Mac Media Center project launches
By Joshua Fruhlinger 
posted January 28th 2005 3:59PM
posted January 28th 2005 3:59PM
Everyone's been asking the question, but no one has the definitive
answer: can the Mac mini become a viable media center? We
did our part with this week's How-To, but some smart
peeps in the UK have put together the Mac Media Center Project, a consortium hell-bent on coming up with the ultimate
Mac mini media center solution. They already have links for audio and video connections at their site.
However, the group also plans to develop applications to tie it all together. They're looking at things like the
Xbox Media Center dashboards that have been going around in hacking circles for a few years as models.
[Thanks, Paul]
Here's an interesting article I found at O'Reilly:
Build Your Own PVR (for free) with HackTV
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/01/26/hacktv.html
the answer is still to come... and it will be an iApp:
http://www.studio2f.com/misc/2005/01/12mac_mini_less_is_more.php
As I point out on my blog, my experience has been less then thrilling when considering my mini for a media center.
http://jonhenshaw.com/blog/2005/01/mac-mini-great-pc-but-too-loud-to-be.php
"As I point out on my blog, my experience has been less then thrilling when considering my mini for a media center."
Try turning on the drive's acoustic management...
Surprised Apple doesn't turn this on themselves.
Great stuff 'zz' and Jon.
I think the Mac mini can be 'grown' as a product, that much is clear although how exactly I'm not sure as I don't work for Apple. My idea was more like an iPod fused with a remote control...so you don't need a computer or TV screen to look through your iTunes files, and maybe you get extra visual feedback for DVD's, chapters, etc
I'm a bit confused as to what a media computer is...isn't it any computer which can play music and dvd's? Or does it have to have another quality? After all, you can connect most laptops to a TV to watch a movie. Big deal.
Another idea, the Sony pS2 was not that great but made a stab at being the focal media player in the living room (apart from that noisy fan). I think Microsoft were influenced by the PS2 screen interface (the way the elements animated, and glowed and sounded) when they came up with the media centre pc idea (a clever extension of XP OS)...is that what a media pc is, an extension to a normal OS which allows for a remote control?
Great stuff 'zz' and Jon.
- Just a reply to your question a media center in the classic term refers to PVR/DVR Features. I dont believe something is calssafied as a "MediaCenter" Unless it can record TV shows to a Harddrive (e.g.TIVO) as well as have other multimedia functions. At least that is what differetiates the desktop you have sitting at home that can play DVD's/MP3s etc.... If you can plug a cable line into your Video card, now thats a media center.
It's fascinating to see all these companies - software vendors, hardware vendors, and consumer products manufacturers - all approach the media-savvy living room from their unique perspectives.
I don't think any of the products we've seen thus far - XP Media Centre, PS2, Mini Mac - is anywhere close to the ideal. But we are clearly moving in that direction, and Apple's wise decision to strip the machine down and let the market figure it out could be its most brilliant move yet.
Time will clearly tell. I'm popping the popcorn already.
"I'm a bit confused as to what a media computer is...isn't it any computer which can play music and dvd's? Or does it have to have another quality? After all, you can connect most laptops to a TV to watch a movie. Big deal."
Yeah, until you try to actually STORE all those movies on that laptop. Good luck.
A "media center" or "media server" or whatever you want to call it is just a PC with a lot of media on it, a fast LAN/net connection (to serve it up), a gi-normous hard drive (something the Mac Mini lacks), and hopefully some software to both browse all this media with a nicely tuned interface, along with potentially a remote control and/or wireless KB/mouse. It's also hopefully very quiet. It's basically a somewhat specialized computer - I mean that's all most electronic devices we use these days are anyway (PDA's, iPods, etc. are just computers with different form factors designed to specialize in different things).
General-purpose PC's can do a lot of what media PC's can do, just not as well. That's true of a lot of specialized applications. You could just as easily say you're confused as to what a "gaming PC" is because you can play games on your laptop. Sure you can, but not that well. A true gaming PC that'll play all the latest and greatest games at high frame rates, high resolutions and with excellent image quality requires specialized hardware. It's the same with a media PC, it just requires different hardware and software that specializes in different areas.
