Media Centre For Mac Mini

| 20-04-2021
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Here's the plan: take an old Mac mini, blow the dust off it, and repurpose it as a media centre. In particular, I wanted it to:

  • Watch and record Freeview channels
  • Watch shows on BBC iPlayer
  • Play downloaded videos

Mac Mini Media Centre Original Posted August 2009 This week I want to tell you about my latest project – setting up a home media centre using a Mac Mini. Last week I got my new MacBook Pro, so my mini really wasn’t needed any longer as my everyday computer. I've been a Mac user for about 1.5 years now and really enjoy the experience so looked at the Mac Mini as the perfect box to act as my media centre. Looking at the options available the current generation (late 2012) i5 model seemed like the perfect choice. Menurut analis – Gene Munster, dari Piper Jaffray, terutama – Apple akan segera meluncurkan perangkat Apple TV yang revolusioner. Jangan menyangka ini dengan 'hobby' Apple lainnya; ini bukanlah.

  • Out of the box, the Mac mini isn't a bona fide media center in the same way a Windows Media Center PC is - at least, if you define a media center as having a distinct TV element.
  • Nearly three years ago I laid hands on a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo Mac mini with the idea of turning it into a media center.This demure little Mac was tasked with playing music, recording and playing TV programs, acting as a radio, and playing DVDs.
Here's how I got on.

The Mac

This was an old PowerPC Mac mini: 1.4Ghz G4 processor, 1GB RAM and 80GB 4200rpm hard drive. Although not very powerful by today's standards, it has decent connectivity - USB, Firewire 400, bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, and 802.11g wireless networking.
First I performed a clean installation of OS X Leopard. This left me with about 60GB of free disk space for recording TV programmes. A half hour show takes approximately 1GB of space, so I should be able to store at least 24 hours of TV without any trouble. If the internal drive fills up I'll try connecting a firewire hard drive.
Lovely as Leopard is, I didn't want to use the desktop interface from the sofa. There are several good media centre applications, but few support the PowerPC architecture. XBMC (XBox Media Center) and Boxee (based on XMBC, but with an emphasis on social networking) only support Intel processors, and the (unofficial) Mac port of MythTV has little support for USB TV tuners.
This left me with Front Row. Version 2 comes as part of Leopard and is very similar to the Apple TV interface (although the implementation is rather different.)

Connecting to the TV

Mac

How could something so simple prove so troublesome? The only suitable connection type was VGA (using a DVI to VGA converter), but my Samsung television has notorious problems connecting to it. Sometimes the computer would boot up and display sucessfully, but it would usually either not display anything at all (the TV would give no indication as to the problem, merely blinking its standby light) or flash on for a few brief seconds before disappearing again. This was particularly troublesome if the TV had been switched off for a while but the computer had not.
In the end, I resorted to a hardware hack. I removed pin 12 from the VGA cable, disabling the monitor detection facility. This allowed me to choose a more reliable resolution and frequency (1280x768 @ 75Hz) instead of the default (1360x768 @ 60Hz).
It's still not perfect but switching to a different input source and then back to VGA seems to help.
Annoying.

Media Centre For Mac MiniMedia

Control

The old Mac mini doesn't have an infra-red port so I couldn't use an Apple remote with it. This is a shame as the alternatives aren't quite as user friendly as I'd liked.
First I experimented with iPhone apps to simulate an Apple remote. The first, Rowmote (59p), worked reasonably well when the iPhone was connected to the wireless network. Unfortunately the iPhone disconnects from the network after a period of inactivity, causing the virtual remote to cease functioning, and it became frustrating having to prod it and wait for it to reconnect.
I tried a second app, Snatch, which is more expensive (£3.49) but comes with a free trial version. This has added usefulness like a virtual keyboard and the ability to use the iPhone screen as a touch pad (like a laptop). Although the touchpad interface was slick, the app proved less than great as a whole - the interface isn't particularly slick when switching between different modes and the interface for creating virtual keyboard buttons was horrible: the editing controls were small and fiddly and there was a complete lack of feedback when recording keypresses. In addition, some of the shortcuts I assigned (such as the one to open Front Row) didn't work at all.
Finally I tried Remote Buddy. This is a powerful Mac application that allows applications to be controlled by many different types of device - including the Wii remote (via bluetooth). This works very well; you simply hold the 1 and 2 buttons on the remote to connect it to the Mac. I didn't find the default button mappings very intuitive but I soon reconfigured it so I could navigate Front Row and EyeTV effectively. It would be nice to use the remote's infra-red pointing facility to move the mouse pointer, but the sensor bar used by the remote to detect where you are pointing only works when the Wii is running.
Remote Buddy also has an Ajax interface which allows the desktop to be controlled remotely via a web browser. This is neat but sluggish, and dead handy for reconfiguring the system when I couldn't get anything to display on the TV.
It's expensive - 20 euros (£18) but I suspect I'll bite the bullet and buy it when the 30 day trial expires.

Watching TV

Media Centre For Mac Mini Download

This is the best bit. I bought an EyeTV DTT (£35) and it works really well. It comes with a tiny aerial and a little sucker to hold it to the window. It easily picked up a signal for all the Freeview channels. Previously, for the TV, I used a much larger powered indoor aerial which was quite fussy about where you placed it.
You can schedule recordings using the EyeTV 3 software. This is quite neat, particularly the way it creates live searches to record future episodes of shows. The built-in programme guide is fairly comprehensive, although for some reason it seems to have confused Five US with a German TV station. I particularly like that I can log into the tvtv web site and schedule a recording away from the computer. The recordings are saved in MPEG2 format, and you can convert them into iPhone compatible files automatically and access them remotely. (In the end I disabled this feature because the conversion process is very CPU intensive and the poor little Mac mini didn't enjoy the experience one bit.)
It isn't perfect; like a video recorder it doesn't cope well with schedule changes. I tried recording an episode of Being Human but ended up with 15 minutes of overrunning rugby instead. Luckily the guide is good at finding when programmes are repeated (and it can distinguish repeats from new episodes) so it was trivial to reschedule another recording. Hurrah for BBC Three's endless repeats!
There's even a full screen interface which integrates with Front Row thanks to a third party plugin called PyeTV and a bit of funky AppleScript.

