Home Theatre Mac Mini

Like many others out there, I’ve been running a home theatre PC for a while now. Any one of you who know me, know that I work in a large corporate IT shop installing and maintaining servers for internal and customer facing systems, so my technical knowledge is quite good. Mostly Windows based but some Linux as well. Personally I don’t mind having a system that is finicky and requires fiddling to get to work, but my wife, like most people out there would rather just sit down and watch TV and not have to know to know what shows to change the output frequency of the video for.

Let’s start out with what hardware I’m using. I have a late 2009 Mac Mini. It has a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 4 GB or RAM and the NVidia 9400 video hardware. My decision to use a Mac Mini was based upon several factors. One, I’m a bit of a Mac Bigot. I mentioned that I work in a Windows shop. We all have to pay the mortgage some how.

For software I’m currently running OS X 10.5 on the Mini along with XBMC for OS X. I tried a couple of other XBMC based programs, like Plex and Boxee. Each one of them has had a lot of hours of hard work put into it and does some cool things that XBMC it self doesn’t do very well. Ultimately, I chose XBMC as both of these were based upon XBMC’s code. What that means is the bug fixes and features will hit it first. Also those extra features didn’t mean all that much to me compared to the core functionality of playing ripped video.

As for storage, I currently have a a few USB drives attached to the Mini. The Mini is great for that in that it has 6 USB ports right on the back of it. I’m currently building a storage server so that I can move the disks out of the living room and stream the video over the network. More on that in another article.

That’s enough for now. Stay tuned.