31/03/08
91Mac Mini Media Centre
(This post is a work in progress, that I will continue to update and tweak. The comments are great, with a whole variety of suggestions and details of other setups. I’ll try and keep the comments open as long as I can)
Apple TV or Mac Mini?
No getting away from it – I still yearned for a Mac based media centre. I’d hoped Wii Transfer would fit the bill, but the quality of the video streaming isn’t good enough (yet?).
That meant either a Mac Mini or an Apple TV, but that’s a hard decision. Apple TV has the ease of use that makes it ideal for the home. No fiddling about, but no PVR functionality either. In the end, I went for the Mac Mini’s potential over the Apple TV ‘just works’, and using FrontRow and EyeTV to provide the interface.
But, I’d dabbled with a Mac Mini media Centre a couple of years ago, with a G4 Mini hacked to use FrontRow. I gave up on it a few months after, but recently decided that the time was now right. So what’s different this time around?
Front Row built into Leopard – rather than tied to particular machines and requiring a hack to make it work. Front Row 2 also adopts the plugin ‘appliance’ architecture of Apple TV, as well as supporting sharing from other macs. As far as I can see it only lacks the YouTube feature of the Apple TV.
Screen sharing – After using other VNC clients, the inbuilt screen sharing facility is easy and responsive. I can barely notice a difference in performance between administering the Mac Mini and working on my MacBook Pro.
Intel Mac Minis – Compared the original G4 Mac Mini I was trying to use, the new Intel Mac Minis are faster, have larger hard drives and Bluetooth and airport as standard (which the G4 didn’t have). They also come with a built in remote and receiver. I previously used a bluetooth phone and Salling Clicker, which works, but it isn’t the kind of ‘slick solution’ you can hand to someone else and expect them to want to use it. The Apple remote works very well, and isn’t too simple (it is easier to lose though, and you can’t ring it to find out where it is.)
Leopard brings everything you need to run a media centre, with the exception of a PVR, and an automagic system for adding new content to the Mini. Finally, I was trying to run the last system through our old CRT telly, that only had 2 scart inputs. It looks like ass. Now that we have an LCD, it doesn’t.
So after studying the Apple Refurb Store for a few weeks, I picked up a good deal:
So, onto the setup…
Preferences
One of the first things you’ll want to do is minimise the possibility of the OS giving you messages, so go to System Preferences > Bluetooth, and make sure this option isn’t ticked:
Otherwise you’ll get interfering messages, worrying about the lack of a keyboard attached. Likewise, go to System Preferences > Software Update and make sure it isn’t checking for updates.
Hardware
This is how my hardware is setup: A Mac Mini sends video to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable, while the sound is sent through my stereo with a headphone to dual composite cable. If I wasn’t playing music, I would just send the audio to the TV. I’m using a Western Digital MyBook external drive to store everything on, but I’d like to replace this with something larger, quieter and (if possible) no blinking lights! The only other piece of hardware is the EyeTV Hybrid dongle.
Essential Apps and plugins
You probably have a different list of essentials, but having tried a lot of potential apps, these are the ones I’ve settled into using:
Perian
A plugin that allows playback of .avi, .flv (amongst many others) in Front Row. Installs as a System Preference.
Syncopation
I use this to automate the adding of new content from my MacBook. You set the Mac mini to subscribe to however many Macs you want, and as long as its open on both, it will suck in any new tracks, movies etc. Works really well, I just wish it had some way of letting you know on the MacBook end that all new tracks have been imported. For Movies though, I’m finding it easier to share the Movies folder on the Mini and just drop the files in there, rather than try and get them into iTunes.
Handbrake
For ripping your DVDs, everyone should know about this!
EyeTV
Along with an Elgato Hybrid stick, this provides the PVR functionality, along with more recording features than my DVD Recorder does. Being able to set up smart recording schedules is genius, and I tend set every recording to automatically export as Apple TV, which adds it to iTunes for me.
PyeTV
A ‘Front Row Appliance’, which adds an EyeTV menu item to Front Row. This has now reached version 1, is easier to install, and the transitions between EyeTV and FrontRow are smoother.
Also, I haven’t tried it yet, but Sapphire looks interesting.
Moving the iTunes Library
I soon ran out of space on the Mac Mini, and while I was loathe to add yet another bloody plug to the overloaded adaptors behind the telly, it had to be done. (An external hard drive doesn’t tend to be as quiet as the Mac Mini either!). Relocating the Movies folder to the external hard drive was as easy as using an alias, but the iTunes library is a bit more troublesome. It should be as easy as choosing the new location in iTunes Preferences > Advanced, but I couldn’t manage to do this and retain paths. Everytime I wanted to play something, I had to select the new path to the file.
Instead, I created a folder on the hard drive, and rather than copy across everything manually, I chose this new folder as the library location in the advanced preferences, and used ‘consolidate library’. This not only copied everything across, but this time updated the paths to the media files, and everything plays as it should!
Switching between FrontRow and EyeTV
Everything works well in this setup, with the exception of navigating between the 2 applications – Frontrow and EyeTV. There are a few ways around this:
- Before launching FrontRow, I make sure that EyeTV is open, and on fullscreen mode (see below). Then I can go back to EyeTV by pressing the menu button on the FrontRow main screen. Pressing and holding the menu button in EyeTV shows it’s onscreen menu (in which you can do almost all the work that you’ll need to do). Pressing menu once will return you to FrontRow. Sometimes it can be annoying if you don’t remember to press and hold in EyeTV, and you get whisked away to FrontRow.
- The Pye TV plugin for FrontRow adds an EyeTV menu, from which you can launch FrontRow, its recordings, or the programme guide.
- Setting recordings to automatically export to Apple TV means that they will appear in FrontRow’s ‘TV Shows’ menu a few hours afterwards (depending on the length of recording, processor speed etc).
Finally, you’ll want to make sure that Syncopation, EyeTV and FrontRow are all set to open at startup. If EyeTV is set to ‘Start EyeTV in full screen’ (Preferences > Full Screen), then when the Mac restarts everything is ready to go.
Downsides
When it works, it’s great. The trouble is that 15% of the time something happens – EyeTV crashes, iTunes has been updated and won’t let you play anything until you’ve accepted terms and conditions, or another app is telling you that an update is available.
