| | Author | Message |
|---|
ryanflucas
  
| | #1 posted August 19, 2007 at 1:14am (EDT) |
It's not mine, but my uncle's. He's lending it to me for a month while he moves between two houses. He wants me to update everything, and then set it up as a Media Server. He plans on buying a HD LCD TV and connecting this to it to play his movies. He wants to rip DVD's to the hard disk and play them thru his entertainment center (TV, surround sound, etc). He eventually plans on upgrading to an Apple TV.
He has a Newer Tech Mini Stack V2 connected via firewire with a Seagate 500GB hard disk inside. The Mac Model is the Intel 1.83/1GB Ram/80GB Hard Disk/SuperDrive/AP/BT/Wireless MightyMouse & Keyboard. He has iWork 08 and iLife 08 installed.
Any suggestions on where to start? Are any of you already doing this? By the way this thing is so damn tiny, I feel like I'm looking at a newborn baby or something. The only Mac I personally own is a PowerMac G3 Yosemite. I've used others since but this is quite a jump. My plan has been to wait until late this year to next year and buy a iMac with a decent amount of dedicated video memory.
 | ndrake
  
| | #2 posted August 24, 2007 at 4:15pm (EDT) |
Is this one of the newly update Core 2 Duo ones? Did it come with Front Row and a remote? If so, that could be a decent interface to play the movies. I'd recommend installing Perian. It is a Quicktime plugin which lets Quicktime (and therefore Front Row) play a ton of formats (DIVX, XVID, etc) that it doesn't support by default.
Did you want to do full size DVD rips or convert them to another format? Check out Mac the Ripper for straight rips, or Handbrake to convert to MPEG-4. To have Front Row play straight DVD rips you'll need something like this.
If he wants to turn it into a DVR, Elgato's eyeTV is supposed to be nice (I've never used it).
Here is a tutorial on making a DVD jukebox out of a Mac Mini: http://modmini.com/theatre/howto/dvdjukebox/index.... |
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