We’re now at Part 8 of our guide to creating a Mac Mini Media Center. If you’ve been following along (and building along) you should have a fully-working, high spec, kick ass Media Center PC that’s working like a dream. Ours has been running now for over a month, and apart from an issue with a DVD not being recognised (and therefore failing to eject from the slot loading drive) it’s proving to be a great investment. Let’s look back at the story so far:
- Get the Mac Mini Up and Running (with OSX)
- Configure Boot Camp to Allow Dual Booting With Windows 7
- Install Windows 7
- Installing and Configuring Codecs
- Install and Configure the Windows Media Center Remote Control
- Connect and Configure our TV Tuners
- Set up Windows Media Center
- Install the Media Center Connector
- Install and Configure Media Center Master
- Install and Configure Media Browser
- Install and Configure TunerFree MCE
So, we could just leave things as they are – everything’s working fine. But, there are a few highly recommended applications that I’d encourage you to investigate (for any Media Center PC, not just a Mac Mini) which takes your media experience to the next level. The remaining parts of this series will walk through these applications – all optional, but as I say, highly recommended. The first of these is Media Center Master.
What is Media Center Master?
I’m glad you asked, or else this would be a short feature. Media Center Master is an application which helps you organise and enhance your media (TV & Movie) collection. It provides a wide range of features, including the ability to automatically download and edit metadata for your TV Programs and Movies (including sleeve artwork, episode guide, synopses, cast and crew info and ratings), download theatrical trailers and subtitles for your movies, as well as provide automatic downloading services via Bittorrent for your favourite TV shows.
The application runs outside the Media Center interface in its own window, and works extremely well in partnership with Media Browser to display metadata in the Media Center environment. We’ll cover Media Browser in the next part of our series. As well as support for Windows Media Center metadata, Media Center Browser also supports additional media platforms like XBMC and Popcorn Hour.
Two editions of the app are available – a free version offers most of the core metadata retrieval and metadata editing functions, whilst a premium option grants access to the more advanced features, including post-processing of files, torrent and trailer downloading and subtitle acquisition. A 10 day demo version offers all of the premium features for testing.
If the above all sounds like gobbledegook, let me bring the features to life. Let’s say you rip a DVD of your favourite TV series – Chuck for example. You’ll be left with a set of generic video files that are difficult to navigate in Media Center. Running those files through Media Center Master will automatically rename each file with series and episode title, move the file to a folder you specify to help with organisation, then go and hunt out screengrabs, backdrops, episode guides, ratings and cast and crew information for each episode. Put in generic video files, get out fully organised annotated files with rich metadata.
Let’s get Media Center Master downloaded and we’ll take a look through its features and configuration.
1. Download and Install Media Center Master
Grab the download and run the installer on your Mac Mini. Once the main application has installed, it’ll run a quick auto-update to ensure that everything’s bang up to date.
Once installed, you find a scree that looks a little like this:
