{"id":1054,"date":"2008-04-22T22:06:46","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T22:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/a-living-room-pc-at-last.htm"},"modified":"2008-04-23T19:50:09","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T19:50:09","slug":"a-living-room-pc-at-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/a-living-room-pc-at-last.htm","title":{"rendered":"My living room PC finally becomes a reality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some time back, I wrote about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/05\/creating-a-media-center-mac.htm\">my plans for a living room PC<\/a> but before this could happen there were several hurdles to overcome:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Earn enough money to replace my Mac Mini so that it could move to the living room.<\/li>\n<li>Negotiate the wife approval factor for IT in a common area of the house (must look good &#8211; hence Mac Mini).<\/li>\n<li>Find a software setup that works for me, but is also consumer-friendly for the rest of the family (i.e. no hint of a Windows, OS X or Linux interface).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Fortunately, the first two items came together for me quite easily &#8211; after<a href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/05\/creating-a-media-center-mac.htm\"> I decided to raid my savings and buy a MacBook a couple of months back<\/a>, my wife asked me which PC it was replacing and I said &#8220;that one&#8221; (pointing at the Mac Mini), never expecting the response that she gave &#8211; &#8220;Oh.  I like that one.  It&#8217;s cute.&#8221;!  This was a revelation to me &#8211; my wife has <em>never<\/em> before referred to any of my IT as &#8220;cute&#8221; &#8211; so I grabbed the moment to say something like &#8220;yeah, I thought it could go in the living room for when we watch films and stuff&#8221; (and the lack of any objection was interpreted as implicit approval).<\/p>\n<p>The hardest part was the software setup.  I still feel that Windows Vista&#8217;s Media Center capabilities are vastly superior to Apple&#8217;s Front Row &#8211; there&#8217;s TV support in there for starters.  There are other options too: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elgato.com\/\">EyeTV<\/a> would add TV support to the Mac (the problem is that it only has a 1 year TV guide subscription in Europe); <a href=\"http:\/\/centerstageproject.com\/\">Center Stage<\/a> looks promising, but is still an alpha release product (and has been for a while now); <a href=\"http:\/\/mythtv.org\/\">Myth TV<\/a> could work too (but my research suggested that USB TV tuner support could be a bit of a &#8216;mare). Then I thought about it a bit harder &#8211; we have lousy terrestrial TV support in my house (digital or analogue), so the clearest TV signal I have is on satellite (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2005\/11\/free-to-air-digital-tv-from-sky.htm\">Freesat from Sky<\/a>).  Unless I can find a way to interface the Mac with my digibox, TV on the living room PC is not going to happen (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.automatedhome.co.uk\/Reviews\/Controlling-Sky-from-your-PC-and-the-Internet-Review.html\">this solution looks interesting<\/a> but is for Windows\/Linux only).  Which meant that the criteria for a living room PC were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Access to my iTunes library (which lives on my MacBook) to watch podcasts, listen to music, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Ability to play content from CD\/DVD.<\/li>\n<li>Ability to play content ripped from DVD or obtained by other means (e.g. home movies or legally obtained digital downloads).<\/li>\n<li>Simple (no technical skills required) user interface.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, ruling out the need for TV integration meant that Apple Front Row was suddenly a contender as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/features\/300.html#frontrow\">the OS X 10.5 (Leopard) version of Front Row can access shared libraries from other PCs<\/a> (so I don&#8217;t have to copy\/convert the media) and the remote control supplied with the Mac Mini does not rely on line of sight to control the PC.  Vista Media Center could do this but I&#8217;d need to have that huge IR receiver and ugly remote control.  Of course, I could just buy an Apple TV, but the Mac Mini gives me so much more (and it can output to my aging, but still rather good Sony Trinitron 32&#8243; widescreen TV).  I will stress though, that if I ever manage to get a decent TV signal from our aerial, Windows Vista Media Center would beat Front Row hands down.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s ironic that I&#8217;m writing this in a hotel room in Bolton (nowhere near my living room) but so far, the software stack on the Mini is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/\">Mac OS X<\/a> 10.5 (including Front Row, accessible via the supplied remote control).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/itunes\/\">iTunes<\/a> (free of charge).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/perian.org\/\">Perian<\/a> (free of charge).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.xtorrentp2p.com\/\">XTorrent Pro<\/a> (from $28).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I may have to add a few more codecs over time (but Perian seems to include most of what I need) and furthermore, this headless PC (sorry, Mac &#8211; for the purists out there) is suiting my requirements pretty well.  