For these times, I don’t have an easy solution, other than to screen share and sort it out with the MacBook. Sometimes (like in the instance of EyeTV crashing) you just have to restart.
I’ll add more detail and photos when I can…
Tags: eyetv, frontrow, macmini, mediacentre, osx
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Dave said 281 days ago:
Hi,
I’ll watch this with interest as something I have been thinking about doing for a while.
Given you’re running this through a CRT you may not have the need to playback any HD content, but have you tried it to see if it can cope?
Secondly, do you have access to an Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive. I understand these can can be connected to a mac or PC via USB and wondered if the mac mini was able to playback HD-DVDs this way? (or if it would require Boot Camp to install XP and put a Windows HD-DVD player on there?). I’m presuming the mac mini will be quieter than the xbox 360.
Cheers,
Dave.
Chris Garrett said 281 days ago:
The lack of live TV in the AppleTV is annoying, I’m currently overcoming this with the help of Miro and http://tvrss.net/. It’s then just a case of encode as m4v with QT and import to iTunes (via the iMac).
Marty said 281 days ago:
Seen XMBC ?
XMBC Homepage
Paul said 281 days ago:
Freecom make some very good fanless external hard drives – I have a 500GB one with aluminium enclosure, and the only problem I’ve had with it in the same sort of setup you have is it’s not big enough! But it’s certainly quiet enough.
Also be aware that EyeTV recordings take up about a third more space than they ‘need’ to, because of the redundancy built into the broadcast format (or something like that). So if you have something you want to keep it’s worth exporting it as an MPEG Program Stream to save space. And you can always use iSquint to save even more space!
Finally, be sure to set EyeTV to use memory for its live buffer rather than the hard drive – your hard drive will thank you later :)
Craig Morey said 281 days ago:
Great find with PyeTV – getting eyeTV into frontrow in a slick way would make the mac mini media centre transition from geek box to consumer device-like. I must keep an eye on it’s development. One more thing to add, Remote Buddy (http://www.iospirit.com/remotebuddy) makes the whole mac mini controllable through your apple remote, iphone/touch or even sony BT remote (waay better than Mira).
Stuart Langridge said 281 days ago:
Cool. My in-the-lounge film-viewing computer is a Mac Mini too. Of course, mine’s running Linux (and MythTV) but the hardware’s pretty good :-)
(G4, though. So no infrared, which annoys me.)
Adrian said 281 days ago:
Why the hell does everyone have to mention XBMC whenever Apple TV or a mac media center is mentioned.
I am currently in the process of building a mac mini media center too, so I will be watching this with interest.
I’m only running a 1.5ghz core solo mac mini though, so I’m shortly gonna be investing in a Turbo.264 for DVD rips. Which will certainly make getting TV shows easier (hire box sets from video shop, rip and return)
Jon Hicks said 281 days ago:
@Dave – sorry, I think I worded that badly. I used to use a CRT, but now have an LCD. I don’t have an xbox though, so can’t comment!
@Marty – I have, and it has potential. However I find it too configuration heavy, by default it doesn’t pick up on iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Also doesn’t seem to support remotes yet.
@Paul – does that save more space (but retain the same quality) than if it’s exported for Apple TV?
@Craig – I quite like Remote Buddy, but I find I don’t really need it with this setup. In fact, it adds a layer of complication.
Jon Hicks said 281 days ago:
@sil – I’m amazed that you can run Linux on a G4, isn’t it painfully slow?
@adrian – I’ve been considering the elgato turbo, and I’d be interested to hear how that goes.
Erik said 281 days ago:
I too was in the same boat you are not long ago. I bought a Mini, and used it as a media center for a while, but I didn’t like the whole mouse and keyboard to use the mac switching between frontrow, your pvr of choice, etc. Also, getting the output from DVI to HDMI on my 60” Sony SXRD to have the correct resolution without overscan, etc. was a pain in the @$$. AppleTV has native HDMI 1080p builtin, simple.
I opted for the AppleTV, with a bit of hacking via AwkwardTV community http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Main_Page. I especially love the Sapphire plugin http://appletv.nanopi.net/trac/timeline.
Granted, the AppleTV route depends on developers making plugins for the platform (somewhat like hacking the iPhone since there is no official SDK yet). I haven’t seen a PVR plugin yet for AppleTV, but I love the current setup, streaming video wirelessly 802.11n to my family room from the bedroom upstairs, using SMB mounts to my NAS, with Perian decoding it all. Works well for me, but I don’t really use too much PVR.
Matt Carey said 281 days ago:
I’m using a very similar set-up to Jon and I too bought a refurb Mac mini from the Apple store.
I’ve installed Sapphire and it is OK. I like getting all the extra movie info on my imported movie files. It did keep crashing on my when trying to do the first scan and I don’t have a big movie library yet (only 35 movies). It took 5 passes to get them all. I really wish it would add the film info to the existing movies folder. Instead it adds a separate (duplicate) of the movies folder. I find I never really use it.
Remy Sharp said 281 days ago:
If only there was iPlayer integration for Front Row – that would probably give it a good boost in the UK.
Alas, it’s unlikely, since iTunes offer the BBC episodes for payment – why would they let it go for free (buuut – iPhone lets us use the iPlayer…)
Chris said 281 days ago:
You might like to snag yourself a copy of Movie2iTunes from Andree Dettmer. It takes a little of the pain away from getting video files (avi, mkv etc) into iTunes so they’ll be accessible in Front Row.
Chris said 281 days ago:
Thanks for the tip re Sapphire, I hadn’t come across that before. Looking forward to having a play with it. Has anyone else any experiences with it?
Jonathan said 281 days ago:
@Adrian: Because XBMC now runs on mac?
Michael Heilemann said 281 days ago:
Because XBMC is the best media center on Earth; that’s why. I’ve been using it for 5-6 years, and nothing, but nothing beats it.
Have a region 4 DVD image split into 55 into .rar files on a SMB share? Click. Play. No fuzz.
It’ll browse everything from DAAP to SMB to uPnP and so on, and it even has built-in support for scripting. The fact that it’s on OS X is nothing less than divine.
