You don't have to use Front Row to play your media and there are many reasons why you wouldn't want to, not least it's inability to play certain file types well.

Having tried many of the alternate media players available for OSX there are only two that I think are worth looking at. The first is VLC [ www.videolan.org ] that is a popular cross-platform media player that can handle almost anything you throw at it without the need for additional codecs. I find it performs a lot better than QT for many media formats especially with hi-def that needs all the performance improvements you can give it.

A lot of the hi-def media I've downloaded recently are 720p resolution in the mp4 h.264 format wrapped in MKV files. I find that whilst QT will play these on my 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo I still do get the occasional dropped frame. When using VLC the playback appears much smoother.

Neither QT or VLC can handle 1080p MKV files though. Whilst a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo should have more than enough power to handle it apparently the problem lies with the ffmpeg decoder that hasn't yet been optimised to use two cores.

One solution I've recently come across is the OSXBMC media player which can just about cope with 1080p on my 1.8Ghz machine and so should perform better on the faster Mac's. OSXBMC [ www.osxbmc.com ] is a port of the Xbox Media Center to OSX and is still in the early stages of development but already performs very well. And there is a skin available to make it look like Front Row!

There is an informative article about 1080p playback on the Mac Mini here.

If you are using Front Row/QuickTime as your media player then you'll soon find that it can't play every movie file you throw at it. For a list of supported file formats and video formats see www.apple.com/quicktime/player/specs.html. There are some glaring omissions from this list, most notably MPEG-2 which Apple have the cheek to charge you extra for!

Note that there is a difference between file format and video/audio format. The file is just a container for the video and audio streams contained within it and to be able to play a particular file QuickTime will need to understand the file format and have codecs for the video and audio content. Whilst the file type can give you an idea of the the codecs used within it you cannot always be certain.

Fortunately there are plenty of third-party codecs available that plug into QuickTime to fill the gaps. The very least you will probably need to install:

• Flip4Mac [ www.flip4mac.com ] - allows you to play Windows Media Video (WMV) files. There is a free version of this and the latest version has much better support for WMVHD files than the previous versions did. I do find though that the latest version appears to spend a few minutes caching the media before starting to play it which wasn't the case previously.


• Perian [ perian.org ] - adds support for a number of video formats including the increasingly popular Matroska MKV format. This is also a free download.


• MPEG-2 [ www.apple.com/uk/quicktime/mpeg2 ] - Apples MPEG-2 component for QuickTime that you unfortunately have to pay £15 for!

These are topics that I will cover in future posts, if you have a suggestion for something then please leave a comment and if it's something I've experienced then I'll do my best to help.

• Installing Additional Codecs
• Using Alternative Media Players
• Importing DVDs
• Using Non-Supported Video Formats in iTunes
• Streaming your iTunes library online
• Problems playing 1080P videos

Front Row is the application that makes the Mac mini a great media machine, however it's not all sweetness and light.

Front Row is basically a fancy front end to iTunes and QuickTime Player so it lists everything in your iTunes library (music, TV shows, podcasts etc) and anything under certain default folders (such as the Movies folder). You can also stream movie trailers online which is a nice feature. Apple recently announced movie rentals will be available using the Apple TV unfortunately this won't be available to other Front Row users as only the Apple TV supports the HDCP copy protection standard on it's HDMI port.

To be honest I've found Front Row to be less useful than I anticipated. I find playing music more convenient using iTunes - Front Row doesn't handle Artist/Album sorting very well when you have multiple artists on a single album. I've also had a few problems playing video but that's mainly due to them being in formats that aren't natively supported by QuickTime and so using third-party codecs, in those cases you are probably better off opening them in some other media player.

If you organise everything in iTunes and only use well supported video formats then it is actually a very good front end. I find it especially useful for flicking through and playing video podcasts downloaded through iTunes - the convenience of using the remote from the sofa can't be beat.

More about these issues later.

