- Plex media server mac mini how to#
- Plex media server mac mini upgrade#
- Plex media server mac mini software#
That's one of the beauties of using a Mac mini as a media center - it's really designed to work easily with a television. If you're working with any Mac mini made since 2010, you just need to get an HDMI cable to connect it your HDTV.
Plex media server mac mini software#
You can certainly add software to do so - again, beyond the scope of this article, but something to consider. One note on Blu-ray Disc content: Apple doesn't include decoding software to enable your Mac to play back video content mastered on Blu-ray. If you want to be able to ingest Blu-ray Disc content or if you're looking to save yourself money, there are plenty of external options available - and most, if not all, will work with the Mac.
It's also pretty pricy for an external optical drive, and it's only capable of working with CDs and DVDs. It's slim, slot-loading and designed to complement the Mac mini and other Mac models. If you have a library of DVD or Blu-ray content, it's possible to ingest it to your Mac, but you're going to need an optical drive to do it.Īpple's $80 SuperDrive is a great option. Ripping contentĪnother thing to consider - the Mac mini doesn't have any sort of built-in optical drive. It's broader than the scope of this article, though - I'm going to save that for another time. You can buy an external USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt-based hard drive and follow these instructions to move your iTunes library.Ī Network Attached Storage (NAS) volume is another way to offload iTunes files, but there are a lot of caveats. If you hit a storage ceiling for your Mac media center, moving it externally is the best solution. Movies and TV collections will take up lots of space, and you'll probably find that the 500 GB and even the 1 terabyte of internal storage is insufficient. Media content - movies, TV shows, music, and more - will take up space. You can do the job yourself and buy good quality third-party memory from a variety of vendors.
Plex media server mac mini upgrade#
The basic 4 GB memory configuration should be adequate to serve up whatever media content you're going to be delivering through the Mac mini, and it's easily upgradable after the fact (the base of the Mac mini), so I wouldn't recommending paying Apple's penalty to upgrade RAM. Transcoding video is a pretty processor-intensive activity, and it's something that definitely benefits from having additional cores. But the quad-core system may provide a bit more oomph when it comes to ripping video from various sources, like DVDs. The basic Mac mini is a perfectly good system to act as the basis for your Mac media center.
Hit the "Convert" button and start converting Windows media files to MOV with this Windows Video Converter.Your budget may guide you initially - perhaps you don't have the extra $200 or don't want to spend it, and that's fine. Start Windows media video to Mac Mini conversion. As for bitrate, the higher bitrate you choose, the better video quality will be. Frame rate can be set to 30 or "original". Hit on the Settings icon and you can customize audio and subtitle tracks. Blu-ray/DVD can also be ripped for playing on Mac Mini.Īs MOV is natively supported by Mac, just go to the format list by clicking the format bar and choose "Common Video" and pick "MOV - QuickTime (*.mov)." You can hit the "Add Video" icon (the second one with a minor read "plus") to import Windows media files, or just drag and drop it directly.
Plex media server mac mini how to#
How to transfer Windows media files to Mac Mini via Plex? Step 1.