How to Turn You're Mac Mini Into a Home Theater Front End

Use a program called Handbrake to rip your dvd collection onto the mac mini

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Mac Mini
• Handbrake
• Some time and patience

1. Put the movie to be ripped into the mini.

2. Start Hand Break from the applicatinos folder.

3. Press the Source button on the top left corner of the program.

4. Select the dvd in the drive as the source and click open.

5. Hand Break Should start Scanning the dvd for the actual Movie Files.

6. Press the Toggle Presets button on the right hand corner that will display a list of presets, I chose to use the apple tv preset becuase it maxamizes the picture and sound but still reduces the size of the file to around 1 to 2 Gigs instead of the original size of the disc which is around 7 to 8 Gigs per Dvd.

7. Once you are satisfied with your settings, it's time to press start and let the program do it's job. This process with take about the time it would take to watch the movie that is currently being ripped.

Tips & Warnings

• If you feel you have a large enough hard drive you could rip the disc in it's entierty with a program called Mac the Ripper or Hand Break as well.
• A one hour film will take about 1 hour to encode as long as you dont change any settings from the apple tv preset.
• Im not going to go into how to configure all the little settings, this is something that you will have to figure out on your own if you choose to do so but this is not really necessary.

Resources

• Mac Mini Theater

[tikrit01]

on 2/10/2009 My brother has a mac mami. I will send him this. 5*s and a recommend!

[malo22forever]

on 2/10/2009 For a more Detailed How to visit my website at

http://macminitheater.webs.com

Thanx and let me know what you think!!