’s lots of good stuff in the comments here.

As a further note Elgato’s software, EyeTV now works with iTunes so you can record TV shows and have them automatically loaded into iTunes for playback on whatever device your mini is driving (HDTV with DVI to HDMI cable).