This Mac mini concept from Victor Anselme‘s Apple Addicted blog looks fantastic. Now that an impending Mac mini update is more that just a rumor, I am really wondering how it’s gonna look. It will definitely follow the new design language that started with the iMac and followed by the Macbooks and this concept conforms to that language beautifully.

Victor designed another concept sans an optical drive, which I would very much prefer. Thanks to Plex I am done with optical media. In addition to Plex, the new mini will make a decent gaming machine as they will be equipped with the same NVIDIA chipset that can be found on the new Macbooks. The Mini Display port is the biggest issue though as Mini Display -> HDMI cables are hard to come by, but I am sure that will change when the new Mac minis are introduced in January.

The demo video I did for Plex with Aeon skin is also part of the paper as the featured video for CenterStage+Plex.

You can get it here.

This new skin was released for XBMC a couple days ago. MediaStream by Team Razorfish is a community effort that has been going on since October 2007. It’s is a very polished piece of work as you can see in the video and need nearly no configuration and tinkering to get it working right.

This skin has replaced my other favorite Aeon for now. One other skin that I am looking forward to is the new default Plex skin. The Plex team has teamed up with the CenterStage team to bring a default skin for Plex in the coming weeks. Judging by the preliminary demos and screenshots, it is going to be a cracker.

To watch it in HD, just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might have heard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.

Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.

I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.

Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.

There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.

The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)

Leopard’s new Front Row look great and acts great and all, but there is a very crucial problem with it. If you have Perian, which is an open source QuickTime component that adds native support for popular video formats suchs as DivX and Xvid, installed on your system; you used to be able to see the subtitles (.srt, .sub) in Quicktime and in Front Row 1.3 – the old one in Tiger. With the new Front Row in Leopard, when the subtitles kick in all you get is a black screen.

I’ve been tinkering with this issue for a while now and boy, have I tried! I tried using Submerge to merge the subtitles with the movie. When you use the Save to disk option in Submerge, it throws out a .mov file that includes a .png layer that is the subtitles on top of the movie. It works in Quicktime, but you get the same black screen in Leopard.

I tried installing the old Front Row (1.3, forTiger) to Leopard. Front Row sits in /System/Library/CoreServices. If you have a machine running Tiger, you can copy the old Front Row from that to the machine running Leopard. Remember to back up the one you’re replacing though.

If you don’t have a machine running Tiger, you can download Front Row 1.3.1 from Apple, but you gotta fool the installer to install it on Leopard. I strongly recommend backing up your system before attempting this. Here’s what you gotta do:

-Remember to back up your current Front Row that is sitting in /System/Library/CoreServices.
-Copy FrontRowUpdate1.3.1.pkg from the .dmg you downloaded to your desktop.
-Right click on FrontRowUpdate1.3.1.pkg and select Show Package Contents.
-Extract Archive.pax.gz and copy the resulting Front Row.app to /System/Library/CoreServices
-Restart your machine and you should be able to launch old Front Row from your Apple Remote.

In my testing it worked most of the time, but it spurts out an error here and there. I can’t say that it’s very stable, but I’ll keep tinkering with this. Also, there is a discussion about this on the Apple Support Forum which you might want to check out.

If any of you reading this has any info or ideas about how to circumvent this subtitle black screen thingy, please sound off in the comments.