Mac Mini & Vista Media Centre

lanpup · **17th March 2008, 02:45 PM**

Guys ive done a little searching and nothing obvious came back..

My question is this - would my 2Ghz Mac mini, leopard 10.5.2 - running bootcamp, 1.5Ghz ram + eyetv diversity be ok running Windows Vista media centre?

History
After setting up my mini with eyetv diversity dual tuner and eyetv 3 on leopard ive come to the conclusion that for the following reasons running the mac as a media centre in OSX leopard is just not quite there, these being:

- EyeTV is very buggy, generates kernel panics when digital audio out is selected, hogs resources and slows the mini down to a halt every 3 or 4 days requiring a reboot. The UI and app are cool, but not everything is enabled in the OSD so i often have to get up and do some mouse pointing and clicking to get rid of some background applicaiton alert
- display options suck (doesnt handle / recognise native res of my tv - hitachi HDTV plasma 720p/1080i capable) so I had to do a tonne of tweaking with displayconfig x to perfect it

what im hoping for
to install bootcamp and vista media centre and run windows media centre as the primary os.

Any thoughts and advice really appreciated

Cheers

Matt

Edit..is this post in the right forum group?

Akuma · **17th March 2008, 04:36 PM**

I've been using a 1.66GHz Mac mini (w/2GB RAM) as a Vista media centre for nearly a year. It's been the most stable media centre I've owned.

My LCD res is 1366x768 the mini works at 1360x768 I haven't missed the unused pixels. Whether or not yours will work will depend on the native resolution of the panel and if the display is supplying accurate EDID.

I've also been using optical audio without any problems.

You'll need a MS media centre remote and receiver. The built-in IR receiver won't work with the MS remote so you'll want to disable it in device manager.

If you won't need OS X you can delete the partition and expand the Vista partition in the Disk Management Console to use the full drive.

The video drivers provided with Bootcamp limit the graphics to 64MB. Don't use the Bootcamp driver installer, install the other drivers manually and download the GMA950 drivers from the Intel ste.

lanpup · **17th March 2008, 09:41 PM**

Akuma your a star.

Bootcamped and installed XP ultimate and oops installed bootcamp drivers before I read your post - i gather i can find the newer ones and update to them?

Now im just getting used to the first time ive ever used vista..

I have a slight overscan issue @ 1280 x 720, I gather this isnt an easy thing to rectify? as I said above it took me literally a weak of tweaking to get leopard to size perfectly (custom res).

What media remote would you recommend, including receiver?

Akuna if you dont mind I might fire the occasional question at you if its mini specific?

Cheers Matt

Akuma · **19th March 2008, 10:23 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by lanpup

What media remote would you recommend, including receiver

Sorry I missed this post earlier. You'll need to get a standard Microsoft remote and receiver they're pretty cheap about $50. There is a new Philips branded remote made specifically for Vista that's recently been released and would match a Mac mini perfectly but I haven't been able to find it available in Australia.

Computer manufacturers like HP and Dell make customised version of the remote and receiver, if you can get a hold of one of them they'll work look a bit more attractive than the MS version.

lanpup · **20th March 2008, 09:46 PM**

cheers bought one and works brilliantly

hed1 · **25th March 2008, 10:20 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by lanpup

cheers bought one and works brilliantly

Basic question for you guys running Vista MC on the mac mini and using as their main TV:

What do you do when you turn the tv on/off? Can you put the mini to sleep and wake it up easily?

I haven't had used a media centre for tv before, interested to know is it as user friendly as just flicking the tv on and off.

Cheers

mw8537 · **13th April 2008, 10:46 PM**

Hi there, I'm looking at entering the Mac world and here are my thoughts ..

I currently use Windows XP Media Centre as my home PC and it lives in my office. I have an XBOX360 in the living room and use this as an extender. I use this solution to record and watch TV and it works brilliantly! I also use the original XBOX (XBMC) for everything else.

My home PC is in dire need of an upgrade and I would like to upgrade to Vista. So I was thinking of buying an iMac and use this as my home PC, then run VMWare Fusion to get Vista Media Centre running. This way I can migrate my home PC to a Mac and run Vista (almost as a background task) so I can still utilise the XBOX360 as an extender.

Bootcamp wont cut it as I want to run both Mac and Vista at the same time .. so VMWare or Parallels is the way to go, but I believe VMWare performs better.

Thoughts and comments on how this will work, or whether it will work would be great. Thanks in advance.

prj32 · **16th April 2008, 06:25 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by mw8537

Hi there, I'm looking at entering the Mac world and here are my thoughts ..

I currently use Windows XP Media Centre as my home PC and it lives in my office. I have an XBOX360 in the living room and use this as an extender. I use this solution to record and watch TV and it works brilliantly! I also use the original XBOX (XBMC) for everything else.

My home PC is in dire need of an upgrade and I would like to upgrade to Vista. So I was thinking of buying an iMac and use this as my home PC, then run VMWare Fusion to get Vista Media Centre running. This way I can migrate my home PC to a Mac and run Vista (almost as a background task) so I can still utilise the XBOX360 as an extender.

Bootcamp wont cut it as I want to run both Mac and Vista at the same time .. so VMWare or Parallels is the way to go, but I believe VMWare performs better.

Thoughts and comments on how this will work, or whether it will work would be great. Thanks in advance.

I am fairly certain VMware or parallels wouldn't support virtualisation of IO devices like a TV tuner. However if you were just going to use the other basic components of MC (i.e. music, photos and video etc) I can't see why it wouldn't work. I have tested this MC VM + 360 extender concept before ... it seamed to worked ok but it required a fair chunk of resources to provide acceptible performance. I guess it comes down to your requirements.