My media center

A lot has happened since the last time I blogged… I must admit the main reason for not blogging has been World of Warcraft :)

Anyways back in December my girlfriend and I bought ourselves a new LCD TV capable of displaying HD 1920x1200. To start out with we used our aged Playstation 2 as a DVD player but the low DVD playback quality really shows on the new TV. A few months later I went out and bought a Mac Mini on which I installed Ubuntu.

So far we’ve mainly used it for the slimserver backed for the Squeezebox and occasionally DVD playback in the VLC media player. I’m looking a the different media centers for Linux but haven’t really decided yet. Being a Gnome guy I’m gonna give the next release of Elisa (0.5) a spin when it comes out in july. The earlier releases of Elisa was beautiful and clean but lacking a lot of functionality. So far VLC and a mouse has worked just fine. What I’m really hoping for is some BlueRay playback support in Linux.

Anyways I’m really happy with the Mac Mini as a “Media Center”. I wont be needing any TV Tuners. Its small, good looking, use fairly little power (I think) xD I’m hoping to replace the DVD drive with a BlueRay drive when Linux support picks up at some point.