He seems to finally settle with beaming media to his PS3 via DNLA and buying an AppleTV to achieve his aims.
Key quote on the Mac Mini:
When it works, it’s great. The trouble is that 15% of the time something happens – EyeTV crashes, iTunes has been updated and won’t let you play anything until you’ve accepted terms and conditions, or another app is telling you that an update is available.
For these times, I don’t have an easy solution, other than to screen share and sort it out with the MacBook. Sometimes (like in the instance of EyeTV crashing) you just have to restart.
There's few good answers in this space at the moment. I've got an Acer Revo running Ubuntu and XBMC that's doing great for me but it required me to climb a major learning hump to get it all into shape. I didn't mind that, in fact I enjoyed it, but there's few good, easy options for non-geeks, or even geeks with less time to spend. There are lots of mediocre options but they're all flawed in a variety of ways.
It's always on, so it's a great home storage server (I have a Drobo w/ 4.5TB of storage attached via FireWire 800).
It downloads torrents & podcasts nicely.
Also, the shared library support coming in Plex/Nine looks killer. I'm looking forward to running Plex on my MacBook without having to maintain a separate metadata library.
Yeah everyone is going to use it differently. I no longer download any media, as I got tired of collecting media and then losing it after hard drive crashes. Also everything I want to listen to or watch is online for streaming, minus latest movies. If I want one of them bad enough I'll bit torrent it.
Overall my Mac Mini connected to my LCD TV using a wireless mouse and keyboard (gyration handheld mouse) suits me via Firefox.
http://hicksdesign.co.uk/tag/mediacentre/
He seems to finally settle with beaming media to his PS3 via DNLA and buying an AppleTV to achieve his aims.
Key quote on the Mac Mini:
When it works, it’s great. The trouble is that 15% of the time something happens – EyeTV crashes, iTunes has been updated and won’t let you play anything until you’ve accepted terms and conditions, or another app is telling you that an update is available.
For these times, I don’t have an easy solution, other than to screen share and sort it out with the MacBook. Sometimes (like in the instance of EyeTV crashing) you just have to restart.
There's few good answers in this space at the moment. I've got an Acer Revo running Ubuntu and XBMC that's doing great for me but it required me to climb a major learning hump to get it all into shape. I didn't mind that, in fact I enjoyed it, but there's few good, easy options for non-geeks, or even geeks with less time to spend. There are lots of mediocre options but they're all flawed in a variety of ways.