I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’ve been looking at ways to make my Mac mini into a media server. Well, I think that I have stumbled upon the right formula for myself. And now for the two of you who have been wondering what I’d do, here is how it broke down.
Hardware – There really wasn’t much of a debate on what I was going to use. I had an Intel dual core Mac mini that was no longer being used so I was going to use that. I just went to Best Buy and bought a DVI to VGA cable and away we went.
Software – Here is where the real dilemma was. I was torn between using Plex or Boxee and so I decided to try both of them. I decided to first give Plex a try since I was more familiar with Boxee having used it on my MacBook Pro. I really wanted to like Plex but I just couldn’t get some of the things to work. One of the main things that I wasn’t able to get to work was the SMB connectivity. No matter how hard that I tried, I just couldn’t get it to connect to a SMB share. I also couldn’t seem to get it working with Hulu.
Then I gave Boxee a try. Like I mentioned before I have a better idea of how Boxee works and so there were somethings that went easier than when I tried it with Plex. One of those things that went easier was adding TV shows. And the neat thing with Boxee is that it will automatically pick out what kind of feeds are out there for the show. If there is a local file, Boxee makes that the default choice.
As you may have figured out, I decided to use Boxee as my media player.
There was one other piece of the puzzle that I needed to get into place. I needed a what to get the shows that aren’t able to be streamed over the Internet, to be downloaded automatically. I found an app that can do that when used in tandem with the Mac bit torrent client, Transmission. The app is called Automatic and it’s a system preference. You tell it which shows you want to download and it will download the torrent file into the directory of your choice. Then, Transmission (which monitors that directory) will pick up the torrent and start downloading the file. The way that it works is simply wonderful. It gets even better when you add in how Boxee will automatically fill in the episode details.
There you have it folks. There is my Mac mini media center in a nutshell.
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