Mac Pro - can u turn into HTPC?

[cdika17]

This post just baffles me...

This is like asking if a Lamborghini can pull a caravan. Well of course it can (it could probably pull six!) but who the hell would want to defile a Lamborghini with such a menial task?

But i already have the Mac Pro, besides it playing music off of itunes, thats all i use it for, so why not build it into something rather than let is collect dust. If you have an alternative route, please, chime in, ur intitled to your opnion, but i'm trying to use what i have to make it work.

 

[brendu]

it is a perfect media center already, get a wireless keyboard and mouse, hide it behind your entertainment center, throw in sata bluray drive and your good to go... front row is nice, hulu desktop is awesome. that thing will be a great htpc as it is.

 

[cdika17]

it is a perfect media center already, get a wireless keyboard and mouse, hide it behind your entertainment center, throw in sata bluray drive and your good to go... front row is nice, hulu desktop is awesome. that thing will be a great htpc as it is.

Can't get hulu in Canada.

 

[gugucom]

Can you guys recommend sites where i can find the procs, mem and drives? Take note that I am from Canada.

So for media software, people recommend eyetv(i already have hd satelitte so don't know if i need eyetv or if it will work up here), front row for an interface? DVD/BluRay software?

Would i need a graphic card update? Sound Card?

Being in North America suppliers like Newegg and OWC should be convenient for you for standard stuff like drives and RAM.

The trickiest part would probably be the TV integration if your service has a smart card access control. It would depend of the smart card interface. If the provider allows standardized interface like a CAM (conditional access module)

you can use the EyeTV or Digital Everywhere hardware. They have an online store that delivers world wide. The Mac software is EyeTV which you can also purchase from Digital Everywhere at a discount.

http://www.digital-everywhere.com/en/alcms/index.php?sid=1190324464

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na.en.html

If you have propriatory boxes only then it would depend of being able to interface with the box by Ethernet or firewire. That would be a second rate interface anyway because you would almost certainly not be able to control the box from your Mac Pro which is the objective.

Blu-Ray playback software is available from CyberLink PowerDVD or Corel WinDVD or Sonic BD. Usually a SW comes with your BR drive.

Ripping BRDs is possible with AnyDVD HD from http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html I probably do not need to tell you that you need to observe your local laws about disabling copy protection. I my country you can rip BDs that you own to HDD for your own use but the legal situation is different across the world.

For sound interface your SPDIF I/O of the Mac Pro is probably all you need.

For graphic I would go to a patched PC ATI 4870 or an original Apple 4870 from the Apple store.

I do not use front row because I see not much benefit in it. YMMV

 

[Tesselator]

I would disagree with that. You need Bootcamp Windows to rip Blu-Ray or play it back.

You sure? I thought there were already several utilities that could mount, play, and burn BRDs. I'm pretty sure Toast 10 has those options and I see other utils that say so too. I don't have a BRDrive so I dunno but I would imagine such utils aren't lying, yeah?

I already use bootcamp and windows xp for some gaming so that end is covered.

Can you guys recommend sites where i can find the procs, mem and drives? Take note that I am from Canada.

So for media software, people recommend eyetv(i already have hd satelitte so don't know if i need eyetv or if it will work up here), front row for an interface? DVD/BluRay software?

Would i need a graphic card update? Sound Card?

Nah, your GFX card is fine unless you wanna also play HEAVY video games.

As far as where to buy the stuff just search on-line for the cheapest prices - really nothing else matters. RAM is RAM - brand is NOT important at all, only spec and warrantee period. HDDs are basically the same deal. Just pick the price/performance you want and buy from the cheapest retailer your search comes up with.

 

[gugucom]

BD titles have copy protection that you cannot play without specialist play back software. This is only available under Windows.

 

[Tesselator]

So OS X pretty much just sucks azz then?!?

 

[gugucom]

So OS X pretty much just sucks azz then?!?

Yep, Steve Jobs wants to flogg his inferior iTunes HD to the customers but it isn't competitive with 1080p stuff.

 

[cdika17]

Being in North America suppliers like Newegg and OWC should be convenient for you for standard stuff like drives and RAM.

The trickiest part would probably be the TV integration if your service has a smart card access control. It would depend of the smart card interface. If the provider allows standardized interface like a CAM (conditional access module)

you can use the EyeTV or Digital Everywhere hardware. They have an online store that delivers world wide. The Mac software is EyeTV which you can also purchase from Digital Everywhere at a discount.

http://www.digital-everywhere.com/en/alcms/index.php?sid=1190324464

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na.en.html

If you have propriatory boxes only then it would depend of being able to interface with the box by Ethernet or firewire. That would be a second rate interface anyway because you would almost certainly not be able to control the box from your Mac Pro which is the objective.

Blu-Ray playback software is available from CyberLink PowerDVD or Corel WinDVD or Sonic BD. Usually a SW comes with your BR drive.

Ripping BRDs is possible with AnyDVD HD from http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html I probably do not need to tell you that you need to observe your local laws about disabling copy protection. I my country you can rip BDs that you own to HDD for your own use but the legal situation is different across the world.

For sound interface your SPDIF I/O of the Mac Pro is probably all you need.

For graphic I would go to a patched PC ATI 4870 or an original Apple 4870 from the Apple store.

I do not use front row because I see not much benefit in it. YMMV

Don't think i'll be doing the TV integration as of now.
Gonna look at a faster proccessor. What do i have for a CPU Socket Type?
More ram.
Bigger drives.
BR drive, any suggestions?
Update the graphics card, whats diff about a patched 4870 compared to the apple one?