Which brings me to my question: Jon, have you tried XBMC? :)
I’ve been wanting to retire my old Xbox in exchange for my Mac mini, but as Erik said:
That’s my major problem as well. I don’t quite understand the problem though; when I set my the resolution to be 1080, shouldn’t it match perfectly? Does anyone know what the issue is?
And finally, how do you manage playing .avi and .mkv files in Frontrow?
Neil Crosby said 281 days ago:
The other feature I’m aware of that the AppleTV will have at some point in the UK that the Mac Mini does not have is the ability to rent HD movies. IIRC, Apple has said that the only way to rent the HD versions of movies will be through the AppleTV and not just straight through iTunes.
John Lockwood said 281 days ago:
The Xbox360 HD DVD drive apparently will work but only as a DVD drive, you cannot use it to play HD DVD titles on a Mac.
I currently run Microsoft Media Center 2005 on my Mac mini (oh the horror!). Much as it pains me to say, I regard this as currently the best full-blown Media Center solution (one that does PVR functions as well as music/video/etc playback). I have all my music in iTunes in Apple Lossless format and shared to Windows Media Player (and hence Media Center 2005).
David Rutledge said 280 days ago:
I have the same issue with sizing of video output from a mac mini, and it is one of the reasons I’m considering switching to a windows based HTPC. The mini puts out monitor sized video, but is unable to resize appropriately for a television. I hook my mini with DVI to an older Sony XBR LCD TV that is 768. The mini gives the option of 720, where there is a black window around the edge, or you can check “overscan,” but that winds up cutting off 10% of the desktop and you can’t see menu bars. Because I virtually only use front row, I can dispense with the outer edge and use it in that manner. I would prefer to simply have component video output such that my video switcher would be able to handle the job, but haven’t had any success figuring that out. I have found no way so far to get more advanced options with regards to monitor setup. Of course, if you had PC input on your TV this would be easy.
Does anyone know of a monitor setup utility which would have more functionality with regards to resizing output?
I’m going to have to try XBMC at some point.
Jon Hicks said 280 days ago:
That’s what Perian is for – it certainly enables .avi anyway. Most of my files are .mp4 though.
I’m yet to be convinced about XBMC. FrontRow and EyeTV give me everything I need/want, but I’m interested to know what the advantages are. If I do want more than my current setup, then it would integration of the media playing and PVR.
David Rutledge said 280 days ago:
I hope this isn’t a stupid question. I use my mini for playing sound in stereo from iTunes and I simply rip dvd’s using mac the ripper to watch at a later time in surround sound. The files are quite large, but I have 2 Tb hard drives in an external case and can fit a couple of hundred movies easily (haven’t filled them up yet). I’ve tried handbrake to save the movies in a compressed form, but I can’t get dolby digital or DTS to work when saved as such, just stereo. Is this a problem with handbrake not saving the full audio stream or the mini not playing it, or me simply missing a simple setting? I enable high quality audio on handbrake, so I’m guessing so far that front row for some reason doesn’t support it (but it does well when playing ripped full size dvd’s, so that doesn’t particularly make sense).
John, with regards to moving the itunes folder to a new site. I tend to add files on my G5 tower and simply copy the entire itunes folder to the external hard drive attached to my mini every once in a while. While it certainly isn’t as up to date as your setup, It’s just easy for me. I appreciate the tip on syncopation, though. I’ve figured out that if I copy the itunes music folder to the external hard drive and the itunes library file to the itunes folder on the mini, all works well. If I don’t, it becomes quite confused and I have to find each individual file if I want to play it. If I try to run it before I copy both files, then it does some crazy organization and all bets are off and it needs to be recopied. Consolidating the library doesn’t work in this configuration for some reason. I’m guessing from my prior experience that you copied the entire itunes folder over to the new hard drive rather than leaving the library folder behind. Is that right?
I’ll quit yammering now, I’m just so excited to find some other people attempting to use the mini as an HTPC.
Charles said 280 days ago:
Hey, this means you can watch stuff like this on the big screen now. Maybe for your staff photo page you could do a version of the Wurzel’s I am a cider drinker done with the lyrics “I am a web designerrr, I do it all of the day, oo-arrr, ooo-ar, ay.”
Matt Carey said 280 days ago:
How are people connecting their Mac’s to the TV?
Currently I am connecting my mac mini to my LCD with a DVI cable, with a VGA adaptor at the TV end. Plus an audio cable for sound.
Last night I tried a DVI to HDMI cable I bought from Maplin. My LCD has 2 HDMI ports (one in use by my Virgin Media HD box and one is free). I plugged it in but had 2 immediate problems:
* No sound (HDMI does carry sound but the DVI part of the cable doesn’t) * The picture colour became really dark and dingy
Any tips and advice? Sorry for turning this thread into an Agony Aunt column Jon!
Jon Hicks said 280 days ago:
@Matt – I’m using a DVI to HDMI cable, which gives a great picture (no dark dingyness), and then a standard audio out cable goes to my stereo. I haven’t yet found a cable that takes the DVI and audio together to HDMI out, but as I want to play music, I prefer taking the audio to my stereo.
Ideally though, I’d like a really nice pair of USB or firewire powered speakers that don’t require another device to be plugged in. There are these ones but I’m not sure if they’re powerful enough.
Matt Carey said 279 days ago:
A +1 for Movie2iTunes from me this evening. Really simple little app. If I am being really picky, I would like to to automate the process rather than having to drag and drop. Otherwise it is great — now all my movies are in iTunes and in the top level of the movies folder in frontrow.
Dmitri said 279 days ago:
I am using very similar setup for one of my stations. Not the best,but still
Byron Servies said 278 days ago:
Why are you bothering with handbrake? Frontrow in Leopard will play a video_ts folder and you get the entire DVD experience without having to fight handbrake to get smooth motion or encode separate tracks. The expense is disk space, of course, but mactheripper does the trick for me.
Jon Hicks said 278 days ago:
You’ve answered your own question! ;o)
krystyn said 278 days ago:
Wow, I’m incredibly impressed.
