HTPCs (Home Theater PCs or Media Center PCs) are all the rage right now, and for good reason. A computer with the right software and hardware add-ons can be a digital video recorder (dvr or pvr), a movie jukebox, a regular jukebox and much much more.
All you need to make this magic happen is:
- A Mac, PC or Linux Computer (you don’t need anything too powerfull so hopefully you can recycle something or find something cheap on eBay)
- A TV capture device
- A remote control device
- Lots and lots of disk space
- Some software to run the whole thing
Being a Mac nerd, my setup is centered around an old PowerBook G4 with a broken screen (but a working video out). I also have an EyeTV 200 by elgato, Keyspan’s Digital Media Remote, and a generic firewire hard-drive to store all my movies, music and recorded TV. The hardware is fairly straightforward there are a few options for Mac compatible TV capture devices and remotes, but all seem to be capable devices with decent support. The real trick to setting up a killer media center Mac is item 5: the software.
Linux users have the well-regarded open source projects MythTV and Freevo and Windows users have the well-featured though somewhat restrictive Windows Media Center Edition as well as a handful of proprietary solutions but for us poor Mac fanatics the options are not so well defined. Thankfully there is some movement in the Mac HTPC/Media Center world, but none of the available solutions is quite ready for prime-time.
There are plenty of good media players for the Mac with my favorites being VLC and MPlayer both open source, but for a true HTPC experience you need an software that will let you pick a movie, song or TV channel or recording to play from across the room with your remote. A little research comes up with the following options:
Though technically not supported on any hardware other than the new Intel iMacs and MacBooks, Front Row can be fairly easily tricked to run on any Mac running Tiger. It is final release and an Apple product to boot, so it is naturally the most polished of the bunch, but it lacks integration with EyeTV or any other TV hardware and tends to freeze up for 30+ seconds while trying to load previews for the movies I have ripped with Handbrake, which makes navigating somewhat… inconvenient.
The MythTV Frontend requires, naturally enough a computer on the network running the MythTV Backend, which is Linux-only. Since I do not have a MythTv box, I cannot comment on how the Mac front end performs.
Center Stage and iTheater are both open source solutions in different stages of development. Center Stage is a 0.5 release and iTheater is 0.1.1 as of this writing. Neither is ready to be used full time in your living room, but both hold a lot of great potential. I am a big fan of OSS projects and have great hopes for these. I only hope that the spliting of such a small market in two will not hurt the development and ultimate adoption of these two products.
MediaCentral is a relatively new free (as in beer) product from Equinux. It is currently at version 1.2 and seems to be extremely feature rich. In my limited testing I found the interface to be extremely sluggish on my 1.5 GHz G4, the video playback was jumpy on some of my files and it froze a little too frequently. One of the frustrating things about a fullscreen application like these is that without a mouse to wiggle (and no spinny rainbow ball) it’s hard to know if an application is frozen or just being slow.
So which of these progams to I use in my living room? None of them. Until one of these solutions matures to the point where I can use it and trust it, I will continue to make do with my makeshift solution involving a little applescript, a few good media apps and the finder with the icons and display font cranked up to max.
If you know of any other Mac OS X media center solutions, want to share your tricks for controlling your computer from the couch or have any other questions or comments about HTPC on Mac OS X, please leave me a comment below.