i'm in the process of building a jukebox in my basement. I've decided to use another mini in my game room. i have one running my theatre with a owc mercury elite pro qx2 with 6.0 tb of hard drive storage! this one will be the brain of my 15" touchscreen jukebox. i'm using this kit for the jukebox: http://www.mameroom.com/Products_Jukebox_Kit.asp here's where it gets tricky. the planar 15" touchscreen is windows only. i need to either use fusion or just totally wipe hd and install windows 7 only! the best jukebox software is only on windows as well. has anyone tried something like this? the mini is such an efficient little machine it'll pay for itself with the energy savings in a short time. i would also like to have an on off button wired into the outside of the cabinet so i don't have to open it up to get in. i'm not quite sure if the touchscreen will allow me to wake the mini when running windows. any tips would be greatly appreciated. i will post pictures as the project starts to come together. touchscreen will be here tomorrow. the cabinet will be here in a week
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mac mini as a jukebox
- Thread starter mystikjoe
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The touchscreen, if its a USB interface, should register as a mouse click. So Windows 7 should wake when pressed. I wouldn't recommend virtualizing when going this route. Sometimes devices can get switched around when waking from sleep. Plus reboots would require a fit of fiddling to get everything working again. I'd go the Boot Camp route here.
Edit: I'd leave a small (<30 GB) partition with OSX installed. That's the only way you'll get firmware updates.
Edit: I'd leave a small (<30 GB) partition with OSX installed. That's the only way you'll get firmware updates.
Actually, it seems that almost all of Planar's monitors are OS X friendly.
http://www.planartouch.com/support/faq/#one
Can't comment much on jukebox software though...
http://www.planartouch.com/support/faq/#one
Can't comment much on jukebox software though...
Many people use their Mac Mini's as Windows based HTPC which is more or less what you are doing. As stated, do keep a small OSX partition just in case you ever need to log in to update firmware, but otherwise there is no reason you can't just use bootcamp and boot into Windows 7 99.999% of the time (the other .001% for updates as mentioned previously). A mini comes with a 500GB hard drive, so you are only needing to set aside about 20-30GB (or about 5-7% of the OS drive) in order to accomplish this.
You can also get many "mac mini-like" windows machines cheaper, but it is entirely upto you.
You can also get many "mac mini-like" windows machines cheaper, but it is entirely upto you.
the super low power usage is what got me. the only thing that sucks is all the really awesome jukebox software is windows based only. i just got the displayport to vga adapter so i'll be playing around with the setup through the weekend. i'll post some updates then!
software installed
so after a long long weekend of trying to get the mini set up i'm almost complete. installing windows on lion was a nightmare. bought an external drive tried to install from dvd no luck. ended up downloading an iso of the newsgroups and using a microsoft usb boot maker to get it to work. windows installed great after that. then i needed to install the bootcamp windows software which again was a little trick but got the .dmg and extracted the windows files to the usb stick and installed them. everything is running perfectly. touchscreen is so nice and no matter how hard i tried i couldn't get it to work in lion. windows on first boot worked. cabinet to install monitor and mini arrives this week and i'll upload pictures of the whole thing then.
so after a long long weekend of trying to get the mini set up i'm almost complete. installing windows on lion was a nightmare. bought an external drive tried to install from dvd no luck. ended up downloading an iso of the newsgroups and using a microsoft usb boot maker to get it to work. windows installed great after that. then i needed to install the bootcamp windows software which again was a little trick but got the .dmg and extracted the windows files to the usb stick and installed them. everything is running perfectly. touchscreen is so nice and no matter how hard i tried i couldn't get it to work in lion. windows on first boot worked. cabinet to install monitor and mini arrives this week and i'll upload pictures of the whole thing then.