Kicking myself that I sold my Mac Mini when I upgraded to a bigass Intel iMac… gaaahhhh…
Matt Comi said 278 days ago:
I’ve been using a MacBook as a media centre for 6 months now and my main gripe is with streaming video from another source. I keep all my media on my iMac and (try to) stream it to the MacBook using Front Row. Problem is, Front Row will only pull about 500kbps over the network – irrespective of the bitrate of the video (and network bandwidth). Streaming 720p, therefore, is RIGHT OUT. Instead, I have to copy the video across in advance. This problem does not exist on the Apple TV – it will pull as much data over the network as necessary to keep up.
Still, as you’ll be using Syncopation, this is a moot point. It is, though, a deficiency of a Mac Mini media centre when compared to an Apple TV.
Paul Linden said 276 days ago:
I’ve been doing this for the past six months (with a refurb 1.66 GHz Mini) with no problems. I don’t yet have PVR, but I’m looking into it. I was worried about FR/EyeTV integration since the Mini is used as a HTPC permanently and exiting into the desktop is fugly, but you’ve allayed those fears (I wouldn’t mind, but I have WAF – Wife Acceptance Factor – to take into account).
And thanks for the tip about Syncopation. I have a regular rsync set up to sync my iTunes library from the main Mac to the Mini. But this looks good.
“It should be as easy as choosing the new location in iTunes Preferences > Advanced, but I couldn’t manage to do this and retain paths. Everytime I wanted to play something, I had to select the new path to the file.”
It’s actually pretty easy to access your iTunes on an external drive. First time after copying, before opening iTunes, make sure there’s no iTunes directory in your Music directory, then create a sym link in Terminal under your Music directory, ie:
“ln -s /Volumes/External/iTunes ~/Music/.”
You may find it a problem that sym links can’t be followed in Finder, but a Finder alias /may/ work, but I’m not going to try it since mine has been working perfectly and I don’t want to screw it up (I’ve already deleted my 300GB iTunes library once from the Mini’s external drive through a mistyped rsync)
Another thing, I don’t find getting movies into iTunes is hard. Just encode them using Handbrake to your iTunes Movies directory with the file extension m2v. iTunes will add it then if you double click it.
One reason to use Handbrake rather than using the video_ts files ripped using Mactheripper is, I encode at the highest resolution and bitrate that an iPhone will accept so I can bring some video with me on trips while keeping just one copy that’s good enough for the TV.
Paul Linden said 276 days ago:
“Does anyone know of a monitor setup utility which would have more functionality with regards to resizing output?’
There are a couple of utilities that do this – SwichResX is the only one I remember right now. Not free, and I haven’t used it, but it apparently works.
Jono said 276 days ago:
Thanks, I was hoping you’d write up about how you set it all up.
Does EyeTV record from Sky, or is it Freeview only?
Jon Hicks said 276 days ago:
Jono – you can get it to switch to Sky too. It doesn’t allow for automatic programming like the Freeview channels, but you can get it and record it. I’ll post instructions here soon.
greenboyroy said 275 days ago:
Excellent post, I shall be keeping an eye on this one. I too have debated the whole issue but ended up putting it all on hold for now as I wanted AppleTV’s TV resolution support but didn’t want to pay almost double the price of an AppleTV in the US (they had a price drop with movie rentals, we are still waiting). I guess in the perfect world (where I had plenty of money) you could get one of each, using the mini as a PVR and sharing the library with the ATV.
@Remy Sharp: There was a BBC Blog post recently stating that they are currently looking into providing iPlayer content via iTunes movie rentals. The idea being that iTunes would work like iPlayer, providing free content for a week after air that will auto delete after X amount of days. This would also give them an outlet for HD content. Further down the line (way down) there is Kangaroo, giving us content from more of the free to air channels (if it worked the same way). This would certainly clear up the whole mini vs ATV debate.
Rob McMichael said 275 days ago:
I have the same set up, although the picture is either too small or too big for my TV :(
My EyeTV receiver is rubbish too, so I never use it :(
Jon Hicks said 272 days ago:
Comments are back on – sorry for the disappearance!
Greendave said 272 days ago:
I have a mac mini media centre, and I have also put them in for my brother-in-law and my 78-year-old father in law! They work better than I could ever have hoped. Picture quality stunning and ease of use astonishing. My favourite part is the gorgeous alloy bluetooth keyboard.
My experience:
DVI to HDMI. Works perfectly – you also need a separate audio cable and to choose a TV which accepts the audio in with HDMI it you want to use the TV speakers (I do because I am a minimalist).
Screen resolution. First system I put in for my Brother-in-law used a Panasonic and I had to use SwitchResX to get the picture to fit accurately without overscan (also there was no audio input for the HDMI). I then moved to Sony Bravia and you just connect it to the mini and Hey Presto – it just works, perfectly, with no set-up. However, my neighbour has a 2-year-old Sony and no amount of changing with SwitchResX will remove the black border!
Movies. I have several hundred on a PC server in a barn about 90m from the house and I watch them streaming over 100Mb ethernet without a problem. I have compressed avi, mp4, VideoTS, and HiDef movies from the internet (BBC has good examples) and they all play over the network without a hiccup. I don’t bother to put them in iTunes – I keep them in folders (Animated, Romcom, Family, Comedy, 18cert etc) and simply place an alias of the Films folder in the Movies folder on the mini and they are all accessible through Front Row – including VideoTS now which is very cool.
I record Sky using the Composite Video input on the eyeTV hybrid. This is awkward but it is only for stuff I can’t get on Freeview. The hybrid analogue input will only record in 4×3 so you need to set your sky box to output 4×3 letterbox and then after the recording is finished and before you export it, open it in eyeTV and change the setting to 16×9 and then close it again. A nice feature is that you can now program the eyeTV to make an analogue recording along with your digital schedules and it will switch between the inputs automatically.
One of the best features of using the mini is the ability to watch the BBC iPlayer (and now ITV catchup) in your living room – works really well. I did go to the trouble of installing Parallels and using the BBC iPlayer download system – which worked very well on my Core2Duo mini – but I have found I just don’t bother with it and simply use the streaming version.
Another advantage of using the mini is the remote management using 10.5 or ChickenOfTheVNC. Apart from being able to manage my own mini from my iMac, I can manage my father-in-law’s mini 120 miles away as if it was here – the 10.5 screen sharing is remarkably fast and I can demonstrate to him how to use his iPhoto library and iTunes etc. I am having trouble getting a decent webcam that will also provide good audio – tried Creative Live!Cam Optima AF but sound was dreadful and AF useless. Now trying Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000.
