It occurred to me that I could use the free iTunes Remote app on my iPod Touch to control the iTunes on the Mini, as long as iTunes was launched on that machine. As mentioned in a previous post, iTunes doesn’t generally need to be open on the Mini as Front Row and Plex can access its library on their own and I would have to close it each time I tried to access iTunes from my laptop.

The solution came in the form of the excellent Rowmote app (£0.59) which, as well as duplicating the functionality of the Apple Remote over a wireless network, adds other controls such as enabling you to launch and quit apps. The Pro version (£2.99) even includes a trackpad and keyboard for those times when the mini insists that it’s a computer rather than a set-top box and requires some user input that the Apple Remote can’t provide. Using a combination of these 2 apps, I can launch iTunes, browse to the music that I want and then quit iTunes when I’m finished, all without having to switch on either a TV or a second computer.

I experimented with a similar setup with the Mini, but swiftly came to the conclusion that as mounting network shares isn’t something that can easily be done using the Apple Remote, it wasn’t a great idea from an ease-of-use point of view. The easiest option seemed to be to have the iTunes library live in the default location on the Mac Mini so it would always be available, and access it remotely from the laptop when required.

To share an iTunes library on a host computer (in this case the Mac Mini) with a remote one (Macbook), the host machine needs to have file sharing switched on and the remote must be connected to it as a user with Read / Write privileges. Launch iTunes on the remote machine while holding down Option and it will prompt you to either choose an iTunes library or create a new one. Navigate to the location of the iTunes library on the host computer and select that library. Now, when opening iTunes on the remote machine, it will read and write to the iTunes library on the host computer. A slight drawback is that only one machine can have iTunes open at any one time, but as Front Row and Plex can both play music from the iTunes library without iTunes having to be open, I didn’t consider this to be too much of a problem.

Another advantage of doing it this way, rather than simply altering the location of the music files in iTunes -> Preferences -> Advanced is that it avoids the default location problem that I experienced with the TViX setup.

Both based on the Open Source XBox Media Centre (XBMC) project, they’re quite similar apps with slightly different approaches. They both play a variety of file formats and have an open-source plugin architecture that allows the functionality to be extended to grab internet content. Boxee describes itself as a ‘social’ media centre, and allows you to make friends with other Boxee users à la any social network you care to mention. Plex’s focus is more on presentation, with a number of different available skins and library functionality which adds metadata to your movies and music (using the metadata stored in your iTunes Library).

I played with both of them for a while before settling on Plex as my preferred option. It’s slightly fiddlier setting up your media libraries than Boxee’s ‘look for media and tag it’ approach, but on the occasions that Boxee made a mistake in looking up information on a movie it was far harder to fix it than in Plex. Boxee’s other strength – the social angle – didn’t interest me at all and I found Boxee to crash a lot more often (in fairness, it is only in alpha, whereas Plex is beta). On the other hand, Plex has gorgeous, modifiable skins and, once the metadata is loaded, the Libraries are intuitive and self-updating. There is also an active project to integrate EyeTV into Plex, and I’m not aware of anything similar for Boxee (in fact, on one forum thread I found, some Boxee users were openly hostile to this idea, suggesting it went against the ‘cut the cable’ ethos of Boxee). Third-party plugins seem to be as widely supported on both apps, with Plex slightly having the edge at the moment for UK-based users due to its 4OD plugin, and thanks to a Plex Front Row plugin it fits easily into the current setup.

Of course, the beauty of all of this sitting on an actual computer rather than a closed box is that should Boxee’s functionality overtake Plex I can easily just switch to using that one instead. In the more likely event that Plex comes out of beta as a genuine replacement for Front Row, then it’s a simple job to reconfigure the system as required.

In other words

• • When switched on, it should default to TV or Music Player, or a very simple menu
• • If defaulting to TV or Music, it should be very simple to get from this to something else
• • putting a CD or a DVD into the drive should either automatically play it, or provide a simple and obvious way to do so

There are obviously other requirements, such as the playing back of ripped DVDs, the use of streaming services and so on, but these three are the most important so were my starting point.

I looked at a few options. Plex and Boxee are both ports of the excellent XBox Media Centre, expandable by an open-source plugin system. They’re both at reasonably early stages of development (Boxee is in alpha, Plex in beta), but neither offers DVD playback yet so I had to count them out for this part of the project. I’ll come back to them in a later post though.

Whilst it has a number of shortcomings¹, Apple’s own Front Row application fulfills almost all of my initial requirements; it will play DVDs and Audio CDs without the need to launch other apps, it can access an iTunes Library and shuffle by artist, album or genre and, with Perian installed, it will play any movie file that Quicktime can play all from a menu which is designed to be controlled by the Apple Remote.

Also, with the aid of a plugin called PyeTV, it allows access to EyeTV recordings, a Now/Next Channel Picker and the EyeTV EPG. As a nice little sidenote, it also integrates with ETV-Comskip, an ad-skipper for EyeTV².

So, by installing PyeTV and adding Front Row to my list of Login Items, the box starts up on Front Row. From here, I can choose to launch EyeTV, listen or watch my iTunes library, or watch a DVD.

