Transforming a Mac Mini G4 to a Media Center: Part 1

So with a bigger hard drive, I plan to use the Mac Mini G4 as a media center. And here's the stuff I'm doing to make it one.

The Remotes:
Since this Mac Mini has no IR port and thus no support for Apple Remote, I have to resort to a third party solution. In this case, I’ll be using Keyspan’s Front Row Control.




And thanks to the new version of iTunes, I can also use the iPhone or iPod touch as a remote with the Remote app.

Software:
Unfortunately, since the Mac Mini has no IR port, Front Row isn’t available for it either. After searching around a bit, I found this nifty app called “Activate Front Row" from Mac OS X Hints. It does what it says, install and activate Front Row. Nice!!!

Enabling the Mini to watch all sorts of video files
QuickTime doesn’t support playback of quite a lot of video files, so I’ll need software to let me do this. And for this, I turn to Perian, dubbed as the swiss-army knife for QuickTime.

Getting my DRM-free music into iTunes
Since I’m might be doing a lot of experimenting with this server, I’m not going to use the Mini with any sensitive information including my Apple ID just in case. As a result, I’m just going to use it to play DRM-free music and media.

So I gathered up all my DRM-free music and dropped it into the iTunes library on my Mini. It turns out I have 6 GB of DRM-free music.


A summary
Ok, so what do I have so far:

Additional Software:

• Activate Front Row
  
• Perian
  

Additional Hardware:

• Keyspan’s Front Row Control
  
• iPod touch and iPhone with Remote app
  

Stayed tune for part 2!