Oh, photos just look amazing on my 37in LCD. Which reminds me – the larger TVs are now starting to be 1080p which will make the computer screen very difficult to read and you need to check you can use a lower resolution from your mini and still get a decent picture – if you choose anything other than the native 720p on the Sony the picture is scaled and does not look very crisp.
Finally, I use the zoom-in feature with the ctrl key and mouse wheel all the time to watch flash that will not play full screen or read stupidly small text.
No way would I have any other system than this mac mini – it is the most versatile, fun, georgeous, do everything, delightful, beautiful, fast, neat………………..
Pål Degerstrøm said 272 days ago:
This might be the most useful blog post and comments ever.
Jono said 271 days ago:
Thanks Jon, I think I’ll give this a try some time this year.
Brian Homer said 269 days ago:
All good stuff except it’s still too fiddly. When will either Apple or someone create an integrated system which is not complex in operation?
What’s needed for a home system is simplicity.
Jon Hicks said 269 days ago:
It’s actually not too fiddly, after the initial setup its easy to maintain and use, but yes, its not as straightforward as plugging in an Apple TV
Adrian said 267 days ago:
“All good stuff except it’s still too fiddly. When will either Apple or someone create an integrated system which is not complex in operation?”
You just described the Apple TV
Peter said 266 days ago:
Great post. I’m thinking of getting a Mac Mini and a TV and doing the same thing.
Question: What kind of TV are you using? Any issues with overscan?
Rob Stokes said 264 days ago:
Hey Jon,
Great talk at FOWD today – really enjoyed it!
I have a very similar setup to yours at home and think it works great. Only difference is that I’m using a 1TB home NAS so I can leave it on and access it from mine and wife’s laptops when the Mac Mini is off.
Only thing I’ve noticed that doesn’t work is the album art that appears fine in iTunes, but not in Front Row. Annoying as I got art for everything (and that took a while!).
I think it worked fine when the iTunes library was on the Mac Mini … do you have the same problem with your files on an external hard drive? Not sure if it’s just ‘cause I’ve got it on a NAS. It appears to be a common problem though, if you Google it.
Also, looking forward to hearing how you set up the EyeTV to record from Sky. That’s the only bit I’m really missing from my setup.
jed said 263 days ago:
@Matt Carey
I have the darkness issue with DVI out to DVI-HDTV in. I’ve tried tweaking brightness settings, calibrating, universal access contrast, and all that, and yet it’s just too dark. TV is great for other inputs but the Mac Mini just isn’t cutting it. There seems to be no solution…caution to those who are contemplating a MM media center!
(Of course, I’m open to hearing other suggestions if anyone has them. It’d be great to get it functioning better.)
Joram Oudenaarde said 263 days ago:
That’s a very nice set of tips you gave us :)
I just have one question I haven’t been able to find an easy solution for yet: resolutionproblems.
I’ve tried using SwitchresX, but trying to make a custom resolution for a HD-ready LCD-TV is just plain impossible and obnoxious. Did you find an easier solution for this? Because for a HD-ready TV you need a custom resolution-setting for your Mac Mini in order to overcome Overscan or black borders around your screen. :)
johnny said 263 days ago:
how about atv4mac?
dlm said 263 days ago:
I agree. ATV4Mac is another great add-on.
http://www.macgeekblog.com/blog/archive/2008/03/13/atv4mac-1-2-available.html
The Downside is it only works on OS X10.4. It isn’t comaptible with OSX 10.5 leopard.
Jay said 263 days ago:
I considered this set up for a long time and finally went with Apple TV. I am really glad I made that decision. Stock Mac Mini hard drive would be too small for my needs. I bought a refurbished 160GB Apple TV which is quite a bit cheaper than a 80GB Mac Mini. I add movies to iTunes on my Mac Book Pro and after they are copied to Apple TV, I delete the original files once a week. I also record free Over the Air TV with EyeTV on my Mac Book Pro, but frankly almost everything I want to watch comes from Netflix and video podcasts that you can so easily watch from Apple TV. Set up is really simple and as a bonus, Apple TV streams internet radio from my Mac Book Pro to the home sound system. Mac Mini would have given me some more capabilities but at the cost of simplicity of my current set up.
Paul said 263 days ago:
@Jon – I’ve never bothered doing the export to AppleTV option, as I run everything from EyeTV rather than iTunes/Front Row (if I’m watching TV I’m almost always surfing too, so just use Screen Sharing). But ‘Export to MPEG Stream’ is exactly the same quality as the recording in EyeTV – all it does is strip out redundant broadcast data from the original signal. Typically that saves up to a third, and compressing with iSquint at maximum settings saves a third of what’s left with no apparent reduction in quality. But you’ve inspired me to try the export to AppleTV now!
While I’m here I can also recommend the Hauppage dual tuner stick – works as well as the Elgato one (it’s based on the same chipset I believe), it’s cheaper, and a USB external drive can keep up with 2 channels recording and a recording being watched at the same time.
Oh, and try not to drop below 5GB free space, it really screws up your recordings :)
Jamie said 263 days ago:
Jon,
Not sure if you are still reading these comments but I thought you’d be interested in the following which made all the difference in usability on my MacMini setup:
In the terminal type:
defaults write com.elgato.eyetv “apple remote menu button behavior” -int 1
This will switch the remote control function from long click to single click to bring up the menu and add a Front Row link into EyeTV’s menu.
It really makes the whole experience more consistent.
I really enjoy my setup so much more than the XP Media Centre setup I had previously.
effingEinstein said 263 days ago:
My early adopter index peaked with my wife in 1999 when I brought home a ReplayTv 2000 PVR with a whopping 10Gb of storage. Dead simple, intuitive interface. Just worked. Since that time, my cred has gone straight down hill with every new incarnation of automated home entertainment system. Move the music collection to iTunes = “I don’t listen to my music any more because I can’t figure out how to make the f*#king thing work !” And, you know, she’s right: Some nag screen has stopped iTunes. The Airport Express has lost the network. The iRed dongle has come loose. Makes me wonder if she would have been better off with that buff surfer dude/sous chef instead of me, the card carrying IEEE member nerd.
