Thankfully OS-X does support the ability disable the sensor but also allows you to ‘pair’ a specific remote to a specific machine.

I’m sure you could have no end of fun with a single remote in a busy room with a bunch of macs. The following steps are from my fair share of reading blogs, wikis and forums on this subject and what I’ve finally managed to figure out to get this working as I want.īy default your Mac listens for any Apple remotes telling it do do something, by default it will listen to any remote and do as it commands. Both have support for the standard Apple remote, but with only 6 buttons a lot of things were inaccessible or required weird combos to get to.Īs I already owned the fantastic Logitech Harmony 725 remote I was pretty keen to get it working on my new HTPC but unfortunately Apples infrared remote implementation is very limited and only supports Apple remote controls few commands via 6 buttons. Thankfully there are two great applications that do almost everything, the XBMC fork, Plex and Elgatos EyeTV.

OS-X’s default HTPC app, Frontrow, is extremely basic to say the least. Unfortunately controlling all this from the couch was always going to require some work. The Mini could finally give me a media centre, Freeview PVR and a rock solid *nix based NAS with the ability to run various background servers (UPnP, AirVideo, iTunes etc). As far as I can tell its the best HTPC chassis out there – if only it had BluRay (stay tuned). The Core2Duo CPU was more than adequate to decode all codecs and resolutions and its new super thin and sexy casing was just the sugar on top.

So when Apple announced the new Unibody Mac Mini just days before my birthday I saw it as a perfect own-gift. It had long since shown its 733mhz CPU was able to output HD but just didn’t have the muscle to actually decode anything over SD resolution.

Retiring my XBOX1 and XBMC setup was inevitable.

Remote for mac mini