Media Center: Part 1

Since I bought my HDTV I have been consumed with building a home media center. Well not consumed but it is the reason for my not posting much to the blog lately. After lots of research, trial and error, numerous posts to forums and friends I have my plans in place. Of at least I think I so. This is the first of a series of posts on my efforts to build my media center.

I will be running everything on an older (yet still capable) Mac I have. So, first steps were connecting the Mac to the HDTV. This was easily done with a DVI to VGA cable. The resolution when doing this is 1366x x 768. Not too bad when at thirty seven inches. I wondered if I went HMDI to VGA if I would get any more resolution out the system. It seems logical since HD gives better resolution/quality via HDMI. But the answer was no. To my surprise I found out that VGA will give me a higher resolution than if I went HDMI. I am not sure if this is true for all HDTV or just mine. So the Mac and HDTV were connected and I was ready to start testing media center software.

My goals were pretty simple.

 Play backed up DVD with 5.1 Dolby Digital
 DVD quality must be very high. I really don’t want any sacrifice the viewing quality.
 View photos (local, iPhoto, Flickr). Play slideshows and individual photo browsing.
 Play my mp3 collection. It needs to functions like a jukebox really when people are over for a pint at the pub.
 A bonus would be accessing YouTube and other video sites. Now I can view Flickr and YouTube via the web browser but I wanted a system to be self contained if at all possible.
 All local content stored on external hard drives.

I have a small collection of about 400+ DVDs. As the kids have grown a good number of DVDs have been trashed. I can’t tell you the number of times I have pulled a DVD from the clutches of a child’s sticky hands. If your kids are younger and don’t know what a DVD is yet then I suggest you lock them away and never let them see them. It will save you a few headaches later. I have not started to build my HD-DVD or Blue-ray collection yet. The kids will never see those. But when I do I don’t think I will back those up to hard drive for a few years.

I know that my requirements are going to weed out a few of the media center applications. And I imagine my selection might dictate the format I use to backup my DVDs. With the time it takes to backup a DVD, and I will talk about in an up coming post, really is a big factor. It is not something I want to do more than one time per DVD. So getting it right, or very close to it, the first time is important. I have to live with it for a long time.

I have been using my Xbox 360 for my media center for a few years now. Being that my house if 100% Apple right now (Amen!) I use Connect360 to link my Macs to the 360. I can play and browser my mp3 collection and of course play any DVD content I have. I also play home movies stored on my Mac via Connect360. But I did not back up any DVDs to play via the Xbox 360. I knew I would not want to put my DVD collection into WMV format so I held off on it. There are some options for transcoding but I know I wanted a better option for DVDs. But if you own an Xbox 360 and have a Mac then Connect360 is a must! This combination will meet the needs of the vast majority of people just looking to have a media center in a mac/xbox 360 environment.

Now that the HDTV is mounted I am ready for selecting the right application to run everything. After a long search here are the different applications I have started to review that run on OS X.

• Matinee
• iTheather
• Media Central
• Center Stage
• Front Row

In my next post I will be reviewing my findings with each of these applications. I will give a pros and cons and a quick review on how they work for my media center. I will also be dedicating a post to what it takes to back up your DVD collection and the format decision I had to make. Check back soon.