Summary

We use a Mac Mini in the living room for audio, video, and web browsing. It is connected to the TV and the stereo. Using the regular cable box remote, we can switch the TV between cable and the output from the computer. The Mini's iTunes music collection replaced our CD shuffle player. The Mini's screen saver is set to show photographs from iPhoto. We currently have about 9000 music tracks (over 1000 albums) in iTunes, and about 4500 photographs in iPhoto: usually we let the Mini pick them at random.

Television

A Mac Mini can drive a high-definition TV easily. The highest screen resolution of HD TVs is 1920 x 1080 pixels. The Mac supports "1080p" resolution. We chose a TV that would display true 1080p in "dot for dot" mode over an HDMI input. Sony and Sharp make models that will work. The best screen size depends on viewing distance: you have to sit pretty far back from a really big TV. LCD seems like the best bet: plasma TVs are cheaper but have problems with burn-in and get dimmer after a few years. Look for fast response (cuts down on ghosting).

Our TV is a Sharp LC46D64U, 46 inch.

With the HDTV, we got HD cable. Comcast swapped the boxes and charged us a few dollars extra per month. We also bought an "upscaling" (progressive scan) DVD player (Sony). These are not expensive, and DVDs look very good.

The audio output from the TV is sent to a stereo receiver that runs our speakers. I spent some time Googling, and found out how to make the Comcast remote control's volume button control the volume on the receiver, no matter what mode the remote is in.

Computer

Our computer is an Intel Mac Mini, bought in 2007. It is currently running OS X 10.6.3. It came with 1GB of memory, and this was not enough, so we bought an upgrade kit to increase the memory up to 3GB. We also bought a 1TB hard drive that stacks under the Mini.

The Mini is connected to the TV with an Apple HDI to HDMI adapter and an HDMI cable. The TV is configured to show the computer's output in "dot for dot" mode.

The Mini's audio output is connected to the stereo with a standard miniplug to RCA audio cable.

The Mini has a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse. Wired USB versions would work just as well except for the cable across the living room.

The Mini's built-in WiFi connects to our AirPort base station, so it has access to the Internet, and we can surf the web, use Google Earth, etc. from the couch. It is also useful for client presentations.

The computer is set up as follows:

• A non-admin user named "AV" is set to log in automatically at boot.
• In AV's startup items, iPhoto and iTunes launch.
• AV's screen saver is set to Pictures, looking at the iPhoto album named "screen," and the start time is the minimum.

Pictures

We add pictures to iPhoto using the Import function. We use the full resolution versions of these pictures and let iPhoto downscale them, rather than trying to shrink them to the screen resolution. We adjust each picture to make it look good on the TV, cropping it to HDTV proportions if possible in order to avoid black bars on the sides, and adjusting the exposure, saturation, noise, definition, and sharpness.

To view pictures, we switch the TV's input to the Mini and wait until the screensaver kicks in. If we want to see a particular set of pictures, we can define an album in iPhoto and cause iPhoto to display a slide show from that album. The OS X screensaver has a number of cute modes. There are also other picture display programs for the Mac. We find that tricky transitions between photos get tiresome after a short while.

Music

We add music tracks to iTunes by ripping CDs or buying music online. We defined several playlists with different groups of music tracks. To play music at random, we set up the "iTunes DJ" to choose randomly from whatever playlist we want, and click Play in iTunes.

Movies

The Mac will work as a DVD player. It doesn't seem to be as sharp as the upscaling dedicated DVD player though. It is possible to copy the content of a DVD to the hard drive but unless you crack the copy protection, it won't play. (Haven't tried this.)

With a Netflix streaming account, we could stream movies (over WiFi) from Netflix onto the big TV. Open Netflix in a web browser, pick a movie, and click Play and then Full Screen. This works ok, with occasional stutters and failures. We got rid of Netflix streaming when they raised the price: not enough movies were streamable to make it worth while.

Management

The Mini appears on our local network via its wireless connection. The other Macs in the house can connect to its file system and move files to and from the Mini. The other Macs can also start Screen Sharing and see the Mini's screen, drive its mouse cursor, and type into applications. It is also possible to open shell windows and execute single commands on the Mini using ssh from a local computer. We can also use the wireless Remote application on an iPhone to cause iTunes to skip to a new song, change volume, etc.

Non-Apple software installed: Firefox, Google Earth, PhotoPresenter, Emacs, Cyberduck, Flip4Mac.

Things We have Not Tried Yet

Music

I haven't tried using the Mini to record audio from the turntable. Apparently the right way to do this involves a little box to convert analog to digital.

Front Row

Macs before OSX 10.7 came with a program called Front Row. Front Row has a simple MacTV-like interface that lets you control music, movies, and pictures. It is flashy but inflexible. In particular, it won't do the "random pictures and random music" that we use most of the time: if you activate Front Row it takes over sound and video.

XBMC

There is a port of Xbox Media Center for the Mac. It seems to be oriented toward playing movies from the Mac, but it does have music and picture display abilities.

Windows PCs

I think there are analogues for all of this on Windows PCs, but I have not investigated.