I&#8217;ve watched films from the hard disk with no issues at all, and streamed video podcast (and audio) content from my MacBook across an 802.11g Wi-Fi network (with no apparent playback issues &#8211; despite the signal having to travel through several walls and to the furthest corner of my living room &#8211; although I wish iTunes would mark podcasts as played when viewed remotely).  There is one caveat though (and that&#8217;s a hardware issue) &#8211; even though the Leopard version of Front Row supports DVD playback, I still watch DVD content on my home theatre setup as that gives me true 5:1 surround sound (it&#8217;s only stereo on the Mac Mini).  <\/p>\n<p>Other applications that will probably find their way onto the mini over time include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.iospirit.com\/remotebuddy\/\">Remote Buddy<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/mysite.verizon.net\/moonlightmac\/Projects.html\">DVD Assist<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.applefritter.com\/node\/18845\">more information<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/handbrake.fr\/\">Handbrake<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mactheripper.org\/\">Mac the Ripper<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.isquint.org\/\">iSquint<\/a> (or possibly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techspansion.com\/visualhub\/\">VisualHub<\/a>).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those are for the future though &#8211; at this point in time, I&#8217;m ripping my content (and performing iPod conversion as required) on other machines and transferring it to the Mini across the network (see below).  I also tried running a Windows XP virtual machine for downloading from BBC iPlayer and Channel 4 On Demand but didn&#8217;t manage to set up the tools that are necessary to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/02\/freeing-digital-downloads-from-the-shackles-of-the-bbc-iplayer.htm\">remove the Windows Media DRM in order to play the content on the Mac<\/a> (I do at least have a PC running older software releases that I can use for that).<\/p>\n<p>As for getting media onto the living room PC (the stuff that I don&#8217;t want to stream across the network), I can always plug in a USB drive and control it remotely using the screen sharing capabilities in OS X.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"inline\" alt=\"Screen sharing in OS X to access the living room TV remotely\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/images\/osx-screen-sharing.png?w=700&#038;ssl=1\" \/><\/p>\n<p>OS X screen sharing is only VNC but it works well across my network (and scales the display accordingly &#8211; it even gave a decent representation of my 1680&#215;1050 resolution display downscaled to fit on a 1280&#215;800 MacBook display, although the picture here is with the Mac Mini hooked up to a standard definition TV).  One point to note &#8211; it&#8217;s necessary to disconnect the shared screen session before trying to control the living room PC with the remote control or else it won&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n<h3>Further reading<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Front_Row\">Wikipedia article on Apple Front Row<\/a>.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.macintouch.com\/readerreports\/intelmini\/topic4100.html\">MacInTouch Intel Mini Home Theater<\/a>.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/journals\/apple.ars\/2007\/03\/30\/mac-mini-the-original-apple-tv-alternative\">ARS Technica review of various Mac Mini media solutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h4>And finally&#8230;<\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/inside.glnetworks.de\/2007\/12\/13\/mac-mini-mediacenter-in-38-room-space\/\">This guy has some great details of how he set up his Mac Mini in his living room<\/a> &#8211; he uses MythTV but gives some good details about mounting the hardware to only take up 97mm (3.8&#8243;) of room space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some time back, I wrote about my plans for a living room PC but before this could happen there were several hurdles to overcome: Earn enough money to replace my Mac Mini so that it could move to the living room. Negotiate the wife approval factor for IT in a common area of the house &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/a-living-room-pc-at-last.htm\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">My living room PC finally becomes a reality<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[92,31,39],"class_list":["post-1054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-front-row","tag-macintosh","tag-useful-software"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>My living room PC finally becomes a reality - markwilson.it<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/a-living-room-pc-at-last.htm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My living room PC finally becomes a reality - markwilson.it\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Some time back, I wrote about my plans for a living room PC but before this could happen there were several hurdles to overcome: Earn enough money to replace my Mac Mini so that it could move to the living room. 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