#PLEX MAC MINI 1080P CPU MINIMUM DRIVERS#
#PLEX MAC MINI 1080P CPU MINIMUM SOFTWARE#

The Software – Grab the “Live” version of XBMC from the Downloads Page and boot off it for a play. The ASRock is a low power computer as you’d expect, burning around 35 watts in use and around 5 watts suspended. This is a slightly less pleasing looking setup, with the external USB IR receiver, but it’s only a cosmetic issue. The system supports many remotes and we used an old Windows Media Center remote which worked perfectly. You’ll need to add a remote control (the Mac mini has the IR receiver built in – but you have to buy the actual remote these days at around £12). The whole idea of a streaming setup like this is to rip your CDs / DVDs / Blu-Rays and store them on a central server to be access from multiple clients around the home. Most people in this space tend to baulk at the thoughts of using physical media though. This is a win for the Mac mini if you must have noise levels at an absolute minimum.Ī version is available with a Blu-Ray drive installed, although at around £100 and with BR playback unsupported in XBMC currently its not really an option. In reality, even with the latest BIOS to reduce the noise of the fan, it’s still definitely not what we’d call “silent”. The PC is describe by the manufacture as “Silent (acoustic below 26 dB)”.

#PLEX MAC MINI 1080P CPU MINIMUM DRIVERS#

WiFi can be added with a USB dongle though, assuming there are linux drivers for your particular model or by using a Ethernet to Wifi Bridge / Gaming Adaptor which would rule out any potential driver issues completely.

The only thing that’s really missing is built in WiFi but its best to stream HD content over wired Gigabit Ethernet. If you value your time at all, there’s no way you’re going to save money specing parts and building your own system. The superb spec continues with a 320GB 2.5” hard drive, 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM (expandable to 4GB), a DVD Re-writer, 6 USB ports and analogue sound inputs and outputs. The Hardware – The unit has VGA and HDMI ports (ships with a HDMI to DVI convertor dongle too), an optical S/PDIF socket and Gigabit LAN. So can this little £250 machine replace our weapon of choice, the Mac mini which costs double the price? Read on to find out. What makes this especially interesting to us is that the XBMC team have recently added GPU support to the Linux version of their world beating media player software.

Plex mac mini 1080p cpu minimum