Loving the Mac Mini as a media centre!

Donka, great thread. Your thread was the reason for me picking up a Mac Mini as well.

Quick question for you or anyone in this thread, how do you guys/gals wake up your server remotely? How about over wifi? My mac mini is connected via wifi. Is the only way to do it is with an Airport Extreme?

Donka said:

Working fine for me. Rowmote, VNC Viewer and Plex all wake my sleeping Mac Mini without issue. I haven't changed any settings since upgrading to Yosemite.

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I have updated two of my mini's to yosemite. Rowmote is now erratic in that it usually connects and works, yet on the setting screen on the ipad or other ios devices, I may get the rotating wheel as if it is trying to connect. Sometimes it will not connect nor work unless I reboot the minis. I also have two macbook pros running yosemite and they work perfectly using rowmote.
My minis are running ethernet and ipad is running wifi through an asus rt-ac68u router.
I have tried a clean install of yosemite on both minis and made sure that wifi is off and only ethernet is working. Bluetooth is off as well. Firewall is off and rowmote 0.397 is set in privacy to allow control of my computer.
Have reverted back to mavericks (clean install) and all works perfectly. Did another clean install of yosemite and the problem reappears. Reverted back to mavericks and all is well again.
Even have Evan of Rowmote stumped.
BTW, the minis are 2010 with 4 gig ram.
Does anybody have any ideas on what is up?

Donka said:

I have a later Mac Mini but Rowmote is working fine with it. Tried out the settings on the iPad app when connected to the mini and they came up straight away so not sure what your issue is. Did the developer say there was any logging that may help identify the issue?

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He was going to send me a howto for logging but hasn't done it yet. Any tips on how to go about it?

I've also recently migrated from a PC media center to a Mac mini running XBMC.

For remote control, this works flawlessly to control XBMC with my Sony TV remote.

http://www.pulse-eight.com/store/products/104-usb-hdmi-cec-adapter.aspx

Just reinstalled yosemite. Again the same issues. Looses connect over time if allowed to sleep and must reboot to re establish.

Something about sleep that sets it off. If I don't sleep the mini, then no problem.
Sent logs of the wake/sleep to evan of rowmote to see what they say.

I love using Plex, I also use the mini as a server for when we are in bed, there's a plex app on our samsung smart TV

Hd master, 24p, 24 bit audio

@doka, with great interest I read your article and was allready finding myself a mac mini, but, I did some more reading and have some extra questions who can be a deal breaker...
I dont want to use itunes to play my audio files because i have mostly flac fies and am creating an ever expanding 24bit folder. That the reason i diged sonos in favour of a simple audio player. Can i play high res files with a mac mini and would i need a seperate dac to up the sound quality? For movies is the mac mini capeble of streaming m2ts files without hickups? Is it possible to choose for 24p playback, can it automatically find subtitles? Is the pcm audio as good as hd-master? If the majority of the answers is yes I will become an apple fan boy ;-)
If i'm planning to hook up several hd's with the usb3 connections is there a benefit to choose for ssd's instead of a 1 tb internal disk?
Hope you will find the time to convince me!
Kind regards, Tom

I just posted my experience of yosemite on a 2010 mac mini after having done extensive logging concerning the sleep/wake issue here. Perhaps this might help someone else.

For those that want to automate the downloading of new TV Shows check out ShowRSS and Catch. You subscribe to shows with ShowRSS and Catch downloads them (via Transmission or whatever you use).

I got one for my TV, so much fun

I also like using it as my Music Box now.. just need one weekend to organise all my music from windows. The optical out is a real bonus though

Mac is set to wake from sleep each morning at the same time for 20 minutes.


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How do I do the above?

Is there a helpful site you'd recommend reading so I can set my Mac Mini 2012 up to be the ultimate media server?

This thread convinced me to go down the Mac Mini route for a media centre which I’m configuring at present. One question that come to mind:

I’ve got 3 kids and a computer illiterate wife. How best to setup users on the media centre? I’m thinking and admin user for any admin-type work that is needed, and then a general standard user (which I’ve called “user” set to auto-login and never lock (assuming that is possible somehow). I've saved all my media to Users\Shared so any user can access it.

