In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps to build a Mac Media Center. Ever since Apple announced the Mac Mini, everyone has been talking about building a Mac Media Center and using a Mac Mini to do it. You will use your Mac Media Center to decide which Mac will best suit your needs.
The Mac Mini
The Mac Mini seems like the obvious solution for a Mac Media Center. Its small design and low noise and heat levels make it a great candidate to fit in with your existing combination of stylish audio equipment. Ports to connect it to all the additional equipment you need. The last thing you need is a big ugly tower box, with loud fans to sit next to your TV and destroy whatever audio fidelity you’re trying to enjoy. And the Mac Mini has some sex appeal, too.
IMac
The iMac is also a good candidate for Mac Media Center, although its appeal is slightly different from that of the Mac Mini. It can be used as a desktop machine during the day and switched to a Mac Media Center at night. The iMac comes in various sizes, from 17 “to 24”, depending on what space you have available and where you want to place it. You have few options. The iMac comes standard with almost everything you need to use it as a Mac Media Center.
The rest of the Mac Pac
The Mac Pro, iBook, and Mac Book Pro aren’t as versatile as the Mac Mini and iMac, but they can still be used as a Mac Media Center, but not as a dedicated media center. Media Center is insane. It’s a bit like using a crowbar to open a can of beans. In the rest of the article I will use a Mac Mini as an example. I have a Mac Mini and have built a media center out of it, so hopefully using my first-hand experience will be a bit more accurate than speculating what is possible if you have x … y … z .. There are a couple of things you’ll need to get your Mac Mini up and running as Mac Media Center. they work fine and some are just a mess.
Remote controls for your Mac Media Center The first device you’ll need to start looking for is a remote control. After all, what good is a Mac Media Center without a remote control that the family can fight over. There’s the infamous Apple remote that comes with most Mac minis and iMacs. It’s a small remote, but it works fine. It comes in typical mac style. It’s small, does everything you need, and doesn’t have fancy features. All in all, it only has 6 buttons that allow you to control the entire Mac Media Center.
There are also several generic remote controls available. Logitech has a ton of remotes, some of which work well with Macs and some of which just for PCs. I have a keyboard and remote from Microsoft, and I haven’t been able to get them to work on the Mac. I recommend using the Mac remote. It’s small, and with half a dozen buttons it’s pretty easy to use. The remote control of my DVD player, for example, has 47 buttons, most of which I have never used and I am not the least inclined to discover how they work ”. You will also need a keyboard for your Mac Media Center Edition.Of course, there are times when you need to enter some data on the screen, like in iTunes, for example, you may need to enter your password when purchasing content. Pushing a button, I mean we barely found the energy to get up for another beer.
Apple has a nice bluetooth keyboard that you can use from your couch. It looks like a normal Apple keyboard, but it has no cables and only fits a couple of batteries in the back. Every now and then you NEED a keyboard and having to get out from under a warm blanket in the middle of winter can spoil the mood. Of course, Logitech and a few others have keyboards that would work just as well. But pairing an Apple bluetooth keyboard with the built-in bluetooth on a Mac Mini is easier than making toast. Several times, at best, the Mac Mini will only have an 80GB hard drive, and when you’re downloading movies, TV shows, music, adding your own CDs, and dumping your digital images, it can eat up disk space. fairly quickly. you know, you are looking for some kind of storage device. You now have a couple of options when it comes to storage.
You can connect something directly to your Mac Media Center, like a USB or Firewire drive, or you can connect a network-attached storage device. If you want storage for multimedia content only and you want it to be available for Mac Media Center only, a USB or Firewire drive is a great option. But if you have more than one computer on your network, as most homes today seem to have, you may want to consider a netwrk attached storage device, also known as a NAS. , and you have an idea of where you are going with some additional storage in the not too distant future, you need to sit down and consider what software you want to use with your Mac Media Center.
You have about a dozen options, I’ve gone through a bunch of them and narrowed them down to 3 that I think you should consider. The best way to decide which media center app you want to use is to install all 3, use them for a week or two and then make your decision. My Mac Mini came with the front row, and that’s what I decided to use. But here’s a breakdown of the 3 I suggest: Front Row The front row is an apple app, and it comes on most Mac Mini’s. It’s a simple interface, it looks a lot like an iPod interface, and it has that glass effect. It’s a very cool interface and makes your TV appear to be in a league of its own. Center StageCenter Stage is an open source application for Mac Media Center. It’s a good design and there is ongoing support and development for it. Center Stage is much more customizable than the first row and allows you to install multiple skins. Center Stage also has additional plug-ins for your Mac Media Center to do more. Make sure to run the stable version. Running a beta version could cause unwanted interruptions during your romantic movie that will result in a night on the couch. ITheatreiTheter is also an open source Mac Media Center.
It is intended to work on almost all Macs. Well, maybe never, but at least in recent years. ITheater also has the best user interface (UI) of the 3. It integrates a bunch of other features and can also display the weather. mac mini, remote control, keyboard, storage and user interface are neat, you need to consider some plugins to make the whole media center a little more enjoyable Connector.DVI-HDMITo improve the display quality of your images , and if your TV supports it, get a DVI to HDMI converter. The Mac Mini has a digital output, and if you can keep your digital output directly on the TV, you will benefit from the video quality. So using a DVI to HDMI converter will remove your audio, but keep your video. You can use your Mac Mini’s audio mini-jack output to bring audio to your TV. TV Your TV is not really an add-on, I can’t imagine you having a media center without the TV. Like a car without an engine (I had one of those for a while and it’s not that great). The most important thing is your contribution.
You need to at least have a VGA input. HDMI is preferable, but VGA is minimal. Having audio is another requirement. While you can get away with not having an audio input on your TV, it will only make your life a bit more complicated. Being able to connect your TV directly to your sound system will allow you to control the audio volume on your Mac Mini from one central place. For more information, visit http://www.shawnsweekly.com. ITunesiTunes forms the basis of your digital content.
I’ve been using Front Row and it integrates very well into iTunes. So when I browse the menus, it’s like browsing iTunes on an iPod interface. Using iTunes means that you can download movies, TV shows, and music from the iTunes store. Once the media has been downloaded, you can access and view it with the click of a button. This is a very easy integration and is done automatically for you. Using iTunes to add your CD library to your computer is another great feature. And from your media center, you can simply click on the remote and play your entire music collection. Just download Apple’s bootcamp, load your favorite operating system, set up your media center, and you’re done. You can run Mac OSX, Windows, or Linux and configure your Media Center the way you want.
