• Best Apps For Mac Mini Media Center
• Mac Mini Media Server
• Mac Media Store
• Mac Mini Media Center Apps Download
• Mac Mini Media Center Apps 2017
• Mac Mini Media Center Apps Windows 10

Jul 25, 2013  – Mac Mini in my home office with plex (and air video server for phone and iPad access to videos – works better than Plex for iOS) – External hard drive to hold all media files connected to Mac. Aug 30, 2019  Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub that can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. Jul 24, 2009  The Mac mini Media Center - M³C for short - was born. The video experience was sub-optimal, owing mostly to my 10-year-old CRT that occasionally turned black-and. May 13, 2015  Using a Mac mini as a media server is very easy and very doable, but it does have some limits. The Mac mini is versatile enough to use as a home media server or small business workgroup server — you just want to make sure you're getting the right Mac mini for the task. Aim too low, and you might not get the higher performance you need. Aim too high, and you may be spending more money. Feb 10, 2020  The new Mac mini looks exactly like the old Mac mini, save for the new color alignment (Space Gray) with the rest of the Mac lineup. The old silver color is no longer available. To sum up the new Mac mini appearance, it’s 7.7 x 7.7 x 1.4-inch Space Gray box that weighs 2.9 lbs, and has just a single light indicator in the front to show if the. Today’s Mac mini offers other advantages as a media server. It sports an HDMI port, which allows you to jack the computer directly into your TV or HDMI-compatible AV receiver.

CNETis UK affiliate on Friday posted the first round of its comparison between the new Mac mini and various Windows Media Center PCs, declaring the former 'ahead so far,' with more to come.

Best Apps For Mac Mini Media Center

The discussion leads off with an acknowledgement that 'a series of attempts to nail the Media Center concept have largely failed.' In particular, the article points to the noise generated by the fan inside 'the majority of Media Centers, especially in comparison to a DVD player or video recorder.' While the Mac mini has a fan that turns on if the computer gets too hot, 'in normal operation itis almost silent,' the editors wrote.

Moving on, the article declares both Appleis Front Row and Microsoftis comparable software 'glass-buttoned masterpieces and easy to navigate.' However, the Mac mini was dinged for not including a built-in TV tuner, although the editors noted that 'Apple probably intends iTunes to eventually usurp terrestrial and satellite TV.'

Mac OS X only: Pure Mac has published a big list of 30-some different apps (some freeware, some open source, some must be purchased) for your media center Mac.

The editors used the Miglia TVMini tuner with the Mac mini and said 'it worked immediately, tuning into all available Freeview channels and displaying a crisp picture on our 32-inch Philips Ambilight LCD.' They described it as 'fast a dedicated hard-drive PVR; it records live TV seamlessly.' While they had problems matching its resolution to the LCDis resolution, they described their experiences getting Windows Media Center PCs 'to display anything at all on a TVi as 'hair-pulling ceremonies.'

They also described Elgatois EyeTV 2 software, which comes bundled with the TVMini, as 'nothing short of a revelation' when it comes to recording shows and exporting them for use on a video iPod. They noted that the Windows Media Center computers canit easily export video in the right format for the video iPod.

That ended round one of the comparison, with 'the Microsoft Media Center already panting in the corner of the ring.' Looking ahead, theyire going to compare TV scheduling systems. 'Itis likely that Microsoft will scream ahead in this respect, their PVR software is far superior to anything currently available to Mac users. Expect this battle to get dirty,' the editors wrote.

Mac Mini Media Server

If the Apple TV isn't enough for you, maybe a Mac media center is the way to go. Here's how to use a Mac mini to get the job done

The Apple TV isn't the best solution for everyone. The number of apps it works with are limited, and you can access most of that content from the web. What's more, it locks you into using iTunes as your media delivery system, whether it's sharing a library on a local computer or syncing via iTunes in the Cloud.

For those use cases and others, it may be better to make a Mac the center of your media center instead, so let's take a look at using a Mac as a media center instead. For this experiment, we're going to rely on a Mac mini, but in reality lots of Macs will do the same job.

Picking the right Mac mini

Mac Media Store

The Mac mini comes in two distinct flavors: a dual-core system clocked at 2.5 GHz and equipped with 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB hard disk drive, priced at $599; and a quad-core system priced at $799, equipped with 4 GB RAM and a 1 terabyte hard drive instead.

