Capture backups and snapshots of your Droplets to store your server images or automatically scale your system. Cloud Firewalls Easily secure your infrastructure and instantly define what services are visible on all of your Droplets. The products are listed in alphabetical order. All servers are UPnP compliant. The Server column is the name of the server and a link to the vendor's product page. The Price column is how much the server costs. The Windows, Mac and Linux columns show support for those operating systems. The Apple TV isn't the best solution for everyone. The number of apps it works with are limited, and you can access most of that content from the web. What's more, it locks you into using iTunes as your media delivery system, whether it's sharing a library on a local computer or syncing via iTunes in the Cloud. For those use cases and others, it may be better to make a Mac the center of your media center instead, so let's take a look at using a Mac as a media center instead. For this experiment, we're going to rely on a Mac mini, but in reality lots of Macs will do the same job. Picking the right Mac mini The Mac mini comes in two distinct flavors: a dual-core system clocked at 2.5 GHz and equipped with 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB hard disk drive, priced at $599; and a quad-core system priced at $799, equipped with 4 GB RAM and a 1 terabyte hard drive instead. 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. The basic Mac mini is a perfectly good system to act as the basis for your Mac media center. But the quad-core system may provide a bit more oomph when it comes to ripping video from various sources, like DVDs. Transcoding video is a pretty processor-intensive activity, and it's something that definitely benefits from having additional cores. 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. You can do the job yourself and buy good quality third-party memory from a variety of vendors. ![]() Storage is a different issue, though. Storage for your media Media content - movies, TV shows, music, and more - will take up space. 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. If you hit a storage ceiling for your Mac media center, moving it externally is the best solution. You can buy an external USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt-based hard drive and follow to move your iTunes library. A Network Attached Storage (NAS) volume is another way to offload iTunes files, but there are a lot of caveats. It's broader than the scope of this article, though - I'm going to save that for another time. Free m word for mac students. Ripping content Another thing to consider - the Mac mini doesn't have any sort of built-in optical drive. Download powerpoint and excel. 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. Apple's $80 is a great option. It's slim, slot-loading and designed to complement the Mac mini and other Mac models. It's also pretty pricy for an external optical drive, and it's only capable of working with CDs and DVDs. 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. 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. You can certainly add software to do so - again, beyond the scope of this article, but something to consider. Connecting your Mac to your TV If you're working with any Mac mini made since 2010, you just need to get an HDMI cable to connect it your HDTV. 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. Other Macs include HDMI connectors too - the Retina MacBook Pro, for example, as well as the new Mac Pro.
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