[mythtvnz] Mac mini

[Wade Maxfield]

On 11/06/2011, at 1:51 PM, criggie wrote:

> On 11/06/11 11:23, Steve Holdoway wrote:
>> I've got this Mac Mini sitting around, and see that there's plenty of
>> stuff on the wiki on running it on a Mac. However, would like any real
>> world experience of running one as a frontend.
>> 
>> Hardware's a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB mem, 1TB disk, running Mac OS X
>> Server 10.6.7 atm.
> 
> 
> I've got a 20" frankenimac which was assembled from some dead ones.
> 
> 2.4 core2duo with 2GB and OSX 10.6.3
> 
> Lots of info at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_on_Mac_OS_X
> 
> I downloaded 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mythtvformacosx/files/MythFrontend-0.24.1-fixes-intel-10.6v0.24.1-9-g3657f31-dirty.dmg/download
> and it just runs.  Choose location, address of backend, and it was away 
> laughing.
> 
> Two problems so far
> 1) Live TV is fine, recordings are fine, but the database says that 
> videos are found at /shared/television/mythtv  so the mac can't find 
> them.  Probably needs a frontend specific address like smb:/server/share/
> 2) Themes don't work... you get the default brown one and it won't change.
> 
> 
> Has anyone used the "apple remote" with mythfrontend?  I don't have one 
> but it should work fine.
> 
> 
> Intel macs are interesting beasts.... I booted XP home's installer, and 
> freeBSD was quite happy too.  Knoppix 6.4.4 messed up the screen badly 
> but still worked in text mode.


I'm running 2 different minis as frontends.  One is a 1.83 Core 2 Duo and the other a 1.66 Core 2 Duo.  I'm only running 0.23 on my backend and the frontends came via The Sniderpad  ( http://www.thesniderpad.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42 )

All my material is SD via DVB-S and a PVR-350 and even though there isn't any real hardware acceleration they both run fine, and I even have yadif deinterlacing running on the 1.83 outputting at 1920x1080 to a 32" Sony LCD TV via DVI to HDMI.  The 1.66 is outputting S-Video to a 32" widescreen CRT. A bit hard to read for iTunes, but works fine for Myth and Frontrow.

I haven't tried 0.24 so can't comment on criggies problems, but I have no issues with themes once they have been copied to the correct location inside the app bundle ( MythFrontend.app/Contents/Resources/share/mythtv/themes/ )

As far as MythVideo, my files are stored at /storage/videos/  and I have used Disk Utility to set up a NFS mount from my Myth box. 

nfs://mymythbox.local/storage/videos  /Network/Myth/videos

This mounts the videos directory on the Mac at /Network/Myth/videos.  I've then set up a symlink from /Network/Myth/videos to /storage/videos.  This has kept MythVideo happy, and all my files play quite nicely.

On the remote front, I tried the Apple Remote but 6 buttons is a pain.  To access somethings you have to hold a button (so in essence you get 12 in total) but that isn't nice to use.  So I've gone with a Harmony remote and Remote Buddy ( http://www.iospirit.com/ ).  Each Apple Remote actually has an ID ( 0-255 ) and you can tell your remote to change it's ID to the next in the sequence. I used the harmony software to learn the 6 buttons of my remote, then changed the ID and learnt the next 6.  I did this til I had enough buttons to map all the controls I wanted (6 in the end I think) then used Remote Buddy to map those to the Myth keys.  Absolute pain and I wouldn't want to do it again, but I'm happy with the results. I have a full featured remote including numeric keys and it works as well as the MCE remote on my main Myth box.

End result we've got a nice quiet low power frontend in the bed room with Myth, which also runs iTunes to keep my g/f happy.  

 - Wade