Apple Mac mini, Home Theater

This is a place marker for when I get around to writing about how I set up a mac mini as my center of media distribution for my Home Theater, also known as the Family Room.

I first heard about using a mac mini for a video server in March 2007, from a podcast I listen to called:

    www.htguys.com
They describe in detail what equipment they use and options they select.  I won't go over that here but in March of this year they updated that blog / podcast.  If you are interested in the details of their setup, here is a link:
The htguys mac-mini-video-server-update
It took me about 6 to 8 months to decide to try this, as I have been off Apple products since the first mac back in 1986 (i think). The final piece fell into place when I found out that Apple DVD player would play my home DVD files from a hard drive. Before this the some were using iso images of the DVD's and had an additional step to do before they would play.  The nice thing about this setup is that Front Row uses the DVD software seamlessly.  In the fall of 2007 I purchased the small $599 version with 1 gig memory and an 80gig hd. At this time Apple had just put out the Leapord OS-X upgrade and I was able to get that disk with this mac mini. I upgraded the OS and that is about it.  It was usable out of the box.  I got the small version, because I never intend to put music or DVD's on this box.  I have a Windows Home Server that hosts all of my media content and I link back to it for any media delivery through out my home network.  This is a different configuration than the htguys used, so I had a little work to do get this to work. 

1.     First step was getting  mac to talk to a windows server. Through a bit of research I found that  Apple OS-X and linux use an ASF network protocal to talk to each other and the windows world use the SMB protocal. I still had a lot of problems until Apple did a minor software update in December 2007. Then it started working.  From the Apple Finder program I clicked on the GO menu drop down and selected "Connect to Server".  In the dialog box I typed in "smb://192.168.0.11" where the number are the local ip address of the server to connect to.  Hint, you should make your local server ip address static, do not use your routers DHCP to asign an ip, otherwise when the router gives you server a new ip address apple won't be able to see it. Once it connects the server will want you to sign in. If you are not going to be saving or writing anything to the server and just reading files, music, and DVD's you can use a guest account. Otherwise sign in with an account the server recognizes with read write privileges.
2.     Now you have to get Front row to see the movie's on my server.  Front Row looks in the "user\movie" folder for any movies to play. Since I didn't want to nor have the room to put the movie's, I had to point to it somehow.  It took me a while but I found out that Apple uses something like shortcuts but calls the "Alias".  With in Finder I would press "ctrl" click on the directory "Adventure" for example and a menu would drop down and I selected "create Alias"  Since this Alias was created in my Server folder, I would drag it to my mac mini "movies" folder.  I did this for all movie catagories I had on the server. I categorized all the movies on my server by genera, "Action" "Drama" "Comedy" etc.
3.  The last little bit was just icing on the cake.  Apple has a nice "Cover Flow" look to most of its media art and I wanted the movies to show this.  So I got a small picture of the movie, a 35 to 50kb jpg works well and put it into the movie folder and name it "Preview.jpg" you will have a nice cover flow graphic of all the movies in the directorys in each subdirectory.

There you have it a mac mini home theater system.  By the way if you have any HD content, may be you purchased some at the iTunes store, and you have a nice HD TV you are using, then you can set the video out of the mac to 720p or 1080p what ever the native resolution is for your TV and now you have an HD Home Theater. NICE!   My mac mini streams 480p and iTunes 720p content nicely with no glitches or jerky.

One negative about using an Apple product for Home Theater is Apple's disdain for buttons. Trying to navigate the menu in Front Row or a DVD menu and having the volume go up and down when I want to navigate up and down is very frustrating, especially, since there are no other remote control options, yet.

Caution, I upgraded to "Snow Leopard" and had jerky video and audio problems.  After some discussion with the local Apple Genius bar guys, it turns out one of the way Apple was able to speed up the mac was to have Snow leopard use some of the GPU power.  That is fine for the new mac mini's which have upgraded video processors, but my 2007 version choked on the extra work load. The fix, down grade to Leopard, the jerky went away and all is well with the Home Theater.