Software speculation

Since I'm still hunting for the Mini I decided to go through a bit of the software selections.

For Linux distribution I will most probably go with Fedora 8 or 9, depending on the schedule. This because my own VDR system is using also Fedora (5) and I'm familiar with its tricks and so on. Fedora should also have quite good driver support for Mini but I'm expecting that some tweaking is needed to get sleep and wake up to work nicely, also with remote.

Of course the very first thing is to clean the hard drive and install as small OS X installation as possible. Then install Boot Camp and Fedora also as minimum setup as possible, to make space for recordings and make the startup fast. I want to preserve OS X as an emergency system and I've also read that boot may be slower if there's no OS X installation available.

VDR will be 1.6.x version with following plugins:

• burn, for dvd burning
  
• dvd, dvd playback (if not using xineliboutput)
• epgsearch, advanced epg
  
• femon, signal monitor
  
• mp3, mp3/media player (if not using xineliboutput)
  
• osdteletext, teletext
  
• softdevice or xineliboutput, video out for X
  
• ttxtsubs, teletext subtitles
  
• tvonscreen, epg viewer
  

Selection between softdevice and xineliboutput is harder, because I don't have so much experience of them. The most crucial feature is the relialibility and stability. Also the performance including deinterlace is important. I haven't studied yet what are the options with Mini's hw and display driver what comes to hw acceleration.

In addition I likely need a bunch of bash scripts to make systems to work as I want.