Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Peripherals, Odds and ends, Mac mini
Showing off a Mac mini media center
This weekend I had some time to kill before going to catch a movie, so I dropped by a friend's house to show him some videos, which were all funny movies off the net, stuff like Wonder Showzen and that one of Chris Pirillo talking about eating his nuts. Unfortunately, I had left the DVD burns of these vids at work. Burning more wasn't an option, because I discovered this less than an hour before leaving. What to do? Well I wrapped up my Mac mini, the AV adapter (for output to a TV), a mini-plug to stereo RCA cable, an old blueberry puck mouse from my ancient G3 tower, and took them on the road in my laptop case. Setup took about 5 minutes, and the reaction was priceless.First, my friend and his fiancé had never glimpsed a Mac mini. They were impressed. "That's a computer?" I had taken the form factor for granted. When I plugged the system into his massive (but old) standard-def big-screen TV, it looked beautiful. I've used the mini on a TV before, but nothing over 30 inches. This was over 4 feet diagonally, and the menus were legible, the dock looked great— just wonderful. The only problem: no remote. My friend asked me if they made a remote. Instead of launching into a typical Mac fanboy rant about ATI this, iMac that, I just said yes, and let his imagination wander. Without a keyboard, I wasn't able to enter fullscreen mode in VLC, but nonetheless the videos looked great. Even WMV's with atrocious blockiness looked nice given the downsampling of the signal.
So my point: a Mac mini media center will be a hit, and I know at least two people who now want one. The total cost of this rig was less than $600! If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend turning a mini into a sort of video jukebox. Next time I'll be sure to install FrontRow or something like it, and really show them some Mac style. Has anyone else had a chance to rock the house like this?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chris Liscio said 7:54PM on 12-05-2005
You can certainly *enter* fullscreen mode in VLC with just a mouse. It's under the Video menu. However, getting out of fullscreen mode isn't obvious to me. It's not like the DVD player, where the menu floats down if you mouse to the top of the screen.
Also, you should keep a DVI cable in your "portable media kit" in case you ever get a chance to hook up to a true HD set. That's certainly the most impressive demo of all, because most folks have only ever seen the standard component video output from a PC.
This same note holds true for PowerBook owners. I hook up my 15" PowerBook to my HD set all the time (through the DVI port), which is awesome for iPhoto slideshows. It's still quite rare for PC notebooks to put DVI ports for external displays...
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Craig Kirk said 8:33PM on 12-05-2005
This may help for controlling VLC on a media center mac. I wrote a dashboard widget to remotely control VLC over a network using its HTTP interface. It can be used locally by setting the ip address to localhost.
http://www.autopoetic.com/vlcremote/
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jpmist said 10:02PM on 12-05-2005
Too bad no Bluetooth phone, ya coulda used it as a remote. That would have blown their minds. . .
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Stacey said 10:05PM on 12-05-2005
Well, this past summer, our family went on vacation to Disney world. I have a sony Mavica, which as you may know uses mini-cd's for storing it's photos. Well, in lieu of buying several blank cd-r's, i opted to use my set of 4 cd-rw's, and take my mini with me. Hooked it up to the TV in the room, used my wireless mouse and keyboard from across the room, and downloaded my photos each evening into iPhoto, and everyone watched a slideshow of the day. It was great!
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Brian Glasscock said 10:18PM on 12-05-2005
isnt there a fullscreen button on the vlc player control interface?
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Michael Collins said 11:06PM on 12-05-2005
rock the house?
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Tom said 11:07PM on 12-05-2005
The Mini I got about a month ago lives in my entertainment center attached to my DLP via DVI. Combined with Front Row (and Flip4Mac for WMV support) it works very well for showing off videos to friends, or just myself.
I'm currently using Handbrake to encode my DVDs to H.264 files. It's taking a while, but it is awesome to play a movie by simply selecting it, instead of dealing with finding the disc, being told your a pirate by Fox, then skipping 5 or 6 ads for other movies.
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Brandon Mawhorter said 2:40AM on 12-06-2005
Next time you only have a mouse quickly enable a hot corner to for expos?o show all windows, than you can simply click the controller and take it out of full screen. I have the expos?lob enabled and thrown into the corner so I have to click if I want it...
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Pedro said 8:35AM on 12-06-2005
Sure I do that all the time... my TV is my monitor!
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