Oh, you tempt me, Mr. Hicks, tempt me big time to introduce this into my personal home entertainment orbit. But if it doesn’t meet the easy-of-use standard set by a 10 y.o. ReplayTV box, I’m out and the new Trophy Husband is in…
pau valiente said 263 days ago:
Also with the “Touchpad” application on the iphone/ipod touch you can have a keyboard and a trackpad of your mac mini on the iphone. It’s a fabulous app.
http://www.touchpadpro.com/
Matthew Schinckel said 263 days ago:
@Jamie:
defaults write com.elgato.eyetv “apple remote menu button behavior” -int 1
For some reason copy-paste into terminal was broken. The string was being altered, and didn’t work. I had to type it in manually. My tip: don’t accidentally spell behaviour the proper way, else this tip doesn’t work!
IndianaTim said 263 days ago:
I went the Mac mini route last year but I was not totally satisfied until I added a few choice components. The centerpiece is a refurb Denon AVR-887 receiver. It does HDMI up-conversion and you can rename the functions. To use the Mac mini, turn the function knob until it says Mac mini. Simple! I also have a separate TV tuner so that the Plasma screen is always on the same input and I can watch one show and record another with EyeTV. I recently got rid of the Apple bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and replaced it with an Adesso WKB-4000 wireless keyboard with integrated trackpad. A Harmony Remote lets me control everything except the mini, but I imagine I could teach it to act like the Apple remote for FrontRow if it was a big deal for me. It’s not. I finally have a system that the rest of the family can use.
Maynard Handley said 263 days ago:
I really really want to love EyeTV, but I must admit there are a few things that I simply cannot get to work IMHO properly. Any suggestions?
(1) Is there any way to get one show to just play after the next one, ie seamless playback. Right now every time I play a show, it just ends and then I have to switch to the next one. I thought I could get what I wanted with playlists but that gets me to my next point which is
(2) is there any way to set up playlists so they are not completely retarded? IMHO the salient point of a playlist is that the material plays IN THE ORDER I WANT. But the EyeTV playlists all seem to want to order the material by some external characteristic —- date, show name or whatever. I appear quite unable to simply create a list of items in the order I want them to be in.
(3) IMHO the UI is really clunky, with none of the obvious ideas from say a web browser being adopted. For example, if I click on an item (say a movie in the TV listings) to see details, there appears to be no obvious key stroke like command-[ to get back to the TV listings. Instead I have to move the mouse from where it was, over to the left, then back to where it was. This sounds trivial, but the experience feels constantly like that, like I’m dealing with an amateur product in it’s 0.5 rev, not with something that has been out for years and damn well should have it’s UI polished by now.
Another example. Once upon a time I stumbled on a way to display technical information about a stream as it was playing —- data rate, resolution, fps etc. I’ll be damned if I know how I did it because I’ve gone through every menu and popup menu in the app and I don’t see the relevant command.
(4) There are some very irritating technical limitations that could easily be fixed. For example
(a) why can’t I set up a separate drive to handle live TV? I’d like to put the liveTV recording on a cheap drive that can handle random access, which means use a 4 or 8GB flash drive for the purpose (or even an old iPod), rather than drastically shortening the life of the biggest most expensive drive I own by forcing it to do two very different tasks —- the random access of liveTV and the streaming of recording shows
(b) why can’t the app just virtualize its data sources so that I can just keeping add drives as I require more storage?
It’s an acceptable program as it is, but damn, I wish they’d take a look at the competition in the space, and just general Mac concepts for how to do UI well.
Alexis Gallisá said 263 days ago:
In regards to XBMC the nicest about it right now on the mac is this skin called Aeon. Its gorgeous. http://aeonismine.com/gallery.html
That being said, XBMC is still a little crash happy and the developers have even said that. At the very least I think its one to keep an eye on since ultimately I think it will allow for the most control over your media compared to Front Row (I hate the fact that I have to select source in order to stream iTunes from another machine for instance). With XBMC you will also need to install Firefly http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/ to enable dapp:// streaming from an itunes library. XBMC is not quite ready yet but its getting to be a really nice alternative especially when you consider how long its been under development (since the original xbox). More options are a good thing and I hope that Apple can improve on the smaller things about Front Row, such as customizable second skips, better MKV performance, and easier integration from multiple sources.
Keep us updated on the MacMini media center Jon. It looks good so far and I think eventually we’ll get to a solution that doesn’t have any significant downsides.
Andy Beaumont said 263 days ago:
I have an almost identical set up, but my EyeTV never crashes. This could be because I have an Elgato Turbo.264 which does the grunt work of exporting all your recordings to iTunes/iPod/WiFi access and takes the load off the CPU. I highly recommend it. Thanks for the PyeTV tip though, I hadn’t got that.
ine Dehandschutter said 263 days ago:
the system actually never crashes here. (using it for the last 1.5 year)
its a basic intel mac mini running leopard, with frontrow as main mediacenter soft, and eyetv, connected it via optical cable to the stereo, and has a 23inch screen as tv screen.
we also tweaked it a bit:
-we downloaded some plugins for quicktime, to make sure the avi works and gives sound (most common problem) ,
-added remote buddy (remote for iphone)
it enables to open/close/handle eyetv or frontrow from a distance.
-added an extra lacie mini hd for extra diskspace.
-added simplifymedia to share itunes libraries with our laptops and iphones.
the latter is a great trick. i can access my homefolder on the macmini when working elsewhere via my macbookpro or my iphone. and at home i can access my macbookpro itunes lib on the macmini. really superb.
-we have the eyetv hybrid. while it worked great in my former place, nowadays I only get BBC1 but not the other (belgian) channels. really weird.
-we always have people bring giftcards from the states and opened an american itunes account to be able to do movie-rentals. it works superb. (a pity the movies and series aren’t all of the quality we would like them to be, a little less blockbusters that is)
will be considering the extra plugins you mention as they seem a great add-on.
a plugin for youtube and hulu would definitely make my perfect set up..
Richard Sheppard said 263 days ago:
Just a little over a year ago, one of the members of the Midlands Mac User Group did a presentation which we video’d and also called it “Mac Mini Media Centre”, should you be interested. I don’t know how it compares with what you’ve done, but it’s one of our most read articles on our site.
