Tim Flight

I’m the proud owner of a new to me little Mac Mini which has been named MediaMac. Although I had contemplated a new MacBook Pro for myself, I decided to postpone that purchase and snag a Mac Mini.

The new computer will serve one major purpose, a Mac media center. I didn’t buy one just ’cause Chip did. Although it has been said time and time again that the Mac Mini is not a media center, I’ve made one out of it. Here is what I did.

MediaMac is one of the earlier Mac Minis and has 1 GB of RAM to ensure good quality video playback and general good performance. It is also equipped with Bluetooth and Airport. That is about all there is to the computer itself, the rest of the goodies come from software and peripherals.

Mac Minis come BYOKDM - Bring Your Own Keybord, Display, and Mouse. But in my case I’m not bringing any of those along. So how do I control MediaMac? Primarily control comes from two sources, the first is a VNC client, Chicken of the VNC. Any other computer in the house can then control the Mac Mini over the wireless Airport network. Chicken of the VNC will automatically locate MediaMac via Bonjour.

I also wanted additional remote control options without needing to use another computer, so I’ve used Salling Clicker to enable my mobile phone as a remote control for nearly every application stored on MediaMac.

Most of the time my Mac Mini will run headless, playing music and performing other mundane tasks where it is happy running headless. But for those times when I want to watch a DVD or music video, I’ve connected the Mac Min to the television via a DVI to video cable.

I also have the Elgato EyeTV 200 connected to MediaMac so I can pause and rewind live TV, and schedule my favorite shows to be recorded. Basically DVR/PVR/Tivo capabilities.

After stripping away most of the preinstalled applications here is what I’ve either put back or installed fresh.

MediaCentral provides Front Row style media browsing of movies, DVDs, music, photos, live TV, etc in a simple interface which can be controlled by Salling Clicker.

Other than that, I’ve left DVD Player, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, and Quicktime Player installed while dumping almost everything else. I transferred all of my music, photos, and movies from my primary working Mac to the new Mac Mini and now MediaMac is now serving up all of this good media.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.