Minimum specs for use as a media centre?

I would like to have a Mac Mini hooked up to my tv to use as a media centre. i have worked out that i will be able to use it without a keyboard mouse etc by setting it up so front row or vlc load up on boot and using the remote, so am ok there...
my question is this - what is the recomended spec for it to be able to play hd movie rips in .mkv/mp4 format? i have a 1.25ghgz emac an that suffers horribly so i want something that will do the job effortlessly. obviously i could just buy the very latest MM but am looking to save a bit of cash if possible!
thanks for any advice...

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
It might help to know in what way the 1.25 eMac suffers horribly in this situation, because in reality, the media centre functions of a system don't require particularly high performance or system specifications. For example, I have a 1.5 G4 mini hooked up to a TV, use Front Row to play mp4 movie files and either VLC or DVD player to play DVDs and it performs pretty well. The quality of image of the mp4 playback depends on settings when the files were ripped more than anything, and the overall quality of image depends a lot on the TV rather than the system.
It must be said that the almost any of the Intel minis is considerably more powerful than your eMac, but in itself, power isn't necessarily the answer!

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Message was edited by: bilbo_baggins

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Many thanks and Happy New Year to all!
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http://help.typekit.com/customer/portal/articles/6618-cancel-your-account
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I'm putting up an online mix hosted from my site and would like people to be aboe to play the tracks back in the order I predetermined in iTunes. I know some software besides iTunes allows sort by track number but that is sort of impractical in this situation...
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Minimum specs for use as a media centre?

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