Speaking as someone that is always looking for alternatives to the everyday thing, this article about turning your Mac-Mini into a media center caught my eye. Engadget did a great job documenting this with lots of pictures and explanations as to what goes where and how to get the audio/video to come out as it should.

Yep, everyone’s talking about using the Mac mini as a home media center, and there’s a reason why: its diminutive form factor makes it a good candidate to fit unobtrusively into an existing audio/video or home theater setup. It looks more like a consumer electronics device than a computer, so it won’t look out of place in your living room. We think of it as the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio/video recorder, audio/video playback, audio/video download, and it even makes a decent audio/video production unit, as well. You might not win the next Sundance with your iMovie, but you sure can impress everyone at the next family reunion.

So for this week’s How-To we’ll cover the various aspects you’ll need to think about when planning your Mac mini media center system, plus show you how to control your Mac mini headlessly from any computer in your house—there’s no need to BYODKM; just BYOB, pop in a DVD and enjoy your HDTV, OK?