Well, this will be my third MP htpc since the beginning of the project 2 years ago.But this is by far my favorite.

I bought my first mac about a year ago when I was fed up with my PC's need for another install after not being able to edit dvd's etc anymore. You know, you get the weirdest errors sometimes only fixable with a reinstall.
I thought about buying a mac prior to the mac mini before but the "unkown" kept me from doing it.

Then the mini came.
What a beauty of a machine that was. I just had to buy it. I had no more excuse not to do so.
Ever since then I started to understand the mac users. I became one myself. I just love apple and my house is full of it. Got an iMac, iBook and mac Mini.
After this the period of non Mediaportal usage came and I left the scene.
I was enjoying computing as it was meant, playing games, enjoying my wife etc etc.
But still, The project I started together with frodo kept on calling me as a friend finally got intererested in MP and bought a machine. (this after loooking @ me with MP for over a year!!!!). He kept on asking me things and I kept on getting more and more online again in the MP forums.
Well, so I bought a new htpc again. A spectra from FIC.
It was nice, worked great. But tv stability was not yet good enough.
World of Warcraft found its way in my home and well, took 3 months of my life :) I vanished from planet earth :)
Then the Intel mac arrived.
Damn, they seemed fast and I liked FrontRow a lot!
It's simple, and eventhough your first idea is that it seems to lack a lot of features, you will soon forget that as it all just seems to works so nice and easy. Only 6 buttons needed.
But, I had no remote @ that time so I needed a keyboard. That sucked ofcourse....

So, enter Intel Mac Mini..........
When I saw it, I needed it.
I sold the previous mac mini and ordered the new one @ the apple store.
The cheapest one, core Solo 1.5 ghz, 512 Mb, Bluetooth, Airport etc etc.
3 days later it was in my posession.
I finally enjoyed FrontRow in full effect with the apple remote.

So, World of Warcraft lost my interest after reaching level 60 (you just cannot get into a big guild with a lvl 60 Hunter these days) and I started working on MediaPortal again.

Enter Boot Camp....
Altough there was allready a "hack" to get windows running on the mac mini, there were still some issues. But then Apple surprised us all by releasing a beta version of Boot Camp. Boot Camp will be integrated in the next release of OSX (thats OS ten not OS X). Boot Camp is a wizard to get the mac prepared for installing and running XP on your mac next to OS X. As I allready had the machine, I wanted to checkout Mediaportal on the mini. SO I went ahead and installed Bootcamp.

Firmware:
As XP doesn't understand EFI the Mac needs to emulate BIOS so XP can boot. This required a firmware update and so I updated the mac. It was an easy install. Simply run the firmware updater, mini would shutdown, start it with holding powerbutton till led started flashing. You would get a progressbar on screen informing of the progress. After this, a reboot was all that was left  to do.

Boot Camp:
An important thing to do is running BootCamp as a computer admin.
Somehow you cannot start the installation as it won't recognise a valid XP cd if you start it as regular user. This set me back a few hours :)

So I started it up, and it asked my to insert a blank CD to burn the drivers for my mac on. After finishing this is asked me how big I wanted the XP partition to be. It then Hot Partitioned the mac drive. All Very cool. Then It asked me for an XP cd and I inserted my original XP-Home edition and pressed OK.The mac rebooted and XP installer began.

Installing XP:
Well, I am not gonna  describe the installation. It was just a standard XP install.(I know, an xp install can be more interesting than my life story above).
When XP boots the first time it ofcourse starts to complain about some drivers. SO I insert the driver cd and start the Installer. After this and a reboot you r ready to go and update XP.

Using the MacMP:
First thing I noticed was that the sound was coming out of the analog and digital outputs, but also the internal speakers. I quikly learned that this is due to the drivers not yet being final and they r unable to redirect sound. I opened the mac mini (which is very easy) and pulled out the speaker connector as I did not wanna wait for a driver update.
Thats about the only issue I had.
MP installed fine.
All codecs installed fine.
The AC3 and DTS passthrough to SPDIF works like a charm.
Firewire works perfectly.
Mediaportal renders nice and fast. The resolution of 1360x720 was supported out of the box for my TV.

So I installed the FireDTV dvb-s. And fired up Mediaportal.
I first though I found a problem, cause when I scanned the satellite, no signal was being found. I found out that the power output of the Firewire was not high enough for the firedtv to work on. So I attached the powerbrick to the firedtv and all was good again. The HTPC I had, had more power on the firewire.
So, after this MP could run TV as well.
I only had a small partition (5Gb, didn't wanna make it bigger as it was an experiment) so I could not timeshift a lot but it worked flawlessly.
Actually, it worked so nice that I wanted more......

DriveSpace:
As I did not wanna buy an internal drive yet (waiting for 200Gb+ laptop drives) I was looking for an external drive. SO I bought a MiniMate. A drive especially made for the Mac Mini. But after connecting it I soon found out it was a loud drive. It is fanless, but it's a 7200rm drive and you heard it very well. It was way louder than the mac mini (which is very silent). So I exchanged the drive with a 5400rpm I had In my sat receiver. This was way better...So, the plan was to let MP timeshift to this drive as well. All over firewire.so the sinal path is :
firedtv > firedtv hub on mini mate > mac mini > firedtv hub > HD
I didn't know if this was going to be an issue but I could always switch the drive to USB2 and then put the firdtv on the mac mini itself.
But, it all worked flawlessly. No stutters, no hickups. All very smooth playback.

Dual Boot:
In OSX and in XP you can set the Startup Disc.  This will be the OS that will start as long as you do not hold the ALT (option) button during boot. When you do press the ALT button you get a nice Boot menu. It ll works flawless.

it was amazing..
My setup now looks pretty clean :) The girls is also happy so it's a win-win situation.

I am sure people would like to know stuff, or see some other pics or...Just request it here and I can update this post.

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