[OSX-Users] Re: Hacking an AppleTV to make a good HTPC

[David Millard]

Not quite the question you asked, but I had exactly the same  
requirements and have gone the mac mini route - although in my case I  
also didnt want to have to faff about to much to get it working  
(although both Boxee and Plex are quite good for a bit of faff when  
you feel the need :-)

As you can probably guess its a very good solution, and the key things  
for me are that it is very quiet and has very modest power needs. I  
personally felt it was worth the slight overhead.

Cheers,

Dave



On 24 Aug 2009, at 11:35, Sina Samangooei wrote:

> So, I've been toying with the idea of building a nice HTPC recently  
> which can:
>
> - Decode h264, mpeg, music, dvd playback etc.
> - ... at 720p
> - ... quietly
> - handle some couch web browsing
> - turned on over night for perfectly legitimate file downloading
>
> First thoughts were a mac mini. Yes fine, pricey but it works as an  
> upper limit of £500 for this task at least ;-)
>
> Building it from scratch is another option. The Zotac mini-itx board  
> with nvidia's ION chipset, which can apparently handle all of the  
> above with no fans at all: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=53#ION-ITX-C
>
> The problem is that after you've got the case, the optical drive,  
> the 80Gb laptop hard disk and 512Mb memory you've basically built a  
> £300 -> £350 PC. Add bigger external drives and a DVP solution and  
> the price quickly escalates
>
> Still a little pricey, so I've looking at the hacked apple TV path.  
> It would seem there is a big community of people adding browsers,  
> torrent clients as well as getting them working with external hard  
> disks, optical drives as well as DVPs like eyeTV. All in all this  
> would cost more in the range of £250.
>
> So the price is right, also its a shiny shiny mac. But is it  
> actually any good? Does playback stutter? It seems like a fairly  
> underpowered machine, but is it enough? Has anyone done anything  
> like this with good results?
>
> Cheers
> - Sina
>
>

--------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. David Millard (dem at ecs.soton.ac.uk)
University of Southampton

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~dem
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