my Mac as a media centre

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Someone recently asked me how I've got my home media centre set up. I wrote this up in response to them, but then figured that it could be shared more broadly.

I have a Mac Mini (the previous generation) running Snow Leopard (plain Snow Leopard, not Snow Leopard Server). It's hooked up via a DVI-to-HDMI cable to the television (since many TVs won't do 1080p over their VGA ports), and via its audio output to the stereo.

I have a ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer, which is roughly the same as the ReadyNAS Pro (except it shipped without disks and is missing a handful of enterprise features). It's hooked up via gigabit Ethernet to the home network. It runs Firefly, which allows iTunes and SlimServer streaming directly from the NAS. The Mini has the NAS share mounted via NFS, and the iTunes library lives on the NFS share. The ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer can survive a double-disk failure if you set it up that way before you start populating it with data. I've only got it set up to survive a single drive failure. The NAS also acts as a print server.

The Mini shares media to the Xbox 360 using Connect360. Time Machine is enabled on one of the household Macs, which uses the NAS. The NAS and Mini each have their own UPS.

The Mini runs a web server and mail server, and allows external access via SSH and SFTP. I've also got CVS and SVN servers set up, which allows collaboration with remote people on papers, code, and projects.

Most of the iTunes playback is done via the Mini, and all additions to the iTunes library are done on the Mini. I do Hulu playback via the Mini. I used to do Netflix on the Mini, but switched over to doing it on the Xbox. For movies that I have saved on the server, I usually play them back via the Xbox because the Xbox does better with some codecs than the Mini (so it saves fiddling with the Mini to figure out whether to playback via Quicktime, VLC, or something else).

My next steps with the home network are:

  • set up the Mini as the household iPhoto library — right now, pictures are scattered across multiple machines, and it's time to consolidate
  • get Time Machine running on the other household Macs (two new MacBooks), to back up to the NAS
  • update the router to wireless N (the current router bridges gigabit Ethernet to the wireless and the DSL connection)
  • consider Slimbox or other streaming audio to the bedroom

Using my Mini as a server has the benefit of being able to run a mirrored boot drive. DHCP configuration means that address assignment can tell me if I've got an unwelcome guest camped on my WPA2-secured wifi. If I were just using the NAS, I wouldn't be able to run these servers and see so much about what's happening on my network. Most NASes are barely capable of supporting file checksum, let alone everything else that I've got going on here.