I don't think the Mac Mini makes a very good media center because of its 2.5" hard drive, which limits capacity. A small form-factor PC with a 3.5" bay would be better - 250GB 3.5" hard drives are only $130 or so these days, whereas you can't get a 250GB drive for the Mac Mini at *any* price.
btw, yes I know you can hook up an external hard drive... but that sort of defeats the purpose of having this small box in the first place.
I agree with #3. I am not impressed so far with the ability of the mini to become a media center. It is missing many fundamental pieces (tuner, large HD capacity, Digital audio out) which all have to be added on via external boxes.
Suddenly the Mac mini is not so mini when there are 3 other boxes sitting on top it it.
i run a media center on my xbox, xbmc. my movies are stored on a headless pc which i stream wirelessy from. the pc has 4 massive hard-drives giving me over a terabyte of storage and i am already fast running out. even if there was a 400gb drive in the mini it still isn't large enough for serious use. i don't see how you could ever get enough storage in any one device to serve a full-time media center so you're going to be looking for external storage regardless.
personally, i'm going to buy a mac mini to replace my pc server and use the firewire port to chain hard-drives. and don't moan about 400 only firewire because that's more than adequate to deliver any form of encoded movie in real time.
To number 8 - don't EVER use the word gi-normous again!
Keep in mind that TiVo only usues 40-120 gig hard drives in those units. Although it would be nicer to have more space, I don't think people are looking to store their entire DVD collections on this thing, I think their looking for more of a TiVo like interface when it comes to the playback of video. Although a much larger HD would be nice, I don't think it is nessiarily a dealbreaker.
All of this is just too much work. The Mac Mini is just half baked. Having to add on all of this just to record and playback is nerve racking. And by the way...eyeTV 200 is just plain terrible. I bought it and tried every setting and tweak on my Mac G5 w/ 23 inch monitor and it just looked plain terrible. Until there is a complete solution from Apple, I am opting for a quality 17 inch HDTV ready flat panel TV (There is a new one coming out from Sony at $599) and a dvd-r/hd recorder. I will get all of the quality video and digital audio I can enjoy and burn dvds to boot! I know we all want to support Apple and the mini is quite cute, but its like trying to tow a mobile home with a Toyota Rav4!
i think some people ARE looking to store everything digitally. i definately am - i have every single episode of every series i want and every movie i want all on hard disk. i no longer have any video cassettes or dvds and i am really happy about that.
without tons of hard-disk storage i'd still have an annoying video or dvd collection lying messily all over the place. i'd also have to actually get off my ass to insert said items into the player whenever i wanted to watch them, yeuch.
Robert Cringely of PBS fame has focused exclusively on this topic for the past couple of weeks. If you do not already read him, follow these links for a couple of examples of some of the best tech-sector writing there is:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050120.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050127.html
I too use xbox media center and perfectly happy with it. And i think it's a much better solution, since it's a lot cheaper. True, there are legality questions when it comes to using a hacked XBOX, but it's a perfect application with new features getting added to all the time.
Pining for a Mac-based media center is years old. That it's gained a feverish pitch only now is *solely* a justification for buying a Mac Mini, especially as a second computer. Where were all of these Mac HTPC projects a month ago?
The question that needs asking: Is a media center a CE device or do we need the fully capabilities of OS X in the livingroom? Working (iLiving?) from my couch might be novel but I think the device we're hoping for will come from another division of Apple.
Just as a point of reference, playing around with it in the Palo Alto Apple Computer store, I found that the base configuration Mac Mini was unable to play Apple's standard Garage Band demo, giving an error message to the effect that there were too many tracks to be processed in real time.
#14, what made EyeTV 200 so terrible? What was the highest quality that it's capable of watching or recording in? Is it comparable to vhs? Thanks.