OK, I’ll admit it. I like to watch movies.
With a DVD library of over 1200 titles, I’ve been on a multi-year quest for the perfect media center system. Today I took the next major step on that journey.
Here’s a brief recap of my journey to date. For several years I’d toyed with the idea of a media center, then the release of LinuxMCE caused me to take the plunge. Built up a system. Hit a few hardware issues, rebuilt it with a new motherboard. Distributed the media on three systems via NFS. But was never really happy with LinuxMCE, probably because I just wanted a media center and not a home control center. Just too complex and persistent player problems drove me to try XBMC. I’ll admit it, I just loved XBMC, it’s way cool. I wanted a plug in replacement for LinuxMCE which meant the system would be a router with firewall and DHCP/DNS server for my media LAN, so went with a gentoo system, which, IMO, is easier to setup and configure than a ubuntu system. But with no time to maintain the gentoo hosted system, and my growing comfort with Macbook laptops, I just decided to jump ship to a Mac Mini running Plex (a fork of XBMC for the mac).
So day one.
Purchased a 2.4GHz, 4GB, 2010 mac mini (with HDMI port). Also went by Radio Shack to get a HDMI cable and was surprised at how proud they are of their cables – ouch.
Initial setup using one of my LG246 HDMI monitors instead of the plasma TV. Mini boots right up, real simple snow leopard config. First issue is the display needed some underscan adjusting under Settings, Displays. Then update the system to the latest and it’s time to have fun.
Download Plex and install. Install the recommended Candelair driver for Apple Remote support. Candelair recommended/advertised Remote Buddy which looked pretty cool so installed the 30 day trial.
Also installed iTerm and Firefox.
My current network has four media sources: a kubuntu workstation with 3TB for media, the old XBMC system with 1TB, a gentoo workstation with 5TB, and a new Thecus N4100Pro NAS Raid5 with 4 2TB drives. I’ve moved my m4v files to the Thecus and started the copying of the iso files from the XBMC system to the Thecus (currently still in progress) in prep for decommissioning the XBMC system. I intend to eventually transcode all the iso images to m4v and have the Thecus as the primary media server.
So for now, just mounted the NFS volumes from the kubuntu and Thecus systems on the mac mini using Disk Utility. Here’s the first difference between XBMC linux and Plex mac – on the XBMC when adding the source, I normally just specify the path to the autofs mount point. But on the mac Plex, I needed to just select the mounted volume as a source. The first gotcha is that the source must be mounted. Currently I’m doing that with Finder, but need to find the mac way of making sure it is mounted on boot.
I had a little frustration with Plex trying to use the default keyboard only. Eventually enabled the mouse primarily so I could right click and remove a bad source definition. For now, I’m planning on leaving the mouse enabled.
Activated the Remote Buddy and configured it to start at login. Set the AJAX password. Then brought up a safari on my iphone and pointed it at the mac mini. Very nice. It did take me a while to figure out that the “Menu” button is functionally equivalent to the ESC key. One cool hint, use the ‘+’ button in safari to add a link to your home screen.
Went to Plex’s app store and added a few neat sounding extensions. Primarily the HDHomeRun app, which is pretty cool. It does take a while to verify each TV channel, so did just a few for now.
Moved the system to the home theater and connected the HDMI to my Yamaha RX-V861 A/V receiver. The video was perfect but no sound. Changed Plex’s system audio preference from built-in output to HDMI and that was solved.
Also hooked up Gyration air mouse to the mac mini.
Finally added Plex to the login.
So ended the first day with a functional mac mini running Plex by default which accesses media from two different NAS systems controlled by my iPhone, iPad and airmouse, sending video and audio over HDMI to my home theater.
TODO list includes reconfiguring my media LAN to remove the XBMC machine. This will necessitate setting up and running a replacement DHCP/DNS server (hopefully either dnsmasq or something equivalent). Also will need to change the mode of my wireless access point to be a gateway to my full home LAN.
