When I bought my Mac Mini last year it was done so with the sole purpose to turn it into an HTPC. But after spending a year with it, the Mini has become so much more. We primarily use the Mini as our video server. We also have an ATSC tuner (El Gato EyeTV) connected to it so it is used as a back up DVR on those rare occasions that we have to record three programs at the same time. With a little networking know-how and a couple of applications the Mini becomes quite a powerful video server.

First lets talk about the hardware...

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Nice article! Right now I use an IO-Data LinkPlayer for HD playback, and a Windoze laptop running CapDVHS as my bare-bones PVR. The Linkplayer doesn't play h.264 streams although it does a decent job on .ts and Xvid/divX and wmv. I've been considering replacing both the laptop and Linkplayer with a Mini once Minis are fast enough to play all BBC h.264 streams.

A few questions:

1. I assume you can play high-bitrate .ts files off of the Firewire drive and off of DVD-Rs. Is that right? Can you play them off of Samba shares? Can you play them from UPnP servers? I burn pretty-much all my caps to DVD-R. Other media (my backup of my music CD collection, and some of my own video) is spread across 1TB and a 2TB Linux RAID servers which have Samba shares.

2. Is there a clear-QAM-capable HD tuner for the Mac, similar to the FusionHDTV USB? I do know that Firewire recording is well-supported on the Mac (better than on Windoze).

3. Can DVDPedia manage cataloging of offline media? Can it manage cataloging of transport streams and other video formats? I assume it doesn't really know about the content of the items you're cataloging, other than where to find them, but some clarification would be great.

Thanks for this article!

Thanks for your question.

1. I assume you can play high-bitrate .ts files off of the Firewire drive and off of DVD-Rs. Is that right? Can you play them off of Samba shares? Can you play them from UPnP servers? I burn pretty-much all my caps to DVD-R. Other media (my backup of my music CD collection, and some of my own video) is spread across 1TB and a 2TB Linux RAID servers which have Samba shares.

We did not play .ts files but we did play HD mpeg2 files that were recorded at 18Mbps. There was no problem playing the file on three system simultaneously. We did not test playing HD content stored on a DVD as this was setup to stream off the hard drive.

2. Is there a clear-QAM-capable HD tuner for the Mac, similar to the FusionHDTV USB? I do know that Firewire recording is well-supported on the Mac (better than on Windoze).

Yes. Its made by Miglia and it uses El Gato's Eye TV Software for the GUI.

3. Can DVDPedia manage cataloging of offline media? Can it manage cataloging of transport streams and other video formats? I assume it doesn't really know about the content of the items you're cataloging, other than where to find them, but some clarification would be great.

DVDPedia is strictly a cataloging application. When you hit play it launches the appropriate application. That can be the DVD player, VLC, or Quicktime

Hope this helps.
Ara

Thanks! .ts files are simply repackaged mpeg, so if you can play
18mbs .mpeg2 files they should be no problem. Thanks for the info!