Dan Hughes said 263 days ago:
Great topic and discussion.
After a ton of debate on which route to take (Linux box, AppleTV, Windows Media Center, ReadyNAS, etc.) I went with a Mac mini for my media center as well. More or less each box could do what I originally needed, which was to stream audio and video from one source, but having a full Mac and access to all of its apps pushed it over the top.
A couple other things to ponder for mini owners who have this setup.
- Use SimplifyMedia, It lets you access your music library on your Mac wherever you have a decent connection. I was pulling my hair out trying to sync up all of my music libraries across multiple machines. With this, no more. Plus, they’ve got a killer iPhone app that is equally as impressive.
http://www.simplifymedia.com/
- VNC access is another killer feature. If I’m at work and I forgot to launch an app, it takes less than 5 seconds to open up a remote screen and click an icon. (I know you can do this via the command line remotely, but this is quicker and more painless for me.)
Even better, with VNC enabled, you can use Touchpad Pro, an iPhone app that lets you use its screen as a virtual trackpad and keyboard. It’s great for those times when you don’t have your primary machine around or just don’t feel like getting off the couch.
http://www.touchpadpro.com/
Of course, there are some downsides to using FrontRow as the main interface. It takes a bit of extra work to get all of your downloads to fit into iTunes just right. For instance, for a DivX file to be displayed in iTunes and thus FrontRow, you need to create a QuickTime reference movie, add the artwork, etc, etc. Not rocket science but a little slow. I’d love to hear about other’s workflow in this regard. (I know Sapphire helps with this, but I haven’t been impressed with its stability or user-friendliness.)
Brian said 262 days ago:
If you just want a divx to show up in FrontRow but dont really care if its in itunes, you can just add the alias of the folder that they are in into the videos folder. I keep my divx on my linux server and ive always been able to navigate to them from FrontRow.
unixtsg said 262 days ago:
Wow, some really great posts here. I’ve just hooked my mini up to my 37” LCD about a week ago and have been trying to get the best out of its multi-media capabilities so thanks for all the great tips. Quick question, I have the mini plugged into the pc VGA port on my TV using the apple dvi—>vga converter …. would I be likely to get a better picture if I use a dvi—>hdmi cable instead ? (tia) …. cheers.
Lee said 262 days ago:
Like many others, I’ve gone with a Mini, but I’m not entirely satisfied. I have the black-bars issue, and it gets choppy all-too-often.
Basically I’d like an Apple TV with an external drive (I’m trying to be discless, so I bought a Drobo for my 700 DVDs to eventually live on). It’s that simple.
Does anyone know of a relatively easy way to get a USB drive working on ATV? Or if there’s plans to support this officially? C’mon! :)
Adam Fortuna said 262 days ago:
Is there any skipping or mis-rendering on a Mac Mini runnin full 1080p mkv files? I’d tried running some on my new macbook pro and they still skipped.
Also, is there anyway to get subtitles with Front Row for mkv files? I watch a lot of anime and foreign movies, and it didn’t seem like there was a good fix for this yet. I know in mplayer you can add a parameter to your startup options (-ass -embeddedfonts -fontconfig -sid 0 -alang jpn) and itll default the language, but I hadn’t seen anything like this that works in FrontRow.
Noah Mittman said 262 days ago:
Re: #17, not only can you not rent HD videos, but when you rent SD videos in iTunes THEY WILL NOT APPEAR IN FRONT ROW. You can watch them using iTunes ONLY. [ This is not good ]
JP said 262 days ago:
I’ve taken a slightly different approach to the Mini-as-Media Center. Some of you might find it interesting…
I’ve got the Mini and the EyeTV set up at work. EyeTV now gives you an option to encode your recordings for streaming over the web. (I set all of these shows to reside on a Lacie external HD, by the way.)
By entering my Mini’s IP address in my browser, I can watch these recordings from any computer, anywhere.
Best of all, I can stream this programming to my iPod Touch’s Mobile Safari browser. When I’m at home, I hook up the Touch to my television set (just a simple CRT). The quality is great – and there’s no hardware in my “media center” except the super-slim Touch!
Granted, you can’t play DVDs this way from the Mini… but you could rip them and put them on the iPod. The Touch also allows you to watch YouTube and Podcasts on your TV. I stream the podcasts from a new web app (versus downloading them from iTunes to the Touch).
I didn’t jailbreak my Touch. I didn’t do much to “trick out” the Mini. This is a pretty simple setup – and it works quite well (at home or on the road!)
Jason Painter said 261 days ago:
You should definitely add a Turbo.264. I used to export to iPod from my G5 as Apple TV quality took so long, but with Turbo.264, I can rip to Apple TV about 3-4 times as fast as to iPod without it.
Jon Hicks said 261 days ago:
I’ve been interested in the Turbo – can people tell me if its ‘hands-off’ once you plug it in, or do you have to drag and drop each recording to use it?
elfriki said 261 days ago:
http://www.elfriki.com/index.php/2008/01/19/mac-mini-media-center.html
Alex Dixon said 261 days ago:
I noticed when you copied the iTunes Library across you did it the long winded way.
There’s a very easy way of doing it. You simply copy the music library between drives and hold the option key while starting up iTunes. This brings up a dialogue box letting you choose between libraries or giving you the option to create a new one.
Jon Hicks said 261 days ago:
Alex – does it rewrite the paths to the files OK? That was the issue I had, although ‘Consolidate Library’ wasn’t exactly any hassle.
CM said 261 days ago:
@70
EyeTv will recognize the Turbo and use it automagically when exporting.
Nick Clement said 261 days ago:
Good tips Mr Hicks, does anyone know of a way to use a PSP in conjunction with this to assist browsing etc. I suppose it would have to be browser based.
Jason said 261 days ago:
FYI your page does not render the article text in firefox 3 beta 5. You might want to look into it and see if it a FF issue or an issue with your page.
Mecki78 said 261 days ago:
Have you tried Media Central for old Macs with no Front Row pre-installed? It will also work for new ones and it has the YouTube feature and other kind of interesting stuff Front Row has not.
You can also buy a TV stick, that comes with own software, but it will also work within Media Central (actually when buying a USB stick, you get Media Central for free – at least you used to).
It’s still not supporting US TV, but they announced to soon release a new version that works in USA, too, with analog and digital TV:
http://www.equinux.com/mediacentral
Jon Hicks said 261 days ago:
I have tried Mediacentral, but it needs a lot more work in my view. Definite potential though!
Mac Steve said 260 days ago:
@ elgato turbo.264
Integration in Elgato products like EyeTV is great and the standalone app works very well too. Be aware that WiFi streaming adds the encoded h.264 version to the .eyetv bundle of any recording thus eating up disk space like mad. The way to go is to set up EyeTV to export to iTunes after each recording.
The turbo is really great when using older hardware. So far it saved my Mac mini G4 and iMac G5 from being replaced as it accelerates h.264 encoding by up to 10 times.
On more recent multicore Macs the speed increase is less noticeable as Matt Haughey pointed out in his review
http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2007/07/elgato-turbo264.html
Matthew Friedman said 260 days ago:
I tried this and ended up taking it down because the video from the mac mini was markedly worse than the video from a standalone DVD player. It has something to do with poor translation from interlaced source to progressive output, and no amount of tinkering with settings in VLC would solve the issue. In the end, I went with the SageTV HD media extender, and love it. The pic quality is exceptional (Just as good as a set top box) and it handles HD even better than the mini.
ed said 259 days ago:
I’ve got an appletv and use Sapphire pretty much exclusively. I don’t have to add any metadata to my itunes or non-itunes files. This is the biggest selling point for it to me. I wish that iTunes would populate that data for you like Sapphire does, but c’est la vie.
I have been debating on making the switch to a Mini for my other tv instead of another appletv. This post has definitely given me something to think about….I just have to decide if I want to keep my existing DVR or go the EyeTV route…..
Mac Steve said 259 days ago:
another advantage of the Mac mini over the Apple TV is that the mini has full power management and the EyeTV software can even cold start the computer (e.g. booting the mini a few minutes before scheduled recording not from standby but from being fully turned off!). this is in contrast to the AppleTV that is running 24/7 and gets pretty hot.
Joe C said 259 days ago:
Nice post I’m always looking for more informative posts to help with my own media centre blog.
Jaymac said 259 days ago:
I recommend the Gyration optical air mouse for sofa to mini/TV use. I must say that I haven’t found Front Row worth the trouble of starting it up. Or importing movies to iTunes. Easier just to double-click the file and watch in QT. FR looks nice, though.
David Day said 258 days ago:
I thought I’d share my recent Mac Mini Media Center experience, I have owned an Apple TV since launch day and really like it, it streams HD content from my iMac over a G network fine once converted and placed in the iMac’s iTunes. I have EyeTV record TV shows and automatically export to iTunes too.
Using VisualHub to convert a 6 GB HD movie into something iTunes can read takes about 3hrs which is a pain but as I said once it’s there the AppleTV plays it just fine.
Fed up with waiting 3hrs for the conversion each time I thought I’d go the Mac mini route, I bought a 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (1GB memory 80GB hard drive) from the online store to connect to my Pioneer PDP-427XD which has a resolution of 1024 × 768.
Straight away I ran into resolution problems, using a HDMI cable to connect I could have the edges of the screen out of view so you can’t see the menu bar and dock or turn off ‘overscan’ and have black borders top and bottom and missing edges to the left and right. I spent hours messing with settings including DisplayConfigX but nothing sorted the problem.
I then purchased a VGA cable and decided to go analogue, this fixed the problem immediately but the analogue screen was not as crisp and the colours were not as vibrant as using a HDMI cable and was a real step down in quality compared to the Apple TV (which just works fine via HDMI).
The next issue was using it, everything seemed a bit fiddly, EyeTV would crash every now and then (not often but it would happen), HD content would sometimes drop frames on playback, the remote was sometimes fiddly to use and the whole system was not user friendly like the AppleTV. I imagined if anyone else in the family was watching TV and suddenly EyeTV quits they would struggle to get things up and running again.
So I decided to call Apple and ask for a refund on the Mac mini, they instantly arranged for TNT to collect it and gave me a full refund which I thought was excellent service.
I’m glad to be back watching live TV via the Freeview box and recorded stuff via the iMac’s EyeTV recordings and the Apple TV. The only downside to the Apple TV I can see is the encoding times.
You can’t have everything I suppose :)
Adrian said 258 days ago:
@David Day
You should get a turbo.264 for your imac to reduce encoding times.
David Day said 256 days ago:
@Adrian Thanks for the tip, that could be just what I need. Now off to elgato.com
John said 256 days ago:
Thanks for this timely and invaluable article – I’ve just bought a mac mini too. The mini media centre set up really makes sense now – I see Merlin Mann has just got one too. I would have congratulated you and bought you a pint at the last OGN, but the beer was free (thanks Google :) ) and I think you were getting asked plenty already (great talk btw).
Anyway, a couple of things, running headless with VNC was a great suggestion, I’ve found that ‘Chicken of the VNC’ is doing an awesome job – using an elderly G3 Powerbook to control the mini, it’s all amazingly fast. The main problem that I have is sometimes the mini suddenly gets very loud, probably the fan or hard disk. Any ideas? Perhaps it’s Spotlight indexing the drive? Have you thought about disabling Spotlight, I know some folks think performance takes a hit when it kicks in?
MissT said 255 days ago:
HI, I may be being naive here, but why not just use an i-Mac with an elagato TV? I have been wanting to set up a multi-media centre for ages, but am put off by all this geek stuff. I’ve priced up buying a mac-mini, and all the bits and there isn’t much in it.
Jon Hicks said 254 days ago:
@MissT – if the small screen size doesn’t bother you, or you don’t have other devices like games consoles or satellite boxes, then an iMac is fine.
However, my setup cost as follows: Refurb MacMini (£350), Samsung 32” LCD TV (£500) = £850. The cheapest 24” iMac is £1,149!
Jaap said 254 days ago:
@MissT; one of the reasons would be that you can hook up a Mac Mini to a large TV screen, for more of a Living Room viewing experience. With an iMac, you’ll be glued to ‘the computer’ (and its smaller screen).