Home Theater PC Setup Guide

I spend a lot of time watching movies, so to facilitate that addiction I’ve also invested in an adequate home theater system. The keystone of the system being the home theater PC (HTPC). So, given that I’ve spent a lot of cycles setting up various HTPCs over the years, I figured I should outline the steps I took to get my current HTPC functional.

Requirements:
MacMini
TV (Mine)
S/PDIF capable receiver (Mine)
RemoteBuddy
VLC

The MacMini is a great choice for a HTPC system for many reasons.  It crams a lot of power into a tiny box and doesn’t put out too much heat.  Also, you can install OSX, Linux, or Windows on the system to suit the needs of whatever software you intend to use.  Obviously the specs on the system are dependent upon what you intend to do with it. Some of the older PPC systems will not be able to handle some 720p or 1080p content, but if you are just watching standard def videos or videos purchased through iTunes then PPC should work just fine. My system is a 1.83 Ghz C2D 1 GB RAM, and can play 720p just fine, and while I haven’t tested first hand I’ve heard that there aren’t any problems with 1080p with this model.

There are two ways you can attach the MacMini to your TV: HDMI or S-Video/Composite. I used a DVI-HDMI cable since I have an HDTV, but I have also tested this setup on an SDTV using the Apple DVI-Video adapter and it worked just as well. From here on out I’ll only be discussing HD specific setup information though. After the MacMini is in place and powered on you need to configure the video settings. Change the display resolution to 1280×720 or 1920×1080, whatever the maximum video size you plan to watch is. Once this is done you may see black borders around the screen or be missing some pixels at the edge of the screen. This is a result ‘overscan’ which occurs when connecting computers to TVs and it is really annoying. In my case I enabled overscan in the display options and then used the ‘Just Scan’ option on my TV to remove the black bars, by pressing the P.SIZE button on the Samsung remote a few times. Hopefully, other manufacturers provide a similar feature.

Next you have to attach the MacMini to your receiver. I use a MiniToslink-Toslink cable to do this. Using this optical connection is preferred to the regular stereo jack connection because it will allow your receiver to do Dolby Digital and DTS decoding instead of your player. Speaking of which…

Time to setup your players, I use VLC because it plays basically everything, you can use other players if you want though. For VLC there is onlye one thing that you have to configure, in the audio preferences be sure to check “Use S/PDIF when available”. This tells VLC to skip the audio decoding and just send it out to the receiver to process it.

The final piece of the setup is Remote Buddy, its not free, but it is a quality piece of software and really worth the money. If you buy one piece of software a year, Remote Buddy is worth it. As of OSX 10.4.9 Remote Buddy has trouble communicating with the Apple Remote so be sure to go through the setup utility to install the kernel driver. This driver gives remote buddy control over processing IR commands so you can do more then use FrontRow.

DONE.

At this point you should be able to use Remote Buddy to navigate your filesystem and open videos with VLC. As a power user, this is a setup that I can live with, I know where my files are, so it isn’t a problem to navigate to them. However, it isn’t nearly as easy as it could be. Other users shouldn’t have to manually browse their filesystem to find the video they want to watch. With that in mind and the fast paced development of OSXBMC I may soon be switching the setup to use that.

Addendum:
After this got setup I actually transitions my setup over to a Logitech Harmony 550 and for the most part it behaves as if nothing has changed. The Logitech software has IR information for the Apple Remote, you just have to get it to recognize it by providing the some IR inputs when you add the MacMini as a device. You don’t need not go through the the entire ‘Learn IR’ procedure, I just gave input from random buttons for the 3 questions it asked and then it recognized the remote. Also, if you are using your HTPC for other things like being a home web server, make sure you modify the settings in the Harmony software so that the the system is always on, otherwise the it will go to sleep every time you leave activities using it.

Hopefully this guide has been helpful to you. Please post a comment if you have a better solution, I’d love to hear about it.

UPDATE: As mentioned above, I checked out OSXBMC and found it to be a superb alternative to using other pieces of software.  It is now known as Plex and if you are using a Mac as a HTPC you shouldn’t be using any other software.  It’s free and you’ll no longer need VLC and Remote Buddy so it’s really worth checking out.  Also, it has Harmony remote support so you aren’t limited by the few buttons on the Apple remote.