 

[brendu]

Can't get hulu in Canada.

ah, bummer... did not realize you were in canada.. are there any similar sites there that you can use? If you have a lot of money to spend on media, does your iTunes store offer the shows and movies you want? and can you use services like netflix? Im not sure at all what multimedia options you have but as far as a machine what you have will work for a HTPC no problems... and if you want bluRay windows 7 is a decent OS, ive been pretty happy with it.

EDIT: I think your processor is fine for a media center... its better than anything in a mac mini you can get.

 

[Tesselator]

Yep, Steve Jobs wants to flogg his inferior iTunes HD to the customers but it isn't competitive with 1080p stuff.

And there's no 3rd party players out there? WOW! Apple-developer-shame!

 

[gugucom]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136174

This will do fine unless you want to burn BRDs. Then you may want to take this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136175

An Apple 4870 will give you VGA via the the MDP. A PC 4870 will give you two Dual-DVI for two 30" Apple cinema displays. For entertainment the Apple card is probably more versatile.

 

[cdika17]

Just 3 things; Procs, memory, and drives.
[*]For drives you need huge space for movies (especially BRD rips) so I would install either four 2 TB drives in a RAID 0 or four 1.5 TB drives in a RAID 0. I would then run the two unused SATA connectors external to some enclosure of your choosing that housed two more 2TB or 1.5 TB drives as a weekly or daily backup - keeping it turned off when not backing up.

I think i need to do some re-seaching, what is RAID?
Which drives u recommend? WD caviar greens?

 

[Dr.Pants]

RAID = Redundant Array of Independent Discs.

There are several levels of RAID. The main ones that can be done on the MacPro (w/out a hardware solution) is RAID 0,1, and 10. What Tesselator suggested is having a large RAID-0 array for maximising storage space and HDD throughput - basically RAID-0 combines volumes. RAID 1 mirrors them. RAID 10 tries to be the best of both worlds.

Wiki entry on RAID

 

[gugucom]

The WD greens are fine for the HTPC. RAID0 can be done with the disk utility in OS X. In Windows you will not manage to run RAID on the Mac Pro.

 

[js81]

here's the answer to your dillema:

Send the Mac Pro to me and I'll send you a Mini in return. Scout's honor.

In all seriousness, it can be done (as other's have said), but it'd sure be a big, noisy machine for an HTPC, not to mention a waste of a great Mac Pro. Trade/Sell it and buy new is my advice.

 

[cdika17]

here's the answer to your dillema:

Send the Mac Pro to me and I'll send you a Mini in return. Scout's honor.

In all seriousness, it can be done (as other's have said), but it'd sure be a big, noisy machine for an HTPC, not to mention a waste of a great Mac Pro. Trade/Sell it and buy new is my advice.

starting to think that selling it and buying/build my own htpc is the way i might go. Just need to find a buyer!

 

[nanofrog]

starting to think that selling it and buying/build my own htpc is the way i might go. Just need to find a buyer!

I don't think it will be that hard on Craig's List or eBay. Now's the time to sell the '06 models, while they still have enough value remaining.

 

[Tesselator]

delete (double post)

 

[Tesselator]

Which drives u recommend? WD caviar greens?

People have various favorites but like I said originally it doesn't really matter about the maker! Just get the drive with the specs, warrantee, and price you like. All the rest of the fanboyism is totally BS.

Yes this will take a little researching on your part.

 

[nanofrog]

People have various favorites...All the rest of the fanboyism is totally BS.

I wouldn't go that far. For example, the concerns over Seagate are deserved, given their recent history (and it affected the enterprise line as well ).

Other than that, you've go the right idea; Match the specs...

 

[cdika17]

I have a guy that will give me $1500USD for my Mac Pro, should i do it, $1500 could get me a pretty good htpc build, no?

 

[jjahshik32]

The mac pro is a perfect HTPC. Just run plex player and tie all 4 hdds into one folder for the movies and categories.

For example on HDD 1 make the "Movies" folder and a subfolder inside named "Action" for all your action movies. If you ever run out of space on hdd 1, you can create another "Movies" folder within your hdd 2 and a subfolder of "Action." Then try running the plex player, go into the preferences and choose your HDD 1 "Movies" and HDD 2 "Movies" folders as the targets. Once you do that go into the Watch My Videos under the plex player and now you'll have a single "Movies" folder that you can go into with a single "Action" subfolder containing all your Action movies that contains all your action movies from HDD 1 and HDD 2 in alphabetical order!

And here's the even better part. If you own any mac portable machine, you can install an app called teleport on your mac laptop and on your mac pro. So the mac pro will be hooked up to your hdtv and you can sit back and control your mac pro (basically the plex player) from afar on your recliner chair through your mac notebook using teleport!

You can do that with all four of your HDDs (put in 2TB in each bay and make it about 8TB total full of movies!). Mac Pro is the ULTIMATE HTPC.

 

[JPamplin]

Let me chime in here...

First of all, the Mac Pro is one of the most silent computers made - so noise shouldn't be an issue. If you run multiple drives, it's going to draw lots of power while the drives are spun up, no matter which box you select. At least with the Pro, everything is ventilated beautifully, which is not always the case with "standard" HTPC cases - cool drives last longer, we all know that.

Gugucom is right - the Pro is expandable, quiet, stable - and free to you since you already have one and aren't using it. You can run Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, which are all good candidates for an HTPC application.

I'd stick with the Mac OS if you don't have a need for Blu-Ray right now (that might change soon, BTW.) The ability to create an 8TB RAID internally is mighty nice when you have terabytes of movies as I do.

Haven't checked out EyeTV very closely but it certainly looks pretty. It's under active development.

 

[Transporteur]

First of all, the Mac Pro is one of the most silent computers made - so noise shouldn't be an issue.

Have you ever heard a Mini?
No?
There you go!

Personally I would not like to have a Pro in my living room. The Mini runs circles around it in means of noise. You can't hear that thing. Perfect for a HTPC!