Mac Mini Media Centre

At last! After long deliberation and daydreaming about a media centre to rule them all, the Mac Mini has been installed in the living room and so far it has exceeded expectation. Let me first list the hardware used in this neat little set up:

The Computer
The Mac Mini is simply a full-blown dual-core Mac computer which comes without a screen of any kind and alas with a measly 512MB RAM which I intend to upgrade as soon as financially possible. We connected it to the Samsung LCD TV (which I have never liked much as I find the picture rather saturated and blurry - and yes, I have been through the Picture menus). The quality of the screen for the computer desktop pleasantly surprised me. OK, it's 640x480 so everthing is huge and websites require horizontal scrolling much of the time, but I had expected to not be able to read smaller letters on the screen and I can.

TV via the Miglia
As far as the Miglia TVMax was concerned - I really had no idea what to expect. So we plugged the cable TV into the Miglia and the Miglia to the MacMini via USB. I have a UPC Digital Media box which I'd like to be able to record from, but the guy at the Mac shop said that UPC was the most dastardly of all cable providers here in the Netherlands and does something to the signal (encrypting?) that makes it impossible to record through the digital media box. OK, so we're stuck with old fashioned 32 channels for now I think I'll return the UPC box soon as I don't really use it enough. Anyway, officially the Miglia only takes analog terrestrial cable, not digital.

The Miglia uses EyeTV2 as its software for viewing and recording TV channels. Auto-tuning the channels took almost two hours and practically froze the software (!!) and by the time it had finished the picture quality was so horrible that I thought I'd have to return the unit. But I auto-tuned again (there appears to be no option to manually tune) and this time it went much faster and resulted in a much better picture (albeit a little blurry thanks to the Samsung). Audio output is from the MacMini (mini-jack) to the stereo and sounds great.

You get a year's free subscription to www.tvtv.nl which means online access to a programming guide and also the possibility to schedule a recording remotely. Yes, even from the other side of world, assuming your mac mini is on. That was a cool feature I never realized existed

Music
Digitizing all of my 600+ CD's into iTunes is taking some time - especially when you're as anal as I am and want all the genres and artwork to be accurate. We have a 250GB Lacie external drive as the internal 80GB will never be enough of course . Eventually we'll have to get a terrabyte or two, I imagine, if we digitize movies as well. Although digitizing all DVDs seems a bit bothersome as you don't generally watch DVDs as often as you listen to albums.

Photos
The idea is to put all our photos on the Mac Mini too, but I don't want to use iPhoto (as it duplicates everything into annoying, dated folders and is slow as shite), yet the Frontrow software that the Mac Mini only really works with that. So we're still looking for an alternative. Suggestions welcome.

DivX Video
Downloading torrents of series is something I've been doing for a while, but then I'd have to watch them lying on the sofa with my laptop on my tummy. Now I can watch in full splendor on the TV with audio over the speakers and a remote control. Perfect!