So, regarding your questions: Yes, absolutely.20 NovemberWith the advent of the new 2014 Mac Mini, I took the plunge configuring one as a lounge-based server (I’d previously toyed with the idea of the brilliantly retro C64x, but my family would never have understood). Just connect the HDMI cable and you have not only a powerful machine to serve all your content but also a nice machine to browser, download and manage your content. I have an 'old' Mac Mini (Macmini5,1 - Intel Core i5 (2.3 GHz) - 8GB RAM and, IMHO, is the best media player you can get.Although there are cheaper and more powerful machines, the Mac Mini is small and discrete, with low power consumption, and a solid Unix-like OS that’s pre-configured and immediately usable. Usage as a media server was really just a happy bonus, and a more tangible reason for buying the server that I could explain to my wife. In my mind, its only worth premium money if it comes with a year warranty, has an intel core two duo chip and technology from the last two years.My real intent was getting a small server to run apache along with various VM images to support my development projects. Good Media Center for an Apple Household.People somehow believe that their 4 year-old mac mini with a power pc chip is still worth 300, or that last years model is worth 500 because it was upgraded at the time of purchase.There are several good reasons for setting up a home media server.Search the worlds information, including webpages, images, videos and more. I use macOS Server for VPN and file sharing, but theres nothing particularly Apple. Its been great, but Ill certainly replace it when Apple remembers the Mini exists. I use a Mid 2011 Mini as a home server for some basic stuff: media server, file sharing, off-site backups, VPN, various and sundry scripts and bots. Auxiliary PCIe power connector enables use of power hungry cards such as the.level 1.
Best Power Setting For A Mini Used As A Media Server Movie Playing InMany of my home projects and late night work was done with Babylon 5, a variant of Star Trek or some other TV program/movie playing in the bottom corner of my screen. As optical drives disappear from our devices (Macbook Retina, Macbook Air, iPads, Galaxy tablets etc) it's getting harder to watch my existing library of DVDs and blu-ray disks … not that Apple ever supported blu-ray anyway, even though I still think its the best format for purchasing content. Having our collective libraries available centrally, and easily playable on our television allows us to enjoy our TV shows and movies together as a family - rather than in insolation, crouched over our laptops and iPads as we’d previously done. I want to make it easier for my family to share our individual libraries of iTunes videos that we’ve been accumulating.It doesn’t handle streaming, and it lacks the “10-foot interface” required for use on a television. However, this assumption was naive - as iTunes just isn’t that smart. My initial assumption was that using Apple gear would allow me to simply use iTunes in conjunction with an Apple remote so long as all the members of my family authorised the device with their accounts. For the moment the videos are being stored on a couple of 2TB external drives, but I plan to move them across to a NAS before long.I didn’t know much about media server packages when starting out - although I’d heard of XBMC (now rebranded as Kodi). Using the Mac Mini that I’d purchased for development seems better - since I can then also use the Mac Mini (with attached blu-ray player) to progressively rip my old DVD and blu-ray collection. Google’s Chromecast seems better, but its yet another device. Although I generally like Apple gear, I really don’t want to be locked into them forever since there are times when other manufacturers’ gear is technically better, or just better value. ITunes’ family sharing feature is also a little complicated and is limited to five devices … which is insufficient since I have four devices, my wife has three, and other family members staying with us have even more.I’m not a fan of how DRM is being used by manufacturers. Apple’s DRM means that the only things that directly play iTunes video content are iTunes and Apple TV. Plex can also be accessed from multiple televisions and blu-ray players so long as they’re network-connected and conform to DLNA (although these devices may potentially still have issues handling some file formats).The downside of Plex is that it doesn’t support direct playback of iTunes-purchased content. I opted for M4vgear since this seemed quickest and simplest based on my limited research - although another similar product would presumably be needed if I purchased movies through Google Play. Worse still, there have been instances where paid content has been removed from the iTunes store and has become unavailable for re-download by the customers who purchased it.Removing the DRM makes things much easier, and DRM can fortunately be removed from iTunes videos with the right product. Having to pay again to view the same digital content on a different (but equivalent) device seems unfair. I respect the concept of content providers using DRM to limit piracy, but using that technology as a means to lock my paid content to a specific manufacturer/configuration is a dirty trick. The subsequent iPhone 6 release eventually addressed most of our issues with Apple’s line-up … but it was a year too late and remains expensive. I went with the beautifully-designed HTC One, whereas my wife went with the larger Galaxy Note 3. My personal view is that it’s morally acceptable if protecting the rights of consumers to watch content they’ve paid for. DRM-removal is needed to achieve this, but remains technically illegal in some jurisdictions. This is the digital equivalent of my old DVD collection, when guests borrowed disks from my DVD shelf - playing them back on their laptops or the TV/DVD players in our lounge plus bedrooms. Nonetheless, it would be nice if these channels were made available through Plex in future, since leveraging an existing (proven and free) platform would be easier and cheaper for Australian providers than building their own separate proprietary platforms across multiple device types for digital streaming.Although the Plex media server is free, Plex offers an additional subscription service called Plex Pass, which adds extra features - such as managed access (e.g. Fortunately I already have on-demand streaming for these available through the Sony blu-ray player connected to my lounge TV ,and apps installed on my iPad. I found that that plugins for the Australian-based streaming services I’m most interested in such as ABC iView, SBS On-Demand, and catch-up services from our other commercial channels currently remain unavailable despite discussion on various forums mentioning them. There’s actually a wide range of plugins, but most are suited only to US-based users. There are plugins for watching YouTube videos, news segments with CNN, and Crackle for a small selection of (mostly very old) movies and TV shows. Download wondershare for macOnce unzipped, these just need to be dragged across into the application folder of the computer you plan to use as your server.In a similar fashion to the TV Show naming convention, the lookup to imdb.com is important to get the proper name variation and release year. It’s really just a matter of going to the Plex.tv downloads website and downloading the appropriate zip files. At this stage, none of these are features that I’m using - hence the subscription is something that I’ll forego for now.Installing Plex onto your Mac Mini (Server and Home Theater)Plex’s installation is very quick and simple. Because of the SRT file is editable, you can potentially change the time codes manually - but it’s tedious.
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