With the addition of the Mac Mini Server i bought earlier this week i now have a spare Mac Mini to toy around with.
A 1.5Ghz Core Solo with 2GB Ram.
Given that my Lacie portable broke just before christmas. Or rather, the controller board of Lacie broke (Like so many other Lacie drives) i did some swapping around with disks here and there and suddenly had a 250GB 7200RPM disk spare.
Earlier today i built that thing in into the Mac Mini. But damn was that fucker noisy! I quickly removed it and after some more swapping of disks it now has a 120GB disk at 5400RPM. Which is dead silent. Yay! Originally there was a 60GB disk in there.
Anyway, i wanted to try out the media center idea i’ve been having for weeks now. So i installed Snow Leopard on that machine, installed Plex and got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of poorly designed settings. After toying with that for a few hours i didn’t even get to play movies properly. The DTS Sound was broken (which is a bug in Plex for the last 6 or so versions) and embedded subtitles do not work. 2 very much required features. That and the total lack of user-friendliness made me decide to look for something else.
Boxee seems very nice, and it is. Apart from its lack of home screen customization, broken DTS downmixing , missing embedded subtitles and poor streaming capabilities i liked the interface a lot! However, since i don’t want to synchronize the mac with my server but just want boxee to look in my movies folder and stream them on demand. It kinda failed. Mounting shares is easy enough, which strangely goes via SMB and not AFP. But then accessing it in a decent matter is a whole different adventure. Every time i would have to go back to the home screen which has the latest online stuff from other users. Something i want to turn off since i’m not at all interested in it. And then find the share under ‘local’. Which lists a ton of other folders and paths you cannot remove. But are not at all familiar too. Another way is to use the browse feature which kinda lets you wander the harddisk and attached devices (including network disks) but that’s confusing too. So if your data is not local, it’s difficult to find. Add broken DTS downmixing and no support for embedded subtitles and you pretty much have a failed software package.
Another thing that didn’t work out well, despite several sites reviewing the Mini saying it was “totally doable”, is that HD content, say anything 1080i and similar, will not always play smoothly. 720p no problems there, streaming it over a 11g Wifi connection. But 1080i often went with a stutter. I’m not sure if it’s because of the wifi, or because of the CPU. But when i copied a file over it wasn’t much better. Just less frequent. So i guess the CPU is on the edge of being capable playing a 1080i movie that is h.264 encoded with AC3 5.1 sound.
stuttering 1080 content over wifi is very normal, it is just too slow as some 1080i content pushes out 20 to 30 mb per second.. play it directly from your HD and you will have no problem..
the other thing is Plex itself.. although they have great plugins that gives content from all over the web, it is waaaayyyy behind the development of the original XBMC.
i am using XBMC myself and still have to encounter the first hickup on my 1.86 dual core … but it will frequently hit the 150% cpu load.. which basicely means, no dual core.. then no multimedia or stick with very low res in which case you really must consider iTunes with an AppleTV. Used that for a long time and it is brilliant, if you can life without all the High Res stuff that is.
good luck with it!
However, as stated one of the media center ‘suites’ support proper AC3 or DTS. DTS currently is broken for all major things.
Meanwhile, we bought a new mini and use Front Row with Perian, which works perfectly well with a bluetooth keyboard and some aliases. Streaming 1080i WITH DTS sound over 11n wifi perfectly fine.