Mac Home Media Center
Updated 8-2-2008: Added information about the USB drive I added for more storage.
Building a Home Media Center with a Mac can be either very easy or just easy depending on what you want to do. There are two options: Store everything in iTunes or store just the music in iTunes. As with any such system, however, it will not be cheap. Now if you happen to have a Mac of some sort then you have the bulk of the money spent. The build I use involves a 20″ Aluminum iMac that pretty much is stock except for the extra 1GB of memory I added to it. The problem is I want to watch/listen to my media in the living room and the computer is in my bedroom.
To solve this little distance issue I needed a plan. Now this was simple enough since I have an XBox360 already connected to my plasma television. All I really need is enough bandwidth to move the data and a way for the 360 to see my iTunes library on the iMac. To accomplish the connection, all you need is Rivet or Connect360. There is a meager $1.05 price difference ($18.95 and $20.00 respectively) between them but most of the features are the same. I personally went with Connect360 in my build. It was a seamless and painless setup.
My 360 immediately found the iMac on my network as a computer sharing media. So there is nothing to be done on the console unless you have it also connected to a Windows system using Media Center. If you do, just select the Change Source option and select the Mac. At this point you will see the songs or photos or videos that you are sharing. Select and play.
I am using 802.11G wireless for the iMac. My 360 is currently wired into the network. I was able to play ripped DVDs without stutter in this configuration. Therefore I would posit that the bandwidth of Wireless-G is sufficient for non-HD streaming. This is good because my iMac doesn’t have N and neither does my router. Money saved.
As for software on the Mac, you will need a couple of things. Of course you need Rivet or Connect360. Beyond that you will need iTunes if you plan on sharing music. If you have pictures and videos in iTunes, those will also be shared. These apps will also let you share folders of your choosing allowing for media outside of iTunes. If you want to rip DVDs for playback on the console, you will need to get Handbrake. I suggest just using the presets for XBox360 which will be in a slide out pane on the right side of the window. Then just insert a DVD, select it as the source, and start the encoding. Depending on the hardware specs and other programs running at the time, you can expect it to take 50%-100% longer than the length of the DVD (a 2.5 hour movie may take 4 hours to encode). Oh, to save on time I suggest changing the name of the file itself to something cleaner than what it defaults to.
Now where you store this is an important decision. You can save these files to the Movies folder under the iTunes music folder if you want iTunes to manage your movies. This has the advantage of letting iTunes handle all of your media management. However this also means you must have your iTunes library on a drive with lots and lots of storage. I used this right at first and added every movie I ripped to the iTunes library. However I do not like keeping my music anywhere other than the default path. So when I got my USB drive, I moved the movies over and took them out of iTunes. Then I opened Connect360’s preferences and changed the Movies path to the USB drive. Either option works well but I chose to keep the movies separate since I don’t plan on watching them on the iMac when I have a 50″ plasma. Just remember that if you are saving the movies in iTunes, actually save them originally in iTunes. If you let iTunes manage the media it will leave the original in whatever folder it was in and just make a copy in it’s library folder thus taking up twice the space it should.
After the encoding is finished you need to add it to the iTunes Library (with Command+O) if you want to watch it on your iMac and share it through iTunes to the 360. Skip that step if you are just using a folder elsewhere to store the movies. Either way you will access it from the Media blade on the dashboard. Just select Videos and the iTunes Movies or whatever you named your media folder to see the list. The system will remember which movies you were watching and ask if you want to resume where you left off if you stop it for any reason. It is a nice little feature that works even if you play another movie before coming back to the one you stopped.
This design gives you access to the movies themselves without menus and extras. It preserves 5.1 surround and while it doesn’t exactly give you chapters, it does have jump points spaced equally throughout the movie. I’ve tested this pretty well on my Samsung 50″ plasma television and the quality is very good even though the movie is trimmed down to take only about a gigabyte of space per hour of video. Which brings up another point…storage. I now have a 1TB external USB hard drive to house all of this media. It works really well thus far. I opted for the SimpleTech SP-U35/1TB drive since I caught it on clearance for $160 off. The speed is really good and it keeps pretty quiet. Best of all is it powers down to a sort of sleep mode when I put the iMac to sleep thus extending the drive’s life.
So here is the short list of what you need to duplicate my build:
- Mac computer
- Xbox360
- Home Network (If not using wired, I suggest using Wireless N if you plan on streaming HD content)
- Rivet or Connect360 software to share media
- Handbrake software to convert DVDs
- iTunes for media management
- SimpleTech or other brand 1TB USB 2.0 hard drive
- Lots of time for ripping and encoding
