Plugged into my 32″ HDTV, I use the Mini to:

* Watch, pause, rewind, and record live HDTV programming for free via EyeTV and my HD Homerun.

All controlled wirelessly via my iPhone and Remote Buddy
 
Imagine all of the bulky components you can avoid by consolidating down to just the Mini! Explore the site for extensive reviews of everything I used to create and maintain this system.

Plex – Amazing (and free) media manager/player that has no peer. Read my full review here.

EyeTV – The only real option for a Tivo-like experience on a Mac is thankfully well-tended by its developers at El Gato Systems. Use it to record & playback HD, digital, and/or analog programming (depending on your hardware).

Must-have features include time-shifting, scheduled recordings, integrated TV guide, snappy editing to remove commercials, robust exporting to devices like iPods and iPhones, and much, much more.

VLC – Hands down the finest standalone Mac video player – VLC’s versatility, price, and feature set make Quicktime look like a child’s toy by comparison. Support for almost every codec out there means you can play a DVD image (or actual disc) back-to-back with AVIs, TS streams, MKV HD files, and whatever else you may find in your archives.

As if that’s not enough, this badboy has been free for years.

Remote Buddy – Whatever you may be using to remotely control your Mac HTPC, Remote Buddy can enhance and refine the experience to EXACTLY how you want it to be. I started out using the Apple Remote, which RB allowed me to remap so it could browse and control every app I use. I then upgraded to an IR receiver from Keyspan and RB allowed me to do the same with a standard universal remote. Now I’m on my iPhone, using it as a beautiful universal remote to control my Mac from anywhere in the house via WiFi.

Extras like Applescript support only gild an app already worth every dollar (or Euro, in Remote Buddy’s case).

Visual Hub – There are tons of video converters out there, but I’ve found Visual Hub to be the most reliable and easiest to use. It’s speed smokes alternatives and presets for my iPhone and 720p screen are spot-on without any adjustments.

Unison – I like swapping video recordings, er, media files with friends around the world and Unison makes accessing these newsgroups easy as pie. Makes swapping BH9 episodes on worn videotapes during high school seem crazy-analog by comparison.

DisplayConfigX – If you’re lucky enough to have an HDTV that displays your Mac’s video perfectly out of the box, Congrats…you can jump to the next app.

For the rest of us, clipped edges and missing menu bars are an annoyance that DisplayConfigX can easily fix. I went without half my dock for six months before tweaking my 32″ Phillips to a perfect-1210×676 resolution. Now, it all fits like a glove. Not sexy at all, this app is nonetheless essential to get things the way they should be.

JollysFastVNC – I used Chicken of the VNC forever to remotely set-up my Mac Mini from my main iMac before heading in to watch a movie and/or TV show. Then someone recommended JollysFastVNC as a faster alternative and, I gotta say, I was surprised at how much more responsive it was. I’m not going back. VERY useful when tweaking with DisplayConfigX. Free just like CotVNC.

Front Row – If you’re looking for a fully-integrated, attractive media manager blessed by Apple, Front Row is really the only game in town. Add-ons like DVD Assist (see below) allow workarounds for frustrating Quicktime limitations.

DVD Assist – A gem I’ve been using for quite some time now, DVD Assist allows Front Row to launch DVD Images and TS files…something it couldn’t do until Tiger’s release (.ts files still aren’t supported). Highly recommended if you back up your DVDs and/or like watching HD material via Front Row.

Airfoil – Those of us with Aiport Expresses units can increase their abilities exponentially with Airfoil. It allows streaming of programs other than iTunes to AEX (VLC, in my case), to multiple AEX units, and more. It effectively allows a whole house to enjoy the audio from one computer!

Until now, my Mac Mini’s limitations haven’t slowed down any HD material I’ve thrown at it. But, admittedly, I’ve never asked for anything beyond 720p playback. I recently began archiving HD material at 1080p however, using the .MKV file compression and I wasn’t sure if my Mac Mini could handle playing it back effectively.

Out of the box, VLC was stuttering and dropping frames…even as the only application running. So I began hitting up friends with similar set-ups and quickly found a solution that worked beautifully.

Using the latest stable build of VLC, I opened up the Preferences menu and made sure Advanced was selected. Then I headed to Inputs/Codecs > Other codecs > FFMpeg, selected
“Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding” and chose “All”. This immediately improved playback exponentially and I’m now enjoying 1080p playback without a glitch.

The only caveat I’d add is that it does NOT seem consistent over a network (mine’s gigabit)…but my media is stored on a Firewire 400 drive attached directly to the Mini and that’s been aces so far.

And after a little digging (and a lot of testing), I discovered this is still very much an emerging area that could use a little clarification for Mac users like me looking to add this seemingly simple feature to their OS X-based home theaters.

I use an Intel iMac for most of my computing, whose lack of a modem made purchasing an external device necessary. There were two possible roads to go down: snagging the Apple USB Modem combined with 3rd party software or a proprietary software/hardware combination. Since the price difference is $50 vs $100+, I chose the former.

ShowCallerID 0.1 (Free) – ShowCallerID is a simple program that lives exclusively in the menu bar. It offers no control over the location or duration of the caller info it displays. The number (no name) is thrown up in black text against a white block on the upper part of the screen.

Unfortunately, this is the first version of the product and the site freely points to a reality I quickly became familiar with: “Sometimes the modem doesn’t talk to the computer. The phone rings but no notification window pops up.” 90% of the time, ShowCallerID sat idle by while my phone rang away.

This lack of consistency combined with development that apparently ended in early 2006 makes ShowCallerID a dry hole in my search.

