The blog & portfolio of Matthew J. Rogers

Mac Mini as a media center

September 12, 2008

Plex on Mac Mini

I have a lot of video media stored on my server (almost 2 terabytes), and I need a way to stream it to my television so we can watch the stuff from a couch instead of a desk chair. Years ago I started with a basic PC running Windows, then moved to a hacked original Xbox with Xbox Media Center, then to a hacked Apple TV. Today, I replaced my hacked Apple TV with a Mac Mini running the excellent Plex media center software.

The Plex interfacePlex is a fork of the original XBMC software that I used way back with my original Xbox. It has been updated and beautified, and definitely sports one of the sexiest user interfaces you’ll ever see gracing your screen. One of its greatest strengths is gathering information about your videos. You point it to your media, and as long as the files are named in a sane way it will go out and fetch all the metadata from online movie and TV databases — it downloads the episode/movie names, descriptions, and even cover art. This makes for a fantastic experience as you’re browsing through your media. You can see in the image here an example of this as I look at the movie “300″.

All in all, it’s fantastic using the Mini has a media center. I have full control over my huge media library using just my Logitech Harmony remote, but I can surf the web or do anything else I want with the computer just by pulling out the bluetooth keyboard and mouse from under the coffee table. Plex is a great piece of software already, and lots of improvements are planned. For digital media junkies, I think this is about as good as it gets right now.

Mac Mini

30 comments ›
Posted in Software Tags: , ,

Similar posts

30 comments

  • sparky September 13th, 2008 at 12:24 am

    nifty setup. which media console is that?

  • Matthew September 13th, 2008 at 11:30 am

    If you’re referring to the TV stand, that’s two Ikea LACK units that I modified so one could be bolted on top of the other. I talk about it a little bit in my comments on this Flickr page: http://flickr.com/photos/rogersmj/2243413596/in/set-72157603856977227/

  • Dom Barnes September 14th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    Nice looking Media Centre there. I’ve just tried Plex after a short trial of OSXBMC. Its a really beautiful program. And if I had an HD TV, it would look better. Its not so great going through DVI to Composite video onto a TV.
    Did you have any issues with getting Film and TV show data to come up? I had it at first, then it went when I moved some stuff, now its half there…

  • dj dead serious September 16th, 2008 at 2:44 am

    so is the mac mini a good option (instead of a PC desktop) to play large video files?

    right now I have my desktop connected to my 32″ Samsung Flatscreen TV, and I need to upgrade my PC to run BluRay rips smoothly.

    my question is, the mac mini is capable enough to play at least DVDrips right? What about blu ray rips?

  • Matthew September 16th, 2008 at 7:12 am

    @Dom Barnes… Most of my media was already very organized, so I just had to make a few changes in order for Plex’s scrapers to properly read my files. There are some tricks to it though, and I’m still ironing out the kinks.

    @dj… As long as it’s an Intel Mac Mini, it can play high-def (Blu Ray) rips without a problem. I watched a HD rip with it the other day, one of the Planet Earth episodes.

  • dj dead serious September 16th, 2008 at 6:14 pm

    Awesome. Thanks! Do you have the cheaper or more expensive mac mini?

  • Matthew September 16th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

    I bought the 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo, which is the lesser of the two available now. It occasionally pops up on Apple’s refurb store for $499.

  • PK September 23rd, 2008 at 12:12 am

    How do you access movies etc from another mac computer to the mac mini? i.e. If I had all my contents on a intel imac with an external hd, how do I get the mac mini to read all content wirelessly?

  • Matthew September 26th, 2008 at 8:01 am

    PK,

    All my content is on my main Mac in another room, and I share the media folders out over the network. The Mac Mini mounts those shares when it boots, and Plex treats them as any other folder — it doesn’t care if the media is local or not. Wireless isn’t going to work very well though; I’ve tried it, the video will sometimes stop and start even though my router is only one room away. Wired is the way to go, especially for high-quality video.

  • Hackintosh at 6 months | RogersMJ.com October 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    [...] file store (2.5+ TB) would return to either a basic Linux server or a Drobo. I could use the home theater Mac Mini to run any secondary tasks (like long downloads) that I can’t leave my MacBook Pro behind [...]

  • Follow up: Plex and the Mac Mini media center | RogersMJ.com November 5th, 2008 at 11:24 pm

    [...] couple months ago I wrote my initial impressions of Plex, a Mac-centric fork of the venerable XBMC software that was originally written for hacked [...]

  • Raphael Essoo-Snowdon November 24th, 2008 at 12:10 am

    AMAZING write up on PLEX and since reading I’m really interested in buying one, one questions if you don’t mind.

    - How are you connecting the Mac Mini to the TV, can my 1080p BluRay rips actually play in 1080p?

    Thanks

    P.S. Love the site – bookmarked!

  • Matthew November 24th, 2008 at 10:19 pm

    Raphael,

    The mini is connected via a DVI to HDMI cable (available for a few bucks at monoprice.com). You can buy that single cable, with HDMI at one and and DVI at the other, or you can just get a DVI to HDMI adapter for the back of the mini and use a regular HDMI cable.

    It will indeed play 1080p, as long as you have at least a Core Duo with 1GB of RAM.

