Mac mini for movies?

Well I haven’t said anything about the Mac mini yet. You’ll remember my prediction was that the mini would not be a general purpose computer but a media center type of box. Obviously, I was wrong on that one, but I still think we haven’t heard the whole story yet. As it turns out, neither does Robert Cringely:

“He’ll sell the first half million just on exuberant inertia. But then sales might drop off as they did with the original Mac. THAT’s when we’ll get the real story on what this thing is for.” … “I think the Mac Mini is a fixed component in a system that will extend iTunes to selling and distributing movies.” … “If Apple hopes to emulate its iPod/iTunes success, what does that mean? It means selling hardware devices and proprietary content to play on those devices. The first such hardware device is probably the Mini. And the proprietary content will be video encoded in AVC H.264, which will be supported first in OS X 10.4, promised for the second quarter of this year.”

Cringely makes a bunch of good points and the article is worth a read. By going straight to HD content and side-stepping the upcoming HD-DVD vs. Blue-Ray betamax war by going straight to online delivery, Jobs puts himself in an interesting position to be first out of the gate, just like he was with the iTunes Music Store. It also gets around the cable monopolies. Pixar gives Jobs movie industry “insider” status and he ought to have no problems negotiating with the studios. 2005 really could be the year of HD — HD Movies.

My only question about the whole HD theory is whether or not the G4 processor in the Mac mini actually has enough juice to decode Hi-Def H.264.. It’s hard to believe it does. But perhaps with some offloading to the GPU, and some good Altivec code, the wee 1.25GHz G4 can be coaxed into decoding such a beast. The Quicktime 7 demonstration at MacWorld with a HD movie scaling from a small window to full screen could very well have been the most significant “taste of things to come” at the show.

Update: Based on the info available in the comments, it looks like the Mac mini will be suitable for HD playback. Very encouraging! Now the only challenge is delivering multi-gigabyte movies over broadband!