the rockstars over at engadget posted a fairly comprehensive how-to on using your mac mini as a home media center. what do you think — will mac mini hacking be as common as the crazy stuff people do with mini-itx boxes?
10 thoughts on “How-to Turn Your Mac Mini Into A Media Center”
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The amount of extras that you need really drills home the point that it ain’t quite there yet. Now if someone put out a box the same size as the mini wth a big hard drive, audio/video in/out and a few xtra ports then that would be good. Sit it next to your mac mini in the stereo rack and connect via firewire. It would look good and get rid of all the extra boxes.
slow news day eh?
I’m trying to get started in a hobby with electronics hacking… Does anyone have any suggestions to get me started down a path where I might someday be able to build, say, the minty mp3 (years from now of course :) ). I have a master’s in CS, if that helps. Any suggestions are great! Thanks!
If you’re going to add so many extra components (including a PC?) it totally defeats the purpose of using the mac mini in the first place.
The mac mini is by no means a home theater – it is a great portable media box tho. Get a HD-ready TV with VGA input and you’re laughing.
Seriously There is not this much needed.
If you can swingit you could use a Dazle Video Creator (eh, whom am i kidding) or get a USB TV tuner.
Then Smack a big ol 200gb usb2 drive (gotta have that one firewire for the Camera) and you have a tivo.
If you have the SuperDrive you have a DVD+- RW/TiVo equivilant.
Now put some music and some pictures on it and now you have a basic machine.
What more do you need? Games? Just wait. They will be here.
/macbias && article simplification
Way easier:
MyTV USB ~ $125
USB 2/Firewire Drive (big) ~ $200
Software:
MythTV
http://www.byopvr.com/displayarticle246.html
Better Yet get an ‘Eye TV wonder’ has everything you need. (HW and SW)
http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetvwonder
If you need HDTV support look at:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040426151111599
the real hack of today isn’t turning the mini mac into a htpc, but its all about finding the schematics to turn that DVI port to SVIDEO!
i’m currently scouring the net to try and find something.
I think this is a good hack to begin with. But, and yes there is a but, I think that this “mini mac” is to small to handle this. Why not by some cheap clone and build off of it. Still it’s a new hack on new hardware. You have to love that. I think that with time we will see something useful out of this hack. I am writing this as an apple hater, but you have to give them points for trying something we are all thinking. :)
21.5 mb pdf manual for modifying Mac mini at http://tinyurl.com/6nndc
I think this is a great hack, however, I have a Mac Mini 1.83 Core Duo that I have simply hooked up 700GB’s of Firewire drive space to, loaded my entire iTunes library up and now I have basically stopped watching television altogether, aside from the occasional nightly news BS that I have to see sometimes. Frontrow and the nifty little remote have become a very good friend of mine lately. The only hack I have done to this Mac Mini was to replace the original Core Solo 1.5GHz with the 1.83 Core Duo, which is not realy a hack but it was a bit more work than I want to admit.