¹Not least of which, the fact that it doesn’t support iTunes’ “Group Compilations while Browsing” behaviour.
²The 10.5 download link for ETV-Comskip is borked. It will download and unzip a file called “ETVComskip-1.0.3-10.5.dmg.bz2″, but you need to delete the “.bz2″ from the filename in order to mount the disk image.

To start with, I found it best to connect the Mini to my network via Ethernet, rather than wirelessly. This enables you to wake the Mini from sleep remotely (using the ‘Wake for Ethernet network administrator access option in System Preferences -> Energy Saver ->Options).

The first thing I did once the network was set up (and this did require plugging in a mouse and keyboard) was to make sure that the admin account was set up with a password (ie not a blank password) and that screen sharing and file sharing were switched on (in System Preferences -> Sharing). This meant that I could now administer the Mini from my laptop without needing to have a keyboard or mouse plugged in and without having to squint at the TV screen from the sofa. The password bit is important because Keychain won’t store blank passwords, and Screen Sharing makes you enter the (blank) password twice to make sure you meant to leave it blank.

Next job was to stop it prompting for a mouse on startup. This was fixed by unchecking ‘Open Bluetooth Setup Assistant at startup when no input device is present’ in System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Advanced.

I then unchecked the automatic Software Update – I figured I would be notified of Software updates when using my laptop and could then run them at my leisure on the Mini. Far preferable to being in the middle of watching something on TV and having the little blue globey thing start bouncing away.

Finally, I used this tip to disable the Crash Reporter dialogues which ask if you want to report when an app Quits Unexpectedly. In the event something crashes, at least this way I should be able to recover without having to go to my laptop and click ‘Don’t Send’ before carrying on.

Next post I’ll go through the software setup

a small form factor device with plenty of storage, capable of playing a variety of audio and video formats, a user-friendly interface and remote, a (preferably dual) TV Tuner with PVR capabilities, a DVD player and access to online content. It should also be able to handle HD when I finally get a big telly

If I’m honest, that was a bit disingenuous, because I’d pretty much already decided what I was going to be using as a replacement; I just thought breaking it up into separate blog posts read better.

Obviously, there’s no off-the-shelf set-top box which can do everything I’m after, and as far as I’m aware there’s not even one which can be easily hacked into doing it. It became clear pretty quickly that I wasn’t talking about getting a media player so much as I was talking about getting a small computer dedicated to performing media player functions. Apple aficionado that I am, it was always going to be a Mac Mini.

A brand new 2.0 GHz Mac Mini from the Apple Store was going to push this project way out of my budget, but after some investigation I concluded that I probably didn’t need that much power for my purposes anyway. I found a really helpful bloke on eBay selling upgraded (maxed-out RAM, 320GB HDD) 1.83GHz Mac Minis and I was in business.

The next purchase was an Elgato Eye TV Diversity USB TV Tuner (the only dual tuner option Elgato do). It’s a chunky USB stick with two aerial inputs that comes with two little desktop aerials and an aeriel splitter so you can either use it ‘on-the-go’ or plug it into a rooftop aerial. It can be used in ‘Diversity’ mode, which uses both tuners together to get a better signal in weaker areas, or in Dual Tuner mode. I get decent Freeview reception, so I opted for the latter. On a side note, the EyeTV is the first bit of kit I’ve bought ages that comes with everything you might need to use it – there are no hidden extras you’ll need to purchase to use it in any of its modes.

The only missing piece of the puzzle was the cable needed to hook up my ancient TV. The Mac Mini has a DVI out and comes with a DVI-VGA adaptor. As and when I upgrade my telly, I can either get one that accepts VGA in, or DVI-HDMI connectors are reasonably inexpensive. Until then, however, Apple sell a DVI-Video adaptor for £15 which outputs to either composite or S-Video. This runs into the TV via the SCART adaptor that I’ve been using with the TViX. So the hardware looks like this:

UPDATE: After a recent conversation with Dave at This Much I Know, it turns out that the new (post March 2009) Minis have mini-DVI and DisplayPort instead of a standard DVI port, and the Apple-branded Mini-DVD -> Video adaptors do not work with this machine. Consequently, there doesn’t appear to be a simple way to hook these machines up to a Standard Definiton TV via Scart or Composite video in.

Next I’ll look at the initial setup

Initially I thought it might just be that a setting had got lost during the upgrade, but everything seemed OK. A cursory Google suggested that other people were experiencing the same problem and that it was a problem with the firmware.

Fortunately, downgrading the firmware through Airport Utility is very easy. Click on ‘Manual Setup’ from the main screen. This presents you with the ‘Airport’ tab, and lists all the pertinent information about your setup. The third item down is the Firmware version. If you hover over where it says ‘Version:’, you see a little disclosure arrow (it looks a bit like an iTunes store link). Clicking on this drops down a dialogue sheet which contains a dropdown list with all the available firmware versions in it. I just selected 7.3.2, rebooted the Time Capsule and everything worked fine!

Apparently there’s a ‘rare’ bug fixed in 7.4.1 which caused problems with backups. I think my backup regime is robust enough for me to risk a ‘rare’ bug for the sake of the functionality I need. It just sucks that I have to.