About a year ago I bought myself a cute little Mac mini to replace my Blue&White G3 that had died. Around six months later I ditched the Mac Mini in favour of a more powerful and capable G5 tower which now acts as my primary computer. Since then I’ve been at a loss to know what to do with my Mac Mini; I tried selling it to people I know, but no one was interested – I had bought it second hand and it just wasn’t new enough or powerful enough to be of interest to anyone. So it sat in a bag on the floor in the study, feeling sorry for itself. Until yesterday.
Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost. We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.
This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system. It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres. But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.
No comments