Been a while since I posted - I've been snowed under with course work and then christmas so haven't been near much more than my laptops - which I try not to break to much as I need them to work.
I stumbled across an unloved 1.66 Core Duo mac mini in the bargain bin of a PCworld. It was missing a power supply and remote and was a base spec with 512mb/70gb with a cdrw/dvd rom drive, it is also a bit yellow - but was going for £200. I immediately decided against buying it as I already have to many computers. A couple of days later I was back buying the thing - my self control is useless. A PSU cost me £30 from play.com and 2gb of ram cost £32 from crucial. Someone supplied me with a 1.83 CoreDuo so that got put in at the same time.
I installed the last licence of Leopard from my families 5 pack of leopard licences. Leopard comes with front row 2.0. A much improved Front Row interface with the added bonus of being able to use the Saphire plugin to make browsing media better. I installed Perian and flip4mac QuickTime components to allow Front Row to play video encoded with pretty much any codec.
Next I need to hook it up to my nfs shares on my Solaris box and it can browse all of my media.
The really nice thing about using front row 2 is that it can connect to other machines in the house to read from itunes collections (like an AppleTV does) means that I don't have to sync my itunes library to the Mini.
I have a script that I'm working on to automatically rip DVDs on insertion using handbrake cli but its still a bit rough round the edges.
Friday, January 11, 2008
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