Other video

Mac media inc

Mac Media Store

I configured iTunes to share the files from my laptop. This allowed me to play music, TV shows and films through Front Row on the Mac mini. It even worked for DRM-enabled content once I had authorized the Mac mini in the iTunes store.
The Mac won't play most of the popular internet video formats out of the box - for this you need Perian, an open source QuickTime component that adds native support for AVI, DivX and more. The final step was to create an alias in the Movies folder on my Mac mini pointing to the share on my laptop, allowing me to play videos over the network.

BBC iPlayer

Media Centre For Mac Mini 2

I'd like to access the BBC iPlayer too, but I'm yet to discover a workable user interface to it.
There's a handy big screen version but it's still hard to navigate the interface without a mouse and it doesn't integrate well with Front Row. I knew I could access web pages using Couch Surfer, but the virtual mouse pointer (controlled using the direction buttons on the remote) was sluggish and awkward to use. The full screen option didn't work within Front Row either, leaving me with quarter-screen sized videos.
The flash player needs quite a powerful CPU to function properly. Unfortunately the G4 1.4GHz PowerPC processor in the Mac mini couldn't cope with the high quality streams.

Conclusion

It was fun to set all this up, but it's all a bit of a Heath Robinson affair and there comes a point when it's easier to buy something that just works. The Mini isn't quite up to spec for the job (a more recent Intel edition would be much better) but I don't want to spend much on upgrading outdated hardware. If, as rumoured, the next Apple TV has an integrated PVR then I'll be first in line to buy one. Until then, I'll continue with this useful but quirky system.

Okay, I know I have blogged about Apple products a lot lately (1st post, 2nd post). I just have to write one more blog about Apple and my new Mac Mini.

Over Christmas I got a Mac Mini to use with my home theater system as a media center computer. I have been using my D-Link DSM-520 with mixed results as my media center device/extender to listen to mp3s, watch video (limited) and view my photos on my main home theater system. The DSM-520 is an okay product. The latest firmware update makes it noticeably faster. Nevertheless, it is a little difficult to use. I have been planning on replacing it with a true media center PC for a while and as it turns out the Mac Mini is the perfect platform, well, almost – more on this in a bit.

Here is my Mac Mini setup:

  • 2 GHz Intel Core-2 Duo CPU
  • 4GB RAM
  • Microsoft Media Center Remote Control

I installed the 4GB of RAM aftermarket. The Apple website does not specifically state that the Mac Mini will support 4GB RAM, but it works perfectly and shows up as 4GB in the Mac operating system. One word of caution, when I upgraded the RAM, I forgot to replace the tiny cable harness that connects the thermal sensor that is used to determine the unit’s fan speed. As a result, when I put it all back together the unit’s fan ran at full speed and was kind of loud. I took it apart again and reconnected the cable and now the variable speed fan works perfectly, and quietly.

I first used Apple Front Row as my media center platform. I both liked it and hated it at the same time. Front Row looks beautiful on my Samsung 61″ 1080P DLP screen. I guess you would expect nothing less than visual beauty from Apple. It connected with my local iTunes libraries and streamed any type of media, as long as the media type works in iTunes. This was one of the biggest problems – I can’t configure Front Row to connect with my networked non-iTunes folders and media to monitor for content. Front Row is also very limited in what types of media formats it supports. Essentially, if a media type works in iTunes it will work in Front Row. The problem is I have a lot of media content that won’t work in iTunes, and therefore does not work in Front Row. This is why I say the Mac Mini is the perfect media center platform – almost.

Mac Media Player

My solution was to use Boot Camp and I installed Windows Vista Ultimate which includes Windows Media Center. Windows Media Center also looks great on my DLP screen. However, one problem with the Windows approach is that the Windows OS only recognizes about 3.2GB of the 4GB of installed RAM. This is a known limitation of the 32bit version of Windows. Anyway, I also use the Windows Media Center remote control that comes with a USB infrared receiver base unit. It works great! With Windows Vista Ultimate I can easily connect to other media sources on my home network; like my home PC and my D-Link DSN-323 that has 1.5 Terabytes of storage space. (I’m always surprised how space much 1080P content takes up!)

Even if Windows Media Center didn’t support a lot more media formats than Front Row, the Media Center Remote is so much better than the little Front Row Remote Control that it makes the choice a no brainer.

Now I stream my mp3s, photos and HD video to my home theater system over speedy GB Ethernet using Windows Media Center. Oh, another great feature of the Mac Mini is the built-in S/PDIF digital output and input that I use to connect with my Denon AVR receiver for true digital multi-channel audio reproduction.

Media Centre For Mac Mini Computers

One small gripe with the Mac Mini is that it only comes with DVI video output instead of a HDMI port. I know I can get a DVI-to-HDMI converter, but it would be nice to have native HDMI support.

I’ve been using the Mac Mini with Windows Media Center for about a week now and I love it! My wife, Deanna loves it too. That’s always nice! ;-) I named it “Marc-Mini” on my home network which I know is kinda nerdy, but hey, It’s my network. The Mac Mini is an awesome small form factor computer that works perfectly as a media center computer with Windows Media Center and looks great in any home theater equipment rack.

Media Centre For Mac Mini Keyboard

Great job, again, Apple!