iRed

[schvin]

this looks like fun.

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/appl ... 232894.php

[Cereb Daithi]

makes me wish i had a remote for my mac.

[avriette]

makes me wish i had a remote for my mac.

Instead of using Wince and XP MCE (despite working for microsoft, and that stuff being free to me), we went with a Mac Mini. I have regretted it since we got it, more or less. FrontRow is a hideous pile of bugs, the remote has limited range (or the receiver, it doesn't matter which), and it has no ability to manage remote (e.g., distributed) files. They're getting close to this with the Apple TV, but all that means is that they admit that a Mini does not an entertainment center make. Makes me pretty angry considering the amount of money we've put it into it, and the fact that they advertise FrontRow (and iTunes!) as entertainment applications. Grrr.

Don't worry about getting a remote for your Mac. It's not worth the effort.

[complacent]

Instead of using Wince and XP MCE (despite working for microsoft, and that stuff being free to me), we went with a Mac Mini. I have regretted it since we got it, more or less. FrontRow is a hideous pile of bugs, the remote has limited range (or the receiver, it doesn't matter which), and it has no ability to manage remote (e.g., distributed) files. They're getting close to this with the Apple TV, but all that means is that they admit that a Mini does not an entertainment center make. Makes me pretty angry considering the amount of money we've put it into it, and the fact that they advertise FrontRow (and iTunes!) as entertainment applications. Grrr.

Don't worry about getting a remote for your Mac. It's not worth the effort.

Very interesting to hear. Have you tried any of the suppliments/replacements to Front Row? Have you tried an RF remote instead? What were your goals with the mini (HD, PVR, etc)??

My experience has been the exact opposite of yours... In fact my Mac Mini is in my car, happily managing my music and video collection for me. Works perfectly.

[avriette]

Very interesting to hear. Have you tried any of the suppliments/replacements to Front Row? Have you tried an RF remote instead? What were your goals with the mini (HD, PVR, etc)??

My experience has been the exact opposite of yours... In fact my Mac Mini is in my car, happily managing my music and video collection for me. Works perfectly.

We have a Core Duo mini, the 1.8ghz model. It has a terabyte of disc attached to it via USB and firewire. The storage is split roughly three ways: itunes, photos, and personal stuff (transient backups, quick storage, etc). We're up to 250gb of stuff in iTunes, which is about 120gb of music, and the rest being video. Photo-wise, we have about 200gb of raw photos, and the rest are jpegs from the older camera (we have a pair of cybershots and a D200). The mini does nothing but serve media (e.g., it's not a desktop). Sandy and I each have a mac laptop, and we use the daap sharing over wireless (three 802.11g waps with WDS). We don't actually have cable, so when we "watch television," we're watching it either on the TV the mini is attached to, or on one of our laptops. We both sync our iPods to the mini, and manage our separate iPod libraries with playlists.

Most of the time, getting video or audio to our laptops is okay (the network hiccups sometimes, but we live in a dense apartment building; there are over 300 waps within range of our bedroom). The real problem is getting the mini to do anything locally. As I said, the remote sucks. FrontRow is a real pain because it's slow (takes forever to read an index, sometimes gets stuck at the spinning beachball in the menu), and it's incompatible with iTunes. For example, if you open a video in iTunes, you can't subsequently control iTunes with the remote. This means you have to always use FrontRow, and it crashes often enough to make this a real drawback. Additionally, the way the Mini handles DVDs is kind of stupid. Like the iTunes/FrontRow dissonance, there's a DVD Player/FrontRow dissonance. DVD Player is also not the greatest application for playing DVDs.

It's actually gotten to the point where we don't use the mini to play DVDs anymore. We just use the Xbox. The Xbox is a lot more tolerant of scratched DVDs than the mini is (we get DVDs from Netflix, which can be pretty bad). The Xbox has also never had the remote or application the remote is talking to crash on us. Lately I've been looking at this software that lets you stream media from your mac to your Xbox. The problem is that we have many thousands of protected files (.m4p, .m4b, etc) that won't play on the Xbox because it obviously doesn't have our authentication token and codec.

I haven't tried an RF remote because I didn't know such things were available.

The experience with the mini bothers me because we're not asking it to do much at all. It just sits attached to the television, and spits files from disk into an algorithm that renders them to video. It's hardly even interactive, and it just fails.

[complacent]

We have a Core Duo mini [with a shit-ton of attached storage for a simple desktop] (just reducing space!)
[word, words, words...] As I said, the remote sucks.

Try this remote, it's what I use and it works well.

FrontRow is a real pain because it's slow (takes forever to read an index, sometimes gets stuck at the spinning beachball in the menu), and it's incompatible with iTunes. For example, if you open a video in iTunes, you can't subsequently control iTunes with the remote. This means you have to always use FrontRow, and it crashes often enough to make this a real drawback.

