Setting up your server on your home network should be fairly straightforward. Look for sales online, keep an eye out for friends with neglected machines lying around. If you go this route, you'll want to soup up the chassis with as many hard drives as you can. We run it headless, as well - another DKMĬhunk of change you can sink right back into extra storage. It lives at the 'front end' of ourīack end/front end media center solution, which we'll talk more about later. We turned an old PowerMac G4 400Mhz machine into our file server. You don't need a speed demon to serve in thisĬapacity, because you can schedule large file transfers to happen overnight or at other times your home network isn't If you have an old PC of any OSįlavor lying around, now is the time to repurpose it into a file server.

Space, your personal preferences, and what equipment you already have lying around. This is going to depend much on your available Start thinking about external storage right now. Whether you get the 40GB or 80GB drive, you're still going to run out of

Without further ado.įirst problem to solve is the storage issue. Issues you'll have to resolve, plus show you how to divert the cash from the D, K, and M into better investments for Most of the connections are fairly simple, so this how-to is geared towards covering the basic We'll do our best to show what we're doing with ours and give you a head start on what you'll need to get your own Audio and video connections are going to vary greatly depending on your particular setup, so There's more than one way to skin a mini, so we're going to walk you through our setup and give some overview of So for this week's How-To we'll cover the various aspects you'll need to think about when planning your Mac mini media center system, plus show you how to control your Mac mini headlessly from any computer in your house-there's no need to BYODKM just BYOB, pop in a DVD and enjoy your HDTV, OK? You might not win the next Sundance with your iMovie, but you sure can impress everyone at the next family reunion. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio/video recorder, audio/video playback, audio/video download, and it even makes a decent audio/video production unit, as well. We think of it as the central brain of our system the glue that holds all the devices together. It looks more like a consumer electronics device than a computer, so it won't look out of place in your living room. Yep, everyone's talking about using the Mac mini as a home media center, and there's a reason why: its diminutive form factor makes it a good candidate to fit unobtrusively into an existing audio/video or home theater setup.

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