This kind of self-contained functionality and utility was something I once had with the original Apple TV that I now have regained with the Mac mini. What can I say. Office and other various browsers and applications have begun to just move on. That will give me the most options. That solution eliminates the partition issues I was having with the mid Mini and lets me use the machine how I want, when I want. Looking even further down the line, I will have to give up the ghost at some point for media — at least with purchased content.

That means sucking it up and moving on, living with less-desirable solutions like the streaming-only 4K Apple TV or creating my own experience though locally stored content and a media center application that can replicate an experience similar to what was there with iTunes 10 or even XBMC that were feature rich.

It has more than enough oomph to drive 4k video and is still relatively compact. Low End Mac is funded primarily through donations. All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact BackBeat Media at This number is for advertising only.

Mac Media Center – Setup any Mac as a Media Center Easily

Awesome app that allows you to use your phone as a trackpad, as well as a remote control for Plex. This article shows you how to make a custom remote screen with a decently attractive theme. Very sweet.

Air Video. Allows you to stream movies from your Mac Mini to your iPhone, works over 3G albeit very slowly! I highly, highly recommend a very strong password on your Mac Mini. I accomplished this by getting a free account at DynDNS. You can pick from a few free domains, most of them pretty terrible. Very nice web server stack that installs and runs very smoothly. By default, Apache listens on port Most ISPs block traffic on port 80 mine did , so you can make Apache listen to a different port by editing your httpd. Now go to a browser and enter the following URL: Torrents are ready to go by the time I get home!

My Mac Mini happened to be So in my router settings I set up the following rules under the port-forwarding settings:. VNC - Forward to: Web Server - Forward to: Torrents - Forward to: If you happen to own your own domain name you can avoid having to type in those ugly URLs blah. Simply open or create an. Now when you type in yourdomain. You should do the same if you want the capabilities listed here. Type in:. You can see a guide to setup secure screen sharing in OS X here.

Image via Flickr ]. Thanks again Jordan! We got this awesome submission from a reader who found the following content originally on the social sharing site Reddit. Thank you to Derek Lee for the submission, and a special thanks to Jordan at Shift Creative for the guide and permission to republish! Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to the OSXDaily newsletter to get more of our great Apple tips, tricks, and important news delivered to your inbox! Enter your email address below:.

I have a Mini sitting around gathering dust since upgrading to my lovely iMac… bookmarked for reading later, looks like a good weekend project: D thanks! For torrents, just have Transmission watch a folder in your dropbox for new torrent files, you can add a torrent into that folder from any computer that is synched to your dropbox.

Am I crazy to consider a 2012 Mini for home server?

Works a treat. The remote access function in Transmission allows you to control your torrents remotely. I also use Sabnzbd for remote Usenet access — I find Usenet download speeds are generally much quicker than torrents. Great article. I have a very similar setup, however I wish there was a way to make the torrents expand to the playable format instead of an archive zip file for example so you can just fire up FrontRow and watch the movie just downloaded.

I can do this, but only when the torrent is an AVI or Quicktime or such… any suggestions welcomed. Links Comments 0 Trackbacks 0 Leave a comment Trackback […]. Of course if […]. Cool guide dude! You should check out applemediacenter. Plug in one HDMI cable and start […]. Does anyone know of a good TV? But, the top and bottom of the display is chopped-off. Videos and audio is working really well.. I wanted to make my setup more friendly to the average cable viewer in order to entice them to cancel their cable so I searched for a bluetooth powered program to run a remote.

I ditched my cable service a year ago and went with a Mac Mini to access all the content I was missing, and I just did a series of blog posts on the whole process. If anyone is interested in a beginners guide to getting started with this, you can find it on my site here: Ill have out wireless internet hooked up soon. However having read a few Mac mini media articles, maybe the Mac mini is the right road to go down.

The Mac mini would […].


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Great article, but I want to remove the big sound system. Does anyone know of some in-ceiling speakers that will connect directly to the mini without an amp? They plug straight in. Do you have any hint about how to extend this to display content on a second TV wirelessly? It is my understanding that the new apple TV will only let me do that with content inside iTunes. Fire up that Mac Mini media center and start […]. And everyone should try Sofa Control app whenever you have a mac mini as media center… Well try it cause you can run your machine without mouse only the iRemote: If you happen to have a Mac Mini, turning it into a media center is also a great […].

If you use the mac mini as described, could you also connect a NAS to the mini as storage for all of your photos, movies, music, etc? We have a macbook pro and numerous seagate external drives that store all of our content. Could it be an overscan issue? This would be particularly cool to run on a Mac Mini media center if you have […]. I found your site is very well ranked on bing i was wondering if you could give a few tips..

I still cant get over how amazing of a writing style you have. For a long time me and my associates have studied this exact field! If you get the eye tv by elgato you can watch everything live and use your mini as a dvr. You'll definitely have a better experience in terms of performance with a Hackintosh, but in terms of the software experience, nothing beats a VM other than a real Mac. I didn't have to do anything special to get iCloud, iMessages or Handoff to work. Like Tsur pointed out, you have to invest in an external array and then populate it with disk.

I used a FireWire-enabled Drobo and it was horrifying awful. Performance was just abysmal on the mini with it.

How to add a Mac mini to Your Home Theater System. - Part One: Hardware

I cannot overstate how much better the NAS was. Plug and play and forget about it. It's just so flexible.

How to setup a Mac Mini Media Center, server, and remote torrents box

I realize this is Ars, but I can't see the allure in Hackintosh and the nightmare of sourcing the parts, building, configuring, and praying every update doesn't break the thing. Maybe I'm lazy, but aside from 5 minutes of setting up the NAS when you unbox it, you never have to worry about it again. The Mac mini would do the job very well but at this age, I'd worry about it dying on you in the next year I know I'm seeing questionable behavior.

With the Lacie, I use it for Time Machine backups. I'm surprised by your experience with Drobo on the Mini. At this point I'm definitely picking up the old Mini at work tomorrow, but I still don't have external storage picked out. So far I've figured that performance of the external disk wouldn't be much of an issue for media library storage and backup, and that an external RAID box would be a waste of money—I'm not editing uncompressed 4k here! Maybe I should look at something like the DS14 though… with 1 drive to start, it might be in the budget in addition to the Mini that I can still use for iTunes, Handbrake minus the malware?