Having our collective libraries available centrally, and easily playable on our television allows us to enjoy our TV shows and movies together as a family - rather than in insolation, crouched over our laptops and iPads as we’d previously done.

I want to make it easier for my family to share our individual libraries of iTunes videos that we’ve been accumulating.

There are several good reasons for setting up a home media server. As such, it’s now comfortably nestled next to my TV, blu-ray player, and network router.

Although there are cheaper and more powerful machines, the Mac Mini is small and discrete, with low power consumption, and a solid Unix-like OS that’s pre-configured and immediately usable. Usage as a media server was really just a happy bonus, and a more tangible reason for buying the server that I could explain to my wife. My real intent was getting a small server to run apache along with various VM images to support my development projects.

There’s no need for a screen or keyboard with the Mac Mini since as I can connect to it remotely from my Macbook via OS X’s in-built screen sharing … although I admittedly needed to book time with the Genius bar of my local Apple Store so I could use one of their screens/keyboards for the initial setup. 20 NovemberWith the advent of the new 2014 Mac Mini, I took the plunge configuring one as a lounge-based server (I’d previously toyed with the idea of the brilliantly retro C64x, but my family would never have understood).

Plex media player for mac v server