So why do I want an Intel Mac Mini?
January 15th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Why did I want to see Apple debut the Intel Mac Mini and not the MacBook Pro? Because the Mac Mini is the perfect whisper-quiet media hub.
I already have a Mac Mini that works as my media hub and it works very, very well. The 80gb hard drive is just enough to store music, tv and photos but it’s not enough to file and forget. The wireless connection means I can tuck it in a corner and forget about it, which, along with the whisper-quiet operation (unlike most other PCs), I can easily do. The ATI remote and VNC connections give me plenty of control, as does the OS X platform which makes setting up SSH, Telnet or HTTP connections a piece of cake. I can even share the hard drive wirelessly making it easy to drag and drop photos to the hard drive using the PC elsewhere in the house. It’s a small thing, but a simple screensaver that randomly pulls out pictures and fades them in and out is a really, really good way of bringing all those wedding/birthday/holiday/baby pictures to life.
On top of that, the Elgato EyeTV box does a great job of piping the TV signal from my NTL box to the flat screen monitor. The quality is great, the picture is clear and the overall effect is just what I wanted. However, since the Mac Mini is only a G4 there’s no pausing live-TV, which is a shame (and fixable with an Intel Mac Mini, of course!). The only real downside is the quality of the recorded TV, which can be poor. However, I don’t watch or record enough TV to be too bothered by this. Although, sometimes the audio and video seem to get out of sync slightly when watching live TV, but I’m not sure what is the real cause of this.
Hicksdesign has a good writeup of the hardware and software involved in setting up a Mac Mini in this way. I’m sure that Front Row will turn up officially for other Macs pretty soon and it feels like the missing piece in the jigsaw that is my home setup.
To recap, the Mac Mini makes a great home media hub but, being more of a geek than a TV watcher, I’d have to say that the Mac Mini makes a great home server. The OS X and Unix platform give me ssh, ftp and web access as well as reliable shell access.