Do you have a need to access intArwebs from the mini? If not, try adding a

Code: Select all

127.0.0.1 www.apple.com

to your etc/hosts to see if that speeds it up. Front Row periodically looks for apple.com as well as any network drives and has been proven to slow down teh front row. That should speed up the scrolling through lists and playing videos. Also, how are you pointing iTunes at your libraries? Are you using symlinks (pointing to the removeable drives) in your /Music, /Movies (local) folders? If not, try that as well.

Additionally, the way the Mini handles DVDs is kind of stupid. Like the iTunes/FrontRow dissonance, there's a DVD Player/FrontRow dissonance. DVD Player is also not the greatest application for playing DVDs.

Optical drive performance in teh mini is p-i-c-k-y. I don't have any good advice there, other than ripping and/or squishing. Sorry

The experience with the mini bothers me because we're not asking it to do much at all. It just sits attached to the television, and spits files from disk into an algorithm that renders them to video. It's hardly even interactive, and it just fails.

I think that might be slightly overstating matters... but it isn't really a terribly robust little bugger either... most of the MCE machines you read about have better guts in 'em. Do keep in mind, it isn't an embedded device optimized for serving vid/aud, it's meant to be a "simple" desktop replacement... competing against teh bargain dells and such. That's why they made the apple TV.

And I part w/ a question - did you grab all the video codecs for quicktime to handle most everything? (flip4mac, xvid, etc) - tends to lend to a more enjoyable experience.

HTH

EDIT: I've read this is a pretty kick-arse substitute also. Free to try....

[avriette]

Do you have a need to access intArwebs from the mini? If not, try adding a

Code: Select all

127.0.0.1 www.apple.com

to your etc/hosts to see if that speeds it up.

The Mini must be connected to the tubes because it has my auth token on it. Without an intarnat connection it can't verify that I'm the guy that owns (just checked) 9,090 DRM'ed files. Also, the Mini downloads shows as they become available (such as Pinks, BSG, etc). So it pretty well has to be online.

Also, how are you pointing iTunes at your libraries? Are you using symlinks (pointing to the removeable drives) in your /Music, /Movies (local) folders? If not, try that as well.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I had this great idea. I thought, gee, I have a fileserver on my network. It's got a huge scsi raid 5. Why do I bother keeping my music on each of my machines (work laptop, personal laptop, sandy's laptop, etc). Why not just NFS mount the directory from the fileserver for iTunes? It actually worked! Music played fine, I could update my playlists, and all that stuff. Then I tried to sync my iPod. Baaaaad idea. Trying to sync 30gb of data (even just 2-3gb) over 802.11b/g is just painful. So all the music lives locally on the Mini, and it's shared over daap (iTunes sharing protocol). The iPods are updated locally on the Mini via their cradles. When I want to listen to music on a machine that doesn't have the library locally attached (such as my iBook right now), I just connect to the shared library over wifi and play from there. The only drawback with this is the playcount on the Mini doesn't get incremented when I play it remotely. (I solved this issue with last.fm.)

Optical drive performance in teh mini is p-i-c-k-y. I don't have any good advice there, other than ripping and/or squishing. Sorry

I have a Toshiba external usb dvd-rw drive, but the Mini is already so ... used with regards to ports, I'm hesitant to attach more devices. If it were a PCI machine, this is the point I'd be adding a new USB/1394 bus to it.

The experience with the mini bothers me because we're not asking it to do much at all. It just sits attached to the television, and spits files from disk into an algorithm that renders them to video. It's hardly even interactive, and it just fails.

I think that might be slightly overstating matters... but it isn't really a terribly robust little bugger either...

The problem isn't that it isn't a robust machine, the problem is that until the Apple TV came out, it was supposed to be robust. If Apple had said "hey, this is for your kids first mac, not a media center," I would have bought a mini-atx machine and run MCE on it. The mini makes me a sad panda

it's meant to be a "simple" desktop replacement... competing against teh bargain dells and such. That's why they made the apple TV.

But a lot of people are using them as media servers. I am wondering whether the video card has anything to do with this. If I were to swap it with a powerbook (as in, G4) that had a dedicated video card, I suspect it would do better. My powerbook always did better than our mini. Heck, I think my iBook does better. The primary difference (because it surely doesn't take 1ghz of G4, let alone 2x 1.8ghz Core Duo, to view mp4 video) seems to be the video card.

As for the AppleTV... Well, if they'd told me that they were going to make a product to obsolete the one I bought from them within a year, I'd never have bought it to begin with.

And I part w/ a question - did you grab all the video codecs for quicktime to handle most everything? (flip4mac, xvid, etc) - tends to lend to a more enjoyable experience.

Really, everything we watch is either AAC-from-Apple or MP4 that I've "ripped/squished" from DVDs (that I own! of course!).

I think I'll be setting things up differently when we move. The waps will be positioned better, there will be a dedicated server room, and wired ethernet where appropriate (so as to be streaming video across gige instead of 802.11).