zdjh22
Head-Fier
As a UNIX guy I really don’t have much skin in the OSX vs Windows game as far as an HTPC goes (I use a jailbroken Oppo, Chinese Oppo Clones, an Apple 4KTV, a couple of home made ZFS NAS systems, Plex, an AVR, and one of the last passive 3D 4K TVs - no HTPC, although technically the Oppo‘s are running Linux). I am, OTOH, very interested in Virtuoso software on both platforms as a poor man’s (far cheaper) Realiser A16. It certainly checks many of the boxes, and perhaps can be even more immersive because of better head tracking support (I’ll know more after I play with the tracker that just arrived). Having gotten Virtuoso working on both my OSX and Windows boxes, I will observe that it’s easier to get going on the Mac, but it works fine on both platforms.So does that mean your Mac Sierra (?) browser is rendering 1080p SD, rather than 4K HDR over your Mac when you want it to decode a 5.1 Netflix soundtrack? Sounds like it does. That's one of the reasons I balked at going to a Mac One Mini. All I could ever read in the reviews was how nifty it was at running Final Cut Pro as if that's the only or even the primary application everyone would be using it for. My concern was always that for all its processing power it would not be able to do some mundane Home Theater task (like decode 5.1 Netflix 4K HDR) that my Mele Quieter 3Q could do in its sleep. Indeed on ASR, they have a thread on how the Mac M1 Pro stutters when outputting to a USB Dac. And reliable Windows developed HT software--things like PEQ software like EQ APO, software crossovers like Dephonica,freeware. and even some of the more ambitious room and speaker correction programs like Acourate and Audiolense won't run natively on it either.
So it just seemed to me that unless a MAC could actually add some new capability to the HTPC game--like Decoding Atmos and rendering a multichannel LPCM stream via USB to a multchannel DAC, it really couldn't do anything a tried and true windows machine could not do more cheaply and reliably, and might actually have a few deal breakers in there (like no desktop Netflix app, difficult streaming via USB, poor support for legacy surround formats) that might just make it (IMHO, of course) the decidedly worse option.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my A16. But it is not an option for many.
For what it’s worth, my Mac is an M1 Mini, with a pair of 4K displays. I don’t have a Netflix 4K subscription but I gather from support pages that I could indeed bring up 4K Netflix in the browser if I paid extra. The built-in Atmos renderer in the Mac OS sound system works great and beats having to deal with DRP and the like on Windows.