Mac mini: the brains & the brawn

Every home theatre setup needs a brain... For me, that brain has to be a Mac mini. Don't get me wrong, although I have a lot of Apple kit I wouldn't consider myself a Mac zealot; I run XP, Ubuntu & Windows 7 for a variety of purposes (some of which I'll get round to writing up on the blog, stay tuned ;) ). But I've yet to find a more aesthetically pleasing, powerful, and easily integrated solution to a home theatre epicentre than the Mac mini. Not cheap, by any means, but damn good :)

My HTPC experiments started about three years ago when I decided to replace my noisy, clunky, home-built PC with a sexy little Mac mini. It was a September 2006 model with a gigabyte of RAM and a 1.83GHz Core Duo (T2400). I promptly stuck it on my computer desk in the spare bedroom (aka the study or computer room), and left it there for well over a year. What a ridiculous waste of a great piece of kit! I subsequently hit on the idea of getting my audio and video content from the Mac mini on to my living room TV somehow, and spent many hours investigating streaming solutions, old XBoxes, Apple TVs, slingboxes and squeezeboxes, before having a eureka moment... all I had to do was pick my mac mini up and stick it to the side of my TV! What a revelation! My spare bedroom became a spare bedroom again, and I got my wish of video and audio content from my computer right there on my living room screen!

Since then, I haven't looked back, and I haven't had a separate, traditional computer in my house. My trusty Mac mini has stood proudly by my TV set right up until it took early retirement last night, when I replaced it with a younger, faster model.

So why a Mac mini and not an Apple TV or similar? Well, the issue with buying into the Apple brand is the risk of... how to put it nicely... having your user experience controlled by Cupertino. I'm a tinkerer, I like to get a piece of kit in and see what I can do with it. An Apple TV is just too... appliancey. It's too pared down, too locked down, and too limiting. I wasn't sure exactly how slick the software solutions would prove to be, I wasn't even completely sure what I wanted to do with it, so instead of going the appliance-trying-to-be-a-PC route with the likes of the Xbox, Apple TV, and their ilk, I rather went for a PC-pretending-to-be-an-appliance: all the power of a full operating system in a aesthetically pleasing and above all quiet package.

Elgato EyeTV: a must have for any Mac HTPC

Any HTPC worth its salt needs to be able to handle broadcast TV, and I've got no big surprises here... anyone even remotely interested in Mac-based HTPCs will have heard of Elgato and their range of EyeTV devices. They offer a number of different USB sticks to enable live TV to be displayed, recorded and time-shifted on Macs. I bought an EyeTV Diversity which I'd highly recommend over the other devices in the range; it provides two aerial inputs and dual tuners to allow recording one channel while watching another. Pretty much a minimum requirement for any PVR if you ask me! You don't need two separate aerials or even an aerial splitter to set this up; everything you need to hook up a single aerial comes in the box.



Live TV is displayed in a window which can be expanded to full screen, and the chunky interface is fully compatible with the Apple remote. Elgato make their own remote, but I much prefer the simplicity of the Apple remote (as long as another piece of software is thrown into the mix - more on Remote Buddy in a later post).

The Elgato software is very slick, as long as you're using a Mac. If you're on Windows, you can still use the kit with a third party application shipped on the same CD, but I tried it out on a Windows 7 box (more on that box later :) ) and to be honest it was awful. On Mac however you're using Elgato's own in-house software which is as slick and polished as it comes. It has a nice big UI, and you can do everything you want straight through the on screen menu system using a remote control. You can also whip out a mouse and use a more typical interface too, should the remote control operation get a bit tiring.

TV listings require an account on a listings website, and a 12 month subscription is included in the box. After a bit of research, I found it is possible to substitute in a free listings service when the subscription expires.