Should I run Plex as the “user” (non-admin) user as this is what will be logged in all the time?

Is there a better way to have it all setup for the application(s) and/or the users?

Are other people in the family going to be administering Plex i.e. Adding new media to it etc. or using the Mac for other activities?

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No, it will just be the standard user doing the Plex admin and viewing etc, and the admin user doing admin things. Sounds good, I will give it a try - thanks for answering so quickly Donka. I'm sure there will be more questions later!

Great Setup

Good writeup on your Mac Mini. I've been running this exact setup myself for about 4 years now and I'm very pleased with it. In fact, Rowmote by itself is a lockout feature that prevents me from ever switching away from the Mac. Using an iPad, control of the Mini is nearly perfect! I only use desktop sharing when I really need to get into the weeds with mouse/keyboard, but that always works great when I do.

I'm not sure how much you like to tinker with this stuff, but you can really go all out with this. I leave mine on 24 hours a day and have it doing all kinds of things:

HTPC (obviously):
It serves media to the TV from the local drive, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and whatever else. It also streams to the other devices in the house.

Game Console:
Macifom (NES emulator) along with 2 Buffalo game pads bring back the old days with all of my old Nintendo games. I could do other emulators too, but I haven't bothered with it yet.

File Server:
A big external hard drive (or 3) stores and serves all of the family's media. Movies, music, pictures, videos, etc. No need for a stand-alone NAS.

Hardware Controller:
The Ubiquiti mFi controller software runs on the Mini and monitors/controls all of my mFi home automation devices around the house.

Server for Syncthing:
I'm using Syncthing as a way of building my own private and secure dropbox alternative. The Mini acts as the always-on server for all of the other devices with synced folders.

Backup Appliance:
I'm using Duplicati to encrypt and backup important files to a cloud server. This is all automated to occur nightly which ensures my important data is recoverable in the event of a disaster.

I'm sure there's other things I'll add to the list as time goes by, but my point is it's really handy to have a power-efficient server that's always on. Since it can do all of these things, I can put everything else in the house to sleep without affecting critical applications.

Some thoughts after running with the mini for a week

I started with HDMI to the receiver but have ended up copying Donka and doing HDMI to the TV with optical audio to the receiver.

For remote I am using a Harmony 650 to control Plex Home Theater, and also have Rowmote working. Also sometimes screen sharing. Rowmote is great (lots of functionality in there and I got the pro version which was only a couple of dollars). But I need a wife- and kid-friendly option and I think the Harmony will be the best option for them.

The biggest issue I have found is the screen resolution. My TV (Pioneer Kuro circa 2008) is native 720P but can play 1080P (downscaled…is that the term?). I have the mac set to 1080p as a “Scaled” option but it often falls back to “best for display" which is 1360x768. Is there a way to force the Mac to stick with the “Scaled” setting which looks heaps better on screen. The only option I have had to date is to go into Preferences each time and re-set but that’s pretty annoying.

@Donka - you mentioned Audio Switcher as a free app. I can see 2 times in the app store called Audio Switcher, neither free but big price difference between them. Any idea which one is yours? One is developed by Lorenzo Thurman with headphones as app icon and one by Paul O’Neill with a round speaker icon (in the Australian app store, anyway).

Like some others I have had problems with the mini not waking properly (it’s a new one, running Yosemite) so I’ve set it to never sleep.

One other question for those who have been running this for a while - I will generally have PHT running in the foreground, but if I turn it on and something else is in foreground, is there any way to easily get to PHT without needing to go through Rowmote’s application switching, for example…..can the Apple TV remote somehow be set to get PHT front and centre effectively like a CMD+TAB?

Finally, storage has become a problem quite quickly - in all the excitement of deciding to digitise my entire DVD collection I have now found myself running a pair of 1TB WD Elements USB drives. What do you guys use and recommend for external storage (brand/model?)