Caller ID for Mac OS X 1.0 Beta 3 ($14.95) – Like ShowCallerID, Caller ID For Mac OS X (CIDOSX) resides exclusively in the menu bar. It does offers rudimentary control over the display location, but nothing else. In fact, there is little in the way of features that sets CIDOSX apart from ShowCallerID beyond the price difference.

Except that CIDOSX NEVER worked with the Apple USB modem…not one call was detected. To that end, CIDOSX is a complete non-starter with a nod to the fact that it’s still in Beta.

Silica 1.2 (Free) – While $14.95 less than CIDOSX, Silica offers a surprisingly robust set of features compared to the programs covered so far. It offers more control over the display’s location and appearance, to start.

It also is the first to offer support for Growl, which theoretically should allow the info to be shared across networked computers also running Growl and display the caller’s info on multiple computers.

But Silica’s performance bordered on lifeless. I was able to get a couple of displays with Silica’s built-in notification, but Growl did absolutely nothing. Truth be told, I’ve been trying get Silica to work for a while on different Macs (with various modems) with little success. As much as I like the price tag, performance is number one in most aspects of my life. Hence, another sad face.

CallWall .92 ($10 during Beta) – Man, I wanted to love CallWall. In addition to incorporating Growl support, it also lets users create a “call firewall” that allows dynamic blocking of specific numbers, plus integration with an online database of know phone marketers. And the interface is simple and very OS X-like. My enthusiasm even led to an ill-conceived and premature purchase.

Premature because I cannot get consistent service. Like so many others, CallWall sometimes saw my calls, but most of the time it just looked pretty while my ringer went on and on. And the developers haven’t answered repeated requests for help.

Moving on…

Jon’s Phone Tool 3.7.2 ($22.50) – By this point, you may be wondering how I know it’s the software and not my system. BECAUSE I FOUND A PROGRAM THAT WORKS EVERY TIME. Before and after each other piece of software failed, Jon’s Phone Tool delivered accurate info every time the phone rang via my Apple USB modem.

But JPT is much, much more than just a caller ID notifier and it demands more of my system’s resources than I’d care to use for just one of it’s features. This is no knock against JPT – it’s a kick-ass phone interface for Macs. Just way more than I want and need.

It does work, however. Which makes it the default winner…with plenty of room for decent competitors in the next race.

Beyond the Apple USB modem, there are pricier hardware options available…I owned and returned Ovolab’s Phlink due (again) to flaky incoming notifications. The only high-profile possibility I haven’t test driven is PhoneValet due to it’s steep cost.

* Obviously, anyone with better info than me – post up and I’ll update the list!

It’s amazing when a company is the first to innovate a product and is able to maintain a superior product in spite of multiple competitors who arrive able to presumably improve on the original idea. Tivo is an excellent example of this…their PVR software and hardware offerings are still the easiest and most respected on the market, despite companies with very deep pockets attempting to best them.

So it’s a high water mark I’m trying to meet putting together a Mac-based HDTV PVR. The mechanics (ATSC tuner, ability to record and playback HDTV, access to other media files, etc) have been available for some time and I had a decent first set-up with my Linkplayer/EyeTV 500 combo. But it was a clunky interface that offered little more than dependable HDTV playback (not a feature to be knocked) and access to networked media files. Playing back other video files (backed-up DVDs in particular) was impossibility for my technically-challenged mind and there was still a lot of hardware stacked under my TV.

So when I read that the new Dual Core Intel Mac Mini would play back HD content smoothly, I just picked one up. Although the price was (a lot) higher than the Linkplayer, Macs hold their value extremely well and I knew I could recoup most of the cost on Ebay if I wasn’t enthralled with the performance.

My Mini’s processor is a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo with 1GB of RAM. It is plugged into my Phillips 32â€? LCD HDTV via the Phillips HDMI slot with the help of a DVI-HDMI converter. The audio plugs into my Yamaha receiver via a miniplug-TOSLINK cable and passes Dolby Digital signals without trouble from EyeTV and Apple’s DVD Player. To repeat an oft-used phrase about Macs: It just works.

I still use my EyeTV 500 ATSC receiver to watch, time-shift, and record HDTV (and SD) signals that I receive at no cost with my OTA antennae. It plugs into the Mini via Firewire and has a 500GB External LaCie HD daisy-chained onto its other Firewire port. This offers my tons of storage space.

EyeTV 2.3 also offers a plethora of features that act as a very reasonable replacement for Tivo…I’m following up with a detailed review of both 2.3 and it’s controversial newer brother 2.3.1 that will expand on these advantages.

* 2/2007 Update: The Mini’s video didn’t originally fit exactly onto the Phillip’s screen…I detailed my fix in this subsequent post.

20″ Apple iMac
2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo

…it looked great. The display was automatically detected by my iMac. I didn’t have an HDMI converter (which I’d need for my TV), so I used a SVHS adapter that I use with my Powerbook. And despite the lack of digital video signal, the picture was BEAUTIFUL when played back with the latest VLC Universal Binary build. Quicktime (Front Row’s media player) has never worked well with my TS files and being integrated into Front Row didn’t eliminate this critical problem. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

Although the iMac was playing back a 1080i TS file on it’s own screen, it effortlessly passed on the analog signal to my LCD screen. There were no artifacts or dropped frames (or, frankly, anything at all) to complain about. The PQ was similar to a well-encoded DIVX file and I look forward to trying out an actual digital connection.

Overall, I was impressed. While I never plan on integrating an iMac into my own home theatre set-up, it would have rocked back when I was younger and jammed into a single apartment. The HD capabilities, integrated remote, and VLC’s ability to play back anything I can think of makes it ideal for someone who plans on using the monitor as a TV as well.