Has a grey lining, sometimes.

Well I am glad to report that I managed to indulge in my technolust. I am now the owner of both the Mac Mini dual core and an Infrant ReadyNAS NV 1TB.
Could not however stretch to the gig switch which will have to wait for a while.

Mac Mini
received the Mac from my connected friend at a discount (thanks Mr D) and went on a mad dash to get a HDMI-DVI cable. Although not the one I wanted (QED) found a good quality cable at a large retailer in Thurrock and used an optical fibre from my stock.
After reprogramming the surround sound amp to accept HDMI and Optical audio, (which wasn’t obvious) I had a working MacMini resplendent on the plasma.
Quality of HD movies is very good. The Mac GUI is also good but not quite monitor quality, I guess this is to be expected however as we are dealing with video technology.

What is annoying however is that the Mini pushes 720p resolution to my amp and then to my screen which is great except that the screen is a different resolution to this which results in a black border around the image. With the plasma’s propensity to screen burn this makes me very nervous. I can zoom the image out to fill but it goes overboard and the image spills of the screen obscuring the apple menu and most of he dock. I am going to experiment with alternative resolutions including the screens native 1024×768. This may require ditching my expensive HDMI cable for a VGA which will be a shame but needs must I guess. I wonder if there are any updates from Pioneer for this kind of thing. I have seen the TV update itself on freeview before so its possible.

I will also try connecting the Mac directly to the screen’s media box to see if the amp is having an effect on the picture. I have resisted using the PC connection or directly to the screen because of the problems of audio sync but it may be worth the risk.

I have therefore set Flurry to kick in after three minutes to protect the screen, probably a wise precaution anyway.

FrontRow on the plasma however is spectacular. Although a little sloow to react to the remote, when it finally kicks in it looks great, with the FR wound coming from the surround system its pretty cool.

HiDef movie samples from the QuickTime site look excellent on the screen (despite the border) and DVDs look great too, being interpolated up to HD by the mini’s video hardware.
I just have to get to grips with HandBrake now and find the best settings for RIPing my DVD collection for easy access. This is also less than obvious as most of the instructions for HandBrake centre around RIPping for an iPod 5G which is far too low resolution for the big screen. More playing in order, which is difficult when everyone wants to use the telly.

NAS
After much soul searching and deliberation I ordered the NAS. I once again went through the exercise of speccing an alternative server and weighed carefully the pros and cons of each. The NAS sill came out on top for its low maintenance potential.

I didn’t want to have to keep patching and fiddling with the thing. It should be an appliance that just works, stores my data without complaint and I don’t have to think about it all that much.

I ordered the unit from eagis and it really stretched my pocket at £915 (yes I know).

I was a little annoyed when despite my filling out a different delivery address they sent it to my home address. I wasn’t there of course, both times (that’s why I didn’t want it delivered to home) and I had to drive to the out of town depot to collect it on Saturday.

I carefully unpacked it and set it up on my network downstairs. All seemed OK and I setup several shares. The main one; “media” is already configured as a SMB only volume and as I wanted to access it from the Mac and on the Mini I also turned on AFP and NFS for the volume. I configured the user accounts and groups for the family and set permissions on the shares appropriately.

I then powered the unit off (using the web interface) and took it to the loft and connected it to the network, powered it on and let it boot.

I reconnected the mini to the network and commenced copying my data up to the server.
It was about now I started having problems with the unit.

I was connecting via SMB to the media share and because of SMB’s restrictions on filenames (AFP is more lenient with characters such as / and #) I had to rename many of the picture files. I also had some disconnect issues when copying.

From the PowerBook I could connect to the NAS via AFP and view and copy files however I got an error when trying to delete them with the system saying that the item was in use when it plainly wasn’t. I didn’t see this behaviour when logged in via SMB.

Infrant assume that all MacOS X users will be using SMB in their documentation and I now think there is a reason for this – AFP on Mac OS X may not work. I am wondering if the AFP implementation on the readyNAS is v2 not the AFP v3.1 that MacOS X likes best. We have had issues at work with older versions of AFP on Unix machines and the readyNAS is a linux server at it heart after all.

I also wondered if the cabled that run in my walls up to the loft may also have had a hand in all this, I have therefore moved the box down to the living room for a while. This is not ideal as the unit does kick out some sound. Four 250GB drives and a large fan to cool them are a bit noisy for a living area and I will definitely have to find a better place if it is the dodgy cables at fault.

More soon.