Mac Mini as home theatre PC?

[Pars]

My brother asked me what I thought about using a Mac Mini as a htpc. Since I've never done this, I thought I would ask here. I know some of you use these as music servers. Any tips, recommendations, etc.?

Thanks in advance

[jp11801]

I use it as my home entertainment hub, it feeds my mediocre View 42 flat screen. I use it for movies and music as well as web video. Not the best picture quality and will not be as good as a blue ray picture but ok for the easy to please movie watcher.

Since my rack is pretty far from the TV I just went to bluejeans cables and had a 25 foot hdmi to DVI cable made for the mac

[grawk]

I use mine with plex for movies, but I don't do any video capture. I use dvi to vga instead of hdmi, because the hdmi input gets more easily confused on my tv.

[crappyjones123]

if you are buying a new machine, my vote goes for this. (almost half the price of a mac mini for a decently configured zino)

Dell Inspiron Zino HD Desktop | Dell

cheaper. and seems to be "designed" for that purpose.

(this is assuming pc is even on the table for discussion)

[MexicanDragon]

if you are buying a new machine, my vote goes for this. (almost half the price of a mac mini for a decently configured zino)

Dell Inspiron Zino HD Desktop | Dell

cheaper. and seems to be "designed" for that purpose.

(this is assuming pc is even on the table for discussion)

You know, I hate to agree with crappy on this, but the Zino DOES have a Blu-Ray option. I have a feeling that will be a bit better for HTPC in this day and age.

Also, it comes in black.

**BRENT**

[Salt Peanuts]

You know, I hate to agree with crappy on this, but the Zino DOES have a Blu-Ray option. I have a feeling that will be a bit better for HTPC in this day and age.

Also, it comes in black.

**BRENT**

As of right now, it doesn't appear to have a Blu-Ray option. At least it didn't show up as one when I was just configuring one for fun.

Edited December 19, 2009 by Salt Peanuts
verb tense

[MexicanDragon]

As of right now, it doesn't appear to have a Blu-Ray option. At least it doesn't show up as one when I was just configuring one for fun.

Same. When it came out BR was an option.

Check out the press release quoted at the bottom of this article from 1.5 months ago The 5 best uses for the $229 Dell Zino HD

It USED to be there. I figure there was either a quirk, or a shortage. I would try to look into it more, but it would just make me want one, so I shan't.

I still think it's a good option, but I'd look into the BR problem a little first.

**BRENT**

P.S. It still comes in black.

[blubliss]

Dell is probably out of the Blu-Ray, there have been some major delays for the Zino, lots of chatter at AVS forum. I jumped on a good deal earlier with 20% Bing cash back (which I don't have yet and will believe when I get it. But, I will be letting this unit go. While it is awesome for the HTPC, the 50 mm fan is just a bit loud in my environment. I am pretty sure it won't bother most people.

Pars, I offered the Zino to 1 other guy who will let me know today. I would be willing to pass along an awesome deal if you are interested. Shoot me a PM.

Zino: 6850 processor/4330 discrete video/3gb ram/320 gb HD/ no blu-ray or wireless card. I paid $415, waiting for $75 BCB. Awesome deal.

[morphsci]

You could always use a USB Blu-Ray drive on the Zino. Not an option on the mini.

[blubliss]

You could always use a USB Blu-Ray drive on the Zino. Not an option on the mini.

I think you can by a slim blu-ray later and pop that in too.

[morphsci]

Yep, I was just going for the quicker instant gratification type solution.

[penger]

Dunno when this comes out but something to consider.

http://www.asrock.com/Nettop/overview.asp?Model=ION%20330-BD

Dual core Atom + Nvidia's Ion. I've read that the combo is pretty potent for playing HD stuff.

[Dusty Chalk]

Looks like it's already out:

Amazon.com: Asrock Intel Dual Core Atom Wireless LAN Barebone ION 330HT-BD (Black): Electronics

And there's another version, the "pro":

Amazon.com: Asrock Intel Dual Core Atom Barebone ION 330Pro (Black): Electronics

Whereas Asus' isn't out yet:

Amazon.com: ASUS Eee Box EB1501-B0167 Nettop PC - Black: Computer & Accessories

[morphsci]

^^^I don't know, 4 to 7 weeks hardly seems like it's out.

