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.