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- #Plex home theater for mac tv
- #Plex home theater for mac mac
For the moment the videos are being stored on a couple of 2TB external drives, but I plan to move them across to a NAS before long.
#Plex home theater for mac mac
Using the Mac Mini that I’d purchased for development seems better - since I can then also use the Mac Mini (with attached blu-ray player) to progressively rip my old DVD and blu-ray collection. Google’s Chromecast seems better, but its yet another device. There’s Apple TV, but reviews of this have been mixed. I’d like to still be able to do this going forward.
#Plex home theater for mac tv
Many of my home projects and late night work was done with Babylon 5, a variant of Star Trek or some other TV program/movie playing in the bottom corner of my screen.
As optical drives disappear from our devices (Macbook Retina, Macbook Air, iPads, Galaxy tablets etc) it's getting harder to watch my existing library of DVDs and blu-ray disks … not that Apple ever supported blu-ray anyway, even though I still think its the best format for purchasing content.
Having our collective libraries available centrally, and easily playable on our television allows us to enjoy our TV shows and movies together as a family - rather than in insolation, crouched over our laptops and iPads as we’d previously done.
I want to make it easier for my family to share our individual libraries of iTunes videos that we’ve been accumulating. There are several good reasons for setting up a home media server. As such, it’s now comfortably nestled next to my TV, blu-ray player, and network router. Although there are cheaper and more powerful machines, the Mac Mini is small and discrete, with low power consumption, and a solid Unix-like OS that’s pre-configured and immediately usable. Usage as a media server was really just a happy bonus, and a more tangible reason for buying the server that I could explain to my wife. My real intent was getting a small server to run apache along with various VM images to support my development projects. There’s no need for a screen or keyboard with the Mac Mini since as I can connect to it remotely from my Macbook via OS X’s in-built screen sharing … although I admittedly needed to book time with the Genius bar of my local Apple Store so I could use one of their screens/keyboards for the initial setup. 20 NovemberWith the advent of the new 2014 Mac Mini, I took the plunge configuring one as a lounge-based server (I’d previously toyed with the idea of the brilliantly retro C64x, but my family would never have understood).