Is there a Mac Mini ATV Hack?

dmm219 said:

Does anyone know of a Hack (or anything for that matter) which would allow a Mac Mini to run the ATV firmware? Having the capabilities of the Mini, along with the ATV menu interface would be pretty nice. I know you can always use front row, but I like how well the current 2.0 firmware is integrated with the itunes store.

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Front Row is elegant and simplistic. ATV is a bit more robust on its front end but you should be looking at Plex. It is by far more comprehensive and works well on the Mac Mini 1.83 and 2.0 for playing typical non DRM media files. DVD , avi, mkv, mpg, mp4 and some m2ts files (blu ray).

Plex is free. You should check out their site. It does have a tiny learning curve to fully utilize but has a terrific forum community to answer questions.

I don't know what Mac Mini you have but hopefully you have 2 gigs RAM. It does* help.

- Phrehdd

No but you can add boxee to it and it makes it a whole lot better.

I just installed it on my ATV before i upgrade the HDD for **** and giggles and it works like a charm though full 1080p support is non existent at the moment. 720p runs like a champ.

dmm219 said:

The only problem I see with the Plex and Boxee solutions, is lack of an interface to the itunes store. I love the easy access to the itunes store that you get from the ATV software. Boxee does not have this capability. The means I'd be stuck with actually using Itunes on the Mac Mini which is a no go.

Now, if I could run a Mac Mini like an ATV, as well as like a computer with Boxee or Plex...I would be sold.

Ofcourse, Apple at the moment probably does not want its own products competing against each other. Which is why we won't see it.

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Why not clone the HDD in the ATV and then port that over the MINI?

I mean an ATV has the same insides and guts of a MINI without the actual OS interface. In fact i know the OS interface is there running in the Background, because when i launch boxee on my ATV, i can see the window in the background with the minimize and maximize and close buttons.

But in theory if you grab an ATV OEM HDD, you can find those on Ebay for cheap, copy it and clone it to the mini, i dont see why it wont boot into the ATV environment, and you can use boxee/itunes all togheter. Only issue you might have is with the wireless part.

if your Mini is an Intel machine and running Tiger you should be able to run ATV4Mac.

http://www.macgeekblog.com/blog/archive/2008/03/25

dmm219 said:

The only problem I see with the Plex and Boxee solutions, is lack of an interface to the itunes store. I love the easy access to the itunes store that you get from the ATV software. Boxee does not have this capability. The means I'd be stuck with actually using Itunes on the Mac Mini which is a no go.

Now, if I could run a Mac Mini like an ATV, as well as like a computer with Boxee or Plex...I would be sold.

Ofcourse, Apple at the moment probably does not want its own products competing against each other. Which is why we won't see it.

Click to expand...

being a couple of posts down from some good answers to your response to me I'll just say this - for me (since this is now subjective) I wouldn't mind having Plex closed for Itunes store stuff and also, playback of music. I admit that I prefer playing music (presently) from Itunes rather than Plex. However for movies and non-drm music etc, Plex is impressive.

I think the solution for mac mini with that ATV4Mac seems worth investigating.

- Phrehdd

I've tried ATV for mac; it's a pretty straight forward install, but it takes a little finagling of the install CD to get an intel version of tiger on the mini (it came with leopard), and to get your ATV to recognize itunes libraries on the same computer. Works fine though, HD movie rentals are great.

+1 for plex though.