| You can read a bunch of posts here about a techy, clueful, Mac savvy guy and the many woes of trying to use a Mac Mini as a mediacentre: 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. |
The new media management features in the upcoming Plex/Nine release look great: http://vimeo.com/11880867
The Apple Bluetooth keyboard is small enough to be living room friendly.
Overall, a Mac mini isn't quite as simple as AppleTV, but it's far more functional.