When we last left off, I was busy prying open my new Mac Mini to get at its deliciously compact innards with a screwdriver and putty knife. Opening up and messing with the internals of the Mini is much more annoying than it should be, but I was able to shove two new sticks of RAM and a new hard drive in the machine with minimal warranty-voiding destruction.
With it finally sitting attractively underneath the TV, I spent some time upgrading it into an actual useful media box befit of the pedigree looming overhead. It’s still a work-in-progress, but the requirements for a living room media center running OSX are a bit different from the workstation/gaming PC setups I’m used to:
On the hardware side, I’m assembled pretty much all I’ll need for media consumption,
- The Mac Mini; of course
- Samsung HDTV; connected to the Mini via mini Display Port → DVI → HDMI adapters and cables
- Onkyo receiver; connected to the Mini via a mini Optical → optical TOSlink cable
- Dinovo Edge keyboard; great wireless media center keyboard, with an on-keyboard trackpad and rechargeable internal batteries wrapped in a sexy black shell
- Harmony One remote; helps turn all the components on, and even controls the Mini, albeit only with directional arrow keys and enter
- Airport Extreme router; for 802.11n, HD-streaming goodness
The software side is still minimally configured, but so far,
- Firefox; for streaming video sites like ABC, Hulu, and Fox
- Boxee; aggregates video from various internet sources as well as local media, presenting everything in a TV-friendly interface
- Windows Live Sync; keeps media files in-sync between the Mini and my desktop so I can still play my music locally, plus having data redundancy is nice
- DoubleCommand; remaps keyboard keys for friendlier OSX keyboardin’
Eventually, I’d like to have the Mini be a media server, auto-downloading and streaming shows, music, podcasts, and pictures to anything else on the network. Certainly it’s beefy CPU and 802.11n wireless are up to the task, but the small form factor lets it fit into the living room, and the cheap power intake (overall it just uses laptop parts, idling at a mere 13 watts!) lets me keep the box constantly on, with OSX proving remarkably stable.
And it’s changed how I consume popular media; no longer do I have to be chained to my desk, squint at Sui’s laptop, nor fiddle with the frustratingly fickle PS3 browser to watch the aforementioned shows. Having television programming shown on a television without paying for cable is a great feeling, and between over-the-air channels and online videos, all I’m missing are my live NBA games (1).
I hereby deem this experiment a success.
- although this year, abc is generously showing one live game per day on their network, available over the air (↩)