The first thing to do is connect the Mac Mini to the TV, this really isn't as easy and straight forward as it should be, so much so that Apple support have a whole forum dedicated to it [ Apple.com > Support > Discussions > Mac mini > Using Displays with the Mac mini]. The MM has a DVI socket on the back and comes with a VGA converter so you can easily connect it to any standard computer monitor with VGA input but using it as a media machine you'll probably want to connect using the superior digital HDMI input of your HDTV. Apple sell an HDMI cable but it is overpriced, there are loads of cheaper DVI-HDMI leads available - CPC is always a good source for those types of things (cpc.co.uk).

This is where all my problems started; I could not get a full 1920x1080 picture to fill the screen. If I used the VGA cable then I was limited as my TV didn't support 1920x1080 on the VGA socket, only the more typical VGA resolutions which it then scaled to fill the screen. Using the HDMI lead I couldn't get the 1080P output to scale properly on the screen, it was either stretched too big so you lost the edges of the screen or it was shrunk so you had wide margins around the screen. This was dependent on whether overscan was switched on or off on the MM display preferences. I eventually got the stretching thing fixed by switching on underscan on the TV and switching on overscan on the MM. But I still had a problem with the image not being aligned correctly and sitting left off the screen about an inch.

These problems are not unusual, just see the above mentioned forum, and appear to derive from the fact the the MM's DVI output isn't really designed for using on TV's and is better suited to monitors. This is crazy considering many people do buy them to use with their HDTVs's. The Apple TV doesn't suffer from this problem so it's not beyond Apple to get it right - though the Apple TV has an HDMI not DVI socket.

My solution to the offsetting was to use a utility SwitchResX which allows you to define non-standard display modes. Finding the right settings to use with SwitchResX is not easy if your TV manufacturer does not publish the full specification of the signal needed and if you get it wrong then you'll restart the MM and just have a blank screen and have to reboot into safe mode. It can take many hours of trial and error to get it right, I suggest looking for them in the above mentioned Apple forum. I found the right ones for mine on another forum after a couple hours Googling it.

Mac Mini 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 80GB HD.

Iomega MiniMax 750GB USB/Firewire external HD - for storing all the media.

Apple wireless keyboard.

Apple wireless Mighty Mouse.

Connected via HDMI to a Sharp LC-37XD1E 1080P TV.

I recently bought a Mac Mini to use as a media centre machine connected to my HDTV. The Mac Mini looks like the perfect machine for the job but what I've found is nothing is ever as straight forward and easy as it should be and there's been a lot of Googling and experimenting to get things working the way I'd like. This blog is a place to share these trials and tribulations as a resource for others in the same boat.

A year ago I bought a full HD 1080p TV and upgraded my Sky to SkyHD but the lack of HD programming made me look elsewhere for HD sources and it was a good excuse to get an XBOX 360. I started downloading HD movies which I streamed to the XBOX using a superb piece of software, TVersity, but this wasn't ideal as the XBOX is probably one of the loudest machines on the planet and the machine I was using to do the streaming was a Windows 2003 Server which I didn't need for anything else anymore and so wanted to retire as it had a habit of overheating and crashing which wasn't good in the middle of a movie.

Having owned an Apple iBook G4 for a couple of years I was very impressed with Mac OS X and the new Mac's using Intel Core 2 Duo processors running OS X 10.5 Leopard which had the great new version of Front Row looked ideal as the basis for a media centre PC.

There were many other one box solutions available, including the Apple TV which uses the same Front Row software, but all these options are restricted to the media they can play depending on which codecs they support. Using a fully fledged PC instead meant that I could at least install additional software to play whatever I threw at it. It also meant I could use it for other things and indeed stream media from sources such as the BBC iPlayer. I could have gone down the Windows Media Center PC route but I would probably have had to spend two to three times as much on a machine and it wouldn't have been anything like the diminutive Mac Mini that now sits so inconspicuously under the TV.