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Software for mac mini media centerLinks of favor for April 18 By: Merlin Mann (5 replies) April 18, 2008 - 6:06am
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Software for mac mini media center
I use XBMC. It was originally written for the old XBOX, but has since been ported to Linux and now the Mac. Not all features have yet been ported over, but most of them have, and the devs are working to get to version 1.0 as quickly as possible.
That said, it works great for me out of the box. Version 0.5 is about to be out soon, which will offer better remote control support (it has basic apple remote support right now).
My worflow is this: I download stuff (TV, Movies, music, whatever) on my upstaris desktop, and then drag and drop them onto my mac mini which is downstairs using Leopard’s built in feature of auto-detecting other Macs on the network. XBMC reads every format like VLC (and maybe more), so I don’t need to convert anything.
There are a few little bugs, but overall I like how much more open it is than Frontrow. Plus you can skin it (one skin called Aeon is unreal).
One drawback I can see is that it won’t play DRM’ed files, since it is an open platform. So you prolly would have to go with something else if you have a lot of DRMed content.
Mac version: http://www.osxbmc.com/
Official site: http://xbmc.org/
Wiki: http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=XBMCOnlineManual