[Dusty Chalk]

I missed that.

[itsborken]

Haven't tried a intel mini as my old power mini's fan kicks on and is a bit noisy when it kicks in. That alone kept me from considering an upgrade and I went with a remote ATV for casual music and listening to podcasts instead.

[macstah]

I haven't used a mini, but I've been using my aluminum 13" Macbook pro (similar specs to the lower end mini, but I put in 4gb ram) with my 46" tv, and it's been working really well for watching games on ESPN360, tv shows on iTunes and Hulu. The fan does sometimes kick in after a while, but it's not too bad.

Wireless-N is plenty fast enough to stream Hulu or ESPN360 (which, to be honest, stunned me.)

All in all, it seems to work pretty brilliantly. Though, if I were going to go with something more permanent, I'd likely go with one of the small windows machines rather than the mac mini so I could get blu-ray in there. I've been considering building a silent, fanless one but haven't taken the time yet.

[Mullet]

I'm using an Early 2009 Mac Mini with my Samsung HDTV. It works great! At the moment, I'm using Boxee as my media player and EyeTV as a DVR. I also set up a IRTrans IR blaster using iRed2 to change channels and do some home automation like dimming lights, etc. I use my iPhone to control it all. This is my first foray into Macs and everything is working out great. Super easy to set up and no fuss no muss.

[episiarch]

I'm using a slightly older Mac Mini this way, and it serves our needs well. Mostly we use it for playing stuff out of iTunes -- we have a 1.5TB drive with a mess of iTunes TV shows and movies -- and we usually control it from the free iPhone / iPod Touch Remote app which provides easy browsing of even fairly gigantic libraries. iTunes has settings to make it automatically go full-screen when playing video, so once something starts playing we have a proper home-theater full-screen experience. Likewise if we put in a disc, Front Row comes up and takes over the screen, so that works fine as well.

What we haven't done yet is really try to home-theater-ize the rest of the things we might occasionally want to do. When it's not showing video the screen just shows the regular Mac screen, regular iTunes UI. Watching browser-based stuff is handled by launching screen sharing on one of our other Macs, taking control, opening and navigating the browser, and starting and maximizing the video. I think there are solutions out there to integrate all this stuff into one seamless experience and add DVR functionality as well, but we haven't looked closely at them because we're big enough dorks that having computer UIs on our TV doesn't bother us.

If I did care about that kind of thing I'd probably spend an hour really trying to get xmbc configured instead of just wincing at it and saying "all this shiny stuff just gets in the way" like I did last time. And even without that there are some iPhone apps we could use instead of screen sharing for remotely operating browsers and such. We just haven't put much effort into it since getting the core play-the-damn-iTunes-library-on-the-TV functionality running.

The main area where I'm not satisfied with our solution is Skype. We have a gooseneck webcam on the Mini, mounted to the top of the TV, so the toddler can visit with her grandparents back home at larger-than-laptop sizes, and this works great. But Skype doesn't have an automatically-go-fullscreen-on-answer option, so that has to be done manually. And our regular remote control techniques are a little too cumbersome once people are excitedly waving hello and you're trying to adjust the gooseneck cam to follow the hyperenergetic little one around the room. Pretty sure this would be the same on all platforms, though, so it doesn't really address the Mac Mini vs. Something Else issue.

My Mini is Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) and has Intel graphics instead of the niiice nVidia chipset the current ones have, and still it's just fine. My TV's a crappy one that came with the flat, so I'm driving it over VGA. But I'm getting completely smooth and good-looking video at 720p even out of this older rig, so I expect a modern Mini can pretty readily handle anything you can throw at it. In case you're wondering why we don't use an Apple TV to play the iTunes content on the TV, it's because this TV doesn't have any interface types in common with the Apple TV, and we needed a place to put the Mac Mini with the video library anyway.