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August 19th, 2006 by eyal | Filed under Techie. |
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I’m thinking of setting up a Media Centre so I can view photos, plays mp3 music, video files and DVDs in the living room from a single location. Microsoft has Windows Media Player which one of my friends uses but I was thinking of getting a Mac mini and Front Row as I’ve never had a Mac (20 years now on Microsoft DOS + Windows). Does anyone out there uses a HTPC or even better a Mac based Home Theatre Media Centre and has some tips? I’m not looking to invest gazillions in it. It’s mostly for playing mp3’s across multiple shared iTunes repositories, playing video files and toying around with a Mac.
Done the switch from Windows to Mac world about a year ago and never loooked back. Get a Mini and an Elgato Hybrid and you will never be dissapointed.
Thanks, Stan.
A modded xbox running XBMC (XBox Media Center) will be a far cheaper way of getting pretty much all you want , except for the live tv media center part. There is nothing really out there that comes close to what XBMC can do, the xbox360 and its media center is a far more crippled way of doing it.
XBMC supports pretty much any type of video downloaded, the music player is the best around with support for an amazing variety of visualisations (7000+ presets using milkdrop viz), photo viewer, net radio streams, quicktime movie trailers and so on.
You can always use various downloadable scripts (python) running under XBMC for extra functionality such as weather and stock tickers etc.
The caveat is that if your not technically inclined, getting it all to work maybe a faily demanding task i.e mod yourself, locate the software and config it etc. Still its a great learning experience.
Something to consider anyway.
Interesting about the XBMC. I’ll check it out although I’m not that technically inclined.. there used to be places here you could get the xbox modded but Msft clapmed down on it and they’ve all disappeared.
I built a media centre last year. It’s based on Windows XP Media Centre Edition. You can build a great machine at arround 700 USD. There are some great HTPC cases out there that look pretty much like an HiFi receiver. You can start with a uATX MB with everything on it (I used the MSI RS482M2), add a dual core cpu, 1GB of memory, HD and most important a video capture card (I used the Hauppauge PVR 500 MCE which has dual tuners). Don’t forget to squeeze in a wireless adapter and you’re done.
Take a look at the following Antec Fusion HTPC case at http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2006642,00.asp
You can get great tips at http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1910025,00.asp
It’s quite expensive configuration but it will give you a good background
Hi Eyal, I didn’t realize you were a reader :)
Thanks for the recommendations.. I actually just bought this 2 days ago: http://www.snazio.com/Links/Net%20DVD%20Cinema.htm
A cheap alternative (at $250) it let’s me stream audio, video and photos wirelessly (or on a LAN) from multiple machines on my wireless network as well as USB devices to DVI/RCA/S-video/5.1 outputs. It also supports iTunes which was a big plus as my entire collection, ratings, play lists and album cover arts are in iTunes. Also a nice thing is that I can hook up my laptop, desktop and iPod to it so I’m not limited to a single machine.
The only thing it doesn’t do is the TV part which I wasn’t interested in (I don’t subscribe to Cable TV).
Hi Eyal,
Actually I’m not a reader. I just heard you were looking for a media centre and I wanted to share my experience. We use the option to record TV shows quite a lot. We record Amit’s favorite shows. We also use it to record our favorite shows and watch them later on.
Actually the main use is for watching TV shows (using bittorrent). I highly recommend Lost and Prison Break if you didn’t watch them.
Anyway, part of the fun in my media centre project was searching for the components and building the machine. I ordered most of the stuff from the US through friends and it took me about 5 months to gather all components and build the computer.
What you ended up buying seems great. We don’t have that kind of stuff here.