    If you didn’t see it, I wrote a follow-up on my Plex experiences here: http://rogersmj.com/2008/11/05/follow-up-plex-and-the-mac-mini-media-center/

  • tarocchi December 11th, 2008 at 12:24 am

    what a great thing…you are very lucky!

  • Raphael Essoo-Snowdon January 5th, 2009 at 4:52 pm

    Was really inspired by your LACK “Hack” and was thinking about trying it out myself, I didn’t fully understand the explanation in your Flickr comments, could you brief a ‘Step-by-Step’ on how to achieve this?

    Thanks

  • Matthew January 5th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    Raphael…

    I’m not sure what else to say. As I mentioned, what appears to be the middle shelf on my stand is actually the bottom of the second LACK unit I bought. I just drilled some extra holes in each side once I saw how the pegs came out of the vertical side pieces. Picture the top half of my stand as a normal LACK unit, but then instead of having four legs under it, it’s got the sides and bottom of another LACK unit, *then* the legs. It was really, really simple…just buy the two units and if you have a measuring tape and a drill you can do it.

  • Chris January 6th, 2009 at 4:40 pm

    Hi

    I’m very interested in using a mac mini as a media centre. The only thing that concerns me is whether the resolution will match my tv (toshiba 32WLT66).

    Did you have any issues with the resolution through a HDMI lead?

    Chris

  • Matthew January 6th, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    @Chris: No, that’s no problem at all. The Mac Mini can do much higher resolution than your TV is capable of. If you check my follow-up article about this (http://rogersmj.com/2008/11/05/follow-up-plex-and-the-mac-mini-media-center/) I discuss connections a bit there. I use HDMI.

  • bsouth February 10th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    i want to use a mini as my media center front end as well but I want to setup a dedicated linux server of some sort to host all the music and videos files. does anyone have a good guide or advice as to how to do this properly? I just do not want to mess up and have to find all my tiny mistakes. Ideally, i would want the files to show up as just another drive as you mentioned earlier so that I can just play the files how i choose off the shared server drive. also, if i wanted to add files to the host server could i ftp them in? or manually add them from another computer to the server?

    sorry for beginner questions, but thank you

  • Matthew February 10th, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    @bsouth… yes, you can do all of that. In fact, I ran a Linux server as my main file repository for years. Now I just use my hackintosh, but it doesn’t really matter what you use. Ubuntu’s site has plenty of beginner guides for setting up basic file servers.

  • bsouth February 10th, 2009 at 1:50 pm

    ah yes i apologize, i caught the bug and started researching, seems like samba on a linux desktop install should do what i want to do and just share w/e folders i want. however, I want the shared connection, the folers themselves to appear as a drive on the desktop of the mac mini frontend… is this possible? if i connect to the samba connection through a mac mini?

  • spongerrich March 1st, 2009 at 5:43 am

    Great right up, just curious where you get the TV show content? Is it from HULU?

  • Doanius May 7th, 2009 at 4:13 am

    Matthew, I am thinking of buying a mac mini and doing what you are doing with Plex. Awesome setup by the way. My question is that did you have any issue with resolution and icons/menu bar/ doc going beyond the TV resolution. In the past, playing with windoze and TV resolution, it was a major pain because TV resolution doesn’t always match with video card resolution.

  • Matthew May 7th, 2009 at 7:04 am

    @spongerrich… No, I mostly download my content (from teh torrentz…shhh!) for archiving purposes after my TiVo records them. I’m keeping an eye on the Hulu/etc plugins for media center apps like Plex, though, and I think one day they’ll be good enough for me to stop downloading and storing the shows myself.

    @Doanius… Yeah I did have some resolution issues at first. After fighting with it in OS X for awhile (which can indeed output the proper resolution), I finally read somewhere that it was actually a TV setting you need to change to get it all to line up right. I can’t remember exactly what the setting was called (and it will vary from TV to TV anyway), but it was something like “Enable 1:1 pixel mapping” or something like that. Just play with the settings while on the input for your Mini and you should be able to make it work.

  • Alan June 30th, 2009 at 1:04 am

    I have a question. I have a sony crt 1080p TV and running plex through a 2009 mac mini 2.26 with gig’s of ram connected to a drobo via fire wire 800. I sometimes get a milli sec pause or frame drop. It seems to happen with avi dvd rips. What are the proper or best settings for plex. Is this a common problem if not what am i doing wrong. Is it the Tv do I need a newer tv. Help

  • ?????? September 26th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

    what a great thing…you are very lucky!

  • Lime Review | Independent Expert Analysis » Cool Mac Mini images June 23rd, 2010 at 5:16 pm

    [...] Plex (the OS X fork of the famed XBMC project) is a beautiful media center. More info in my blog post. [...]

  • Wesman June 25th, 2010 at 11:17 am

    what do you use as a DVR? I dont think PLEX supports that

  • Warren July 12th, 2010 at 8:03 pm

    I have a very similar setup to his, but using a Pioneer display. Plex can’t be used as a DVR at this time. Most users acquire their content using other means.

  • t goes July 18th, 2010 at 3:06 pm

    i phone theme for blackberry is hot .keep doin what u do

Leave a comment