I've been using Channels with my 2014 Mac Mini (2.6 GHz i5, 8GB RAM, 4 x 1TB RAID 0) and have been perfectly happy with it. I also own an nVidia Shield and am wondering if there are any advantages (or disadvantages) to switching to the Shield with an USB drive or if I'd be better off staying with the Mac Mini.
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No advantages it's just a matter of preference
The only potential difference I can think of is hardware h.264 transcoding quality. The QuickSync compression in the 2014 Mac Mini's Haswell generation processor is so-so (it tends to cause a lot of macro blocking on some scenes). The Shield may be better or may be worse (I've never owned one so I don't know for sure).
If you don't use transcoding, or if you only use software transcoding, then this doesn't matter.
Is the 2014 Mac Mini (1.4GHz) QuickSync compression better or worse than the 2012 Mac mini i5 I currently use?
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Intel claims that Haswell (2014 Mac Mini) improves Quick Sync quality over Ivy Bridge (2012), and some PSNR tests confirm this (although these are not a reliable indicator of subjective quality).
See https://rseghers.com/q264Test1Analysis/q264test_4.html for a PSNR comparison.
I also noticed that you asked about the 1.4 GHz configuration specifically:
Is the 2014 Mac Mini (1.4GHz) QuickSync compression better or worse than the 2012 Mac mini i5 I currently use?
My recollection (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) is that Quick Sync quality is based solely on processor generation -- the Quick Sync part of the processor die is identical in every processor from that generation (with the exception some low-end processors and Xeon processors that omit Quick Sync entirely). So every 2014 Mac Mini should have identical Quick Sync output -- the 1.4 GHz i5 configuration should do Quick Sync just as well as the 3.0 GHz i7.
Thanks for the info dbloom. Would the nVidia shield be better (newer processor) at compression than either of these Mac Minis?