Recording programs out to hard disk is fairly space-intensive, running around about 2GB for an hour. They are stored as MPG files which can be played back either through Elgato's software or through any other MPG playback system, such as XBMC and Air Video. The latter of these is covered in another post, but it's worth bringing up here as Elgato's software allows you to export recordings to an iPhone friendly streaming format. Now, running this on my old Mac mini was not a lot of fun; the transcoding is pretty heavyweight and brought my system to its knees. Elgato sell a hardware accelerator USB stick snappily named the Turbo 264 HD 1080p Video Encoder/Accelerator to offload the majority of the work from the processor, but it costs a pretty penny. The best tip I can give you is to download Air Video Server by InMethod. They sell an accompanying iPhone client called Air Video (for a measly £1.79 last time I checked) and the two pieces of software together allow you to stream any video out to the iPhone via Wifi or 3G, whether you've transcoded it in advance or doing it on the fly. The performance hit is nowhere near that of Elgato's transcoding, so this is absolutely the way to go in my opinion. More on Air Video in another post, but suffice to say, leave that "Prepare all new recordings for iPhone access" option unchecked for now ;)

The general iPhone access however is well worth enabling, and go and install the Elgato EyeTV iPhone app. It will let you review your recordings, schedules and guides on the go. Never get caught out missing a program again!

Anyway, there's probably a ton more I could say on EyeTV, but I've written enough for now and Family Guy is on in a window next to this which is incredibly distracting but infinitely more entertaining :)

XBMC or Plex?

The first thing I'd recommend for anyone interested in their own HTPC is a top-notch media player front end. Even before forking out for the right kind of hardware to run this on, I'd suggest heading over to xbmc.org or plexapp.com and try the software on for size on any kit you have handy. Plex and XBMC are two very slick, polished media players who share a lot of DNA. Plex is Mac-specific, whereas you can get a build of XBMC for pretty much any piece of hardware you might have lying around already.

Welcome to XBMC:

and Plex:


The first thing to say when comparing these two is that Plex is an offshoot from the XBMC code stream and has been diverging ever since. The Plex team have done a fantastic job of polishing up third party application support, installing plugins for streaming services such as YouTube & iPlayer (to pick the two most obvious examples). It's possible to install similar plugins in to XBMC of course (and I think perhaps the plugin library for XBMC is larger), but XBMC hasn't put so much time and effort into making it a slick process. While Plex hides any technical detail behind a simple, searchable interface not unlike Apple's own App store (in fact the Plex team also use the name App Store for their interface), XBMC happily shows its SVN backend to the user and leaves them to navigate a deeply nested file hierarchy to find the plugins of interest.

The clunky XBMC plugin system:

And the smooth as silk Plex approach:


On the downside, in my experience XBMC is by far the more responsive UI to use, which is such an important factor of any living room equipment. When I click a button, I want the system to respond immediately. XBMC does... Plex not so much. I often found an irritating one or two second delay when interacting with the Plex UI. Now admittedly this was on my old generation kit (more on the hardware in a later post) and perhaps the UI is perfectly responsive on my brand spanking new Mac mini, but for now XBMC is doing a nice job for me.

So I'm in the XBMC camp right now, but I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming release of Plex 9 which is set to bring a whole new decentralized media server implementation to the party. That might just be enough to make me switch back :)

A new toy and a new blog!

So I've just upgraded the heart of my home entertainment centre with a shiny new Mac mini. I've had a Mac mini hooked up to my living room TV as an HTPC for a couple of years now, but the hardware has struggled a bit to cope with the load. Not any more :) My main media server is now purring along very nicely indeed, serving out music and video from a whole range of sources out around the house and beyond, courtesy of a few handy iPhone apps.

I've explained to a few people what software & hardware I run on my HTPC and in other places around the house, but I figured I'd get it written up in a blog over the next few weeks (or maybe months!). I plan to write up my experiences so far after a couple of years experimenting with different bits of kit, what has worked, what really hasn't, and hopefully figure out what to do next... well, I do now have an old Mac mini lying around doing nothing after all :)

My goal is always to put together a system so slick, so simple and user-friendly, that partners, family members and visitors can use it without a 30 minute presentation and a lot of hand-holding. My litmus test for any new piece of function I build in is the reaction I get from my GF: boredom and confusion are a miss, and while excitement is perhaps a bit of a stretch, mild interest and actually using the system herself are the seals of approval I go for. I'd love to hear about other peoples experiences with this stuff as I'm always on the lookout for adding new toys.