Your budget may guide you initially - perhaps you don't have the extra $200 or don't want to spend it, and that's fine. The basic Mac mini is a perfectly good system to act as the basis for your Mac media center. But the quad-core system may provide a bit more oomph when it comes to ripping video from various sources, like DVDs. Transcoding video is a pretty processor-intensive activity, and it's something that definitely benefits from having additional cores.

The basic 4 GB memory configuration should be adequate to serve up whatever media content you're going to be delivering through the Mac mini, and it's easily upgradable after the fact (the base of the Mac mini), so I wouldn't recommending paying Apple's penalty to upgrade RAM. You can do the job yourself and buy good quality third-party memory from a variety of vendors.

Storage is a different issue, though ...

Storage for your media

Media content - movies, TV shows, music, and more - will take up space. Movies and TV collections will take up lots of space, and you'll probably find that the 500 GB and even the 1 terabyte of internal storage is insufficient.

If you hit a storage ceiling for your Mac media center, moving it externally is the best solution. You can buy an external USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt-based hard drive and follow these instructions to move your iTunes library.

A Network Attached Storage (NAS) volume is another way to offload iTunes files, but there are a lot of caveats. It's broader than the scope of this article, though - I'm going to save that for another time.

Ripping content

Mac Mini Media Center Apps Download

Another thing to consider - the Mac mini doesn't have any sort of built-in optical drive. If you have a library of DVD or Blu-ray content, it's possible to ingest it to your Mac, but you're going to need an optical drive to do it.

Apple's $80 SuperDrive is a great option. It's slim, slot-loading and designed to complement the Mac mini and other Mac models. It's also pretty pricy for an external optical drive, and it's only capable of working with CDs and DVDs.

If you want to be able to ingest Blu-ray Disc content or if you're looking to save yourself money, there are plenty of external options available - and most, if not all, will work with the Mac.

One note on Blu-ray Disc content: Apple doesn't include decoding software to enable your Mac to play back video content mastered on Blu-ray. You can certainly add software to do so - again, beyond the scope of this article, but something to consider.

Mac Mini Media Center Apps 2017

Connecting your Mac to your TV

If you're working with any Mac mini made since 2010, you just need to get an HDMI cable to connect it your HDTV. That's one of the beauties of using a Mac mini as a media center - it's really designed to work easily with a television. Other Macs include HDMI connectors too - the Retina MacBook Pro, for example, as well as the new Mac Pro.

If your Mac doesn't have HDMI but includes Thunderbolt, a Thunderbolt to HDMI connector will work just fine. Before Thunderbolt, Macs included Mini DisplayPort, which looks the same but isn't. And only some of those carry both an audio and video signal, making them easy to connect with an HDMI adapter. If your Mac is equipped with Mini DisplayPort, check out this Apple tech note to figure out if it's audio/video capable.

Other issues

The Mac mini comes equipped with 802.11n Wi-Fi wireless networking, which is perfectly suitable for streaming video content over the Internet. But if you're looking for more networking oomph because you're going to be transferring large files to your new media center, it may be a good idea to go hardline instead, and use the Gigabit Ethernet connector on the back of the Mac mini.

If you just use your Mac mini as a repository for media files, you're wasting a large aspect of what it can do - actually work as a computer. So to that end, I'd definitely recommend considering a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse or trackpad.

Apple's Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad are both fine choices, especially if you have a coffee table or some other flat surface you can use. Twelve South's MagicWand enables you to attach the Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad together into one integrated input device.

Another advantage of using the Mac mini as your media center - it's the only modern Mac still equipped with an infrared receiver, making it able to work with the Apple Remote and other infrared remote controls, like Logitech's Harmony products.

HDMI carries both video and audio, so if you're connecting your Mac media server to an HDTV or HDMI-equipped receiver, you'll get multichannel digital audio too. Don't forget about the Mac mini's audio line out minijack, however - it's digital/analog, so you can connect the Mac mini to a stereo receiver; if your receiver is equipped with digital optical (Toslink) input, you can use a Toslink to mini cable; if your receiver only has RCA analog inputs, you can use a 3.5 mm to RCA adapter instead.

More to come

That covers the basics of physically connecting your Mac mini to your home entertainment system and having a workable system that you can access from the couch. Next we're going to get into how to configure the software on your Mac mini for optimal media center use.

Have questions already? Have you set up a Mac mini media server yourself? Share your thoughts, questions or comments below. I can't wait to hear from you!

Mac Mini Media Center Apps Windows 10

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