http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/
http://www.transtec.de