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Changes inside the Mac mini—a new class of processor and improved graphics—make it a better candidate for a home media center than it was a few years ago. The Mac mini has also recently been. JRiver Media Center for Mac MC for Mac. JRiver Media Center is available on Mac (the Apple OSX platform). Download here.Follow development and learn more on Interact (our forum).
The Mac Pro, iBook, and Mac Book Pro aren’t generally as versatile as the Mac Mini and iMac, however, would none be able to the less be utilized as a Mac Media Center. The 17″ Mac Book Pro would make a decent versatile excitement framework, yet not a devoted media center. Instead, I'm going to try using a Mac Mini, along with a number of parts and accessories, as a home media center that depends on the Internet, and eventually Over-the-Air (OTA) digital broadcast television, to satisfy my video entertainment needs.
As a result of my research on how much power is used by my various media equipment at home, I’ve treated myself to a Mac Mini. It reduces the energy bill by 200 euros and at the same time adds a lot of functionality. You can read up here: part 1, 2 and 3.
My brand spanking new Mac Mini came in today. I love the smell of a freshly opened Apple box. Can’t help it. It’s amazing how Apple manages to put a full sized PC into such a tiny, beautiful, well shaped box. Not having a DVD drive helps with the small form factor and who needs one anyway. It will take it’s place tucked away in a cupboard beneath my TV set. Now it’s time to construct a proper media center from this little aluminum box.
First some initial impression. Sound production is virtually non existent. In a typical environment, I have to put my ear to it to hear anything at all. The only giveaway it’s on is the subtle tiny white LED on the front. It came with OS X Lion and the first-time-setup was fast and smooth. Because it was purchased after the 11th of June 2012, I was eligible for a free upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion and after a somewhat elaborate licensing procedure and one hour of downloading and installing the upgrade was complete. I’ve only had a few hours playtime with Lion 10.7, so I’m not an expert on it, but Mountain Lion feels snappier and the implementation of various iOS elements like message center, spell check, and specially iCloud feels more natural and better integrated.
Goals
For the Mac Mini to become the beating heart of my media experiences, I had a list of pre set goals in mind. The main focus is on Plex, both the server and client. For those who enjoy downloaded movies and TV shows and not familiar with Plex, I suggest you check it out here. It’s a free and very powerful media indexer/streamer/transcoder. More details later, first here’s my list of demands.
- Awesome picture quality
- Airplay
- iTunes server
- File server
- Energy efficient
The whole process of getting the MacMini exactly how I want it to work and for it to surpass the image quality, functionality and ease of use of the PopcornHour C2oo will be an ongoing one. I will post separate articles on the different subjects and link to them as I go. The list of goals will serve as the index.
In this article however,I will elaborate on the battle of the operating systems. I really liked the idea of complementing my home setup with another OS X driven device, but I ended up with Windows 7…
Why Windows, WHY!
I love Mac and Mac OS X. Having worked with (and against) Windows professionally for many years, I can say I prefer the more minimalistic, efficient and ‘thought-through’ approach of OS X. The simplest of simple examples I can think of being; the window beneath the mouse arrow is the one affected by scrolling and not necessarily the active one. It’s the little things. I spend many many hours less on keeping my workstations problem free compared to my Windows days. Although pricey, the prefect marriage between soft- and hardware makes for a very stable environment. But here we immediately hit the Mac’s biggest drawback. It customizability is very limited, hardware and OS. Apple’s philosophy ‘It just works’ is applicable to 90% of my work and home needs, but not to my tweaked media center. In this particular instance. I’ve got two practical problems with OS X;
1. No control over the display settings whatsoever. My Samsung d8000 does a very good job at improving the input signal with all kinds of filters and image processing. I want my media player to provide a relative raw and unaltered image and let my Samsung do it’s magic. To prevent them from working against each other, you need full control over the graphics card’s settings, something that’s just not possible in OS X but easily done with the Windows drivers. I also like to experiment with RGB colorspaces and YCrCb, force refresh rates, et cetera.
2. No support for 23,976 hertz. OS X (Mountain) Lion doesn’t support 23.976 hertz, only 24 Hz. The majority of my video library and other HD content out there is 23.976 hertz! This means a double frame every 41 seconds to keep in sync (more under Awesome picture quality) which shows a small stutter. Sounds negligible, but I can’t accept it.
These are the two main reasons why I decided to go with Windows 7 as the preferred OS for my media center. Installed it with Bootcamp without any issue (see below). Now I had my platform on which I could build my Mac Mini Media Center
Bootcamp and Windows 7 Upgrade sidenote
Installing a Windows 7 upgrade on a fresh Bootcamp partition can be problematic. Here’s why and how to get around it. It is possible to install Windows 7 within Bootcamp from a USB drive. Unfortunately, I only have a copy of Windows 7 Upgrade on disc. The Mac Mini no longer comes with an optical disc reader, so I had to loan a USB DVD drive, better known as Apple’s SuperDrive. Because it’s an upgrade, you need to provide proof of an earlier ‘full license’ Windows edition. I have multiple version I can provided, all the way back to Windows 3.11, but all on disc as well. The problem is you can’t eject the disc from within Windows setup. There simply is no physical eject button. The eject on a Mac’s keyboard is software driven and only becomes available when the Windows Bootcamp drivers are installed. Luckily, the setup enables you to complete the installation without the use of the product key or the need to provide an older version. It becomes a 30-day trial.
Here’s the trick; after the installation is finished, restart the Windows setup from scratch by rebooting the Mac, hold down the alt key on startup and choose the Windows DVD as boot disc at the presented screen. Watch for the ‘press a key to boot from disc…’ message and do so. Once again in the Windows setup, format the Bootcamp partition (do NOT remove it, just format). There will remain some residual Windows info on disc (in the MFT or MBR, I’m not sure) which is enough to let the Windows 7 upgrade think it’s updating a previous installed full version. Complete the installation with the product key and activate as normal. Now you have a fully activated and legitimate (provided you own an older full Windows version) installation of Windows 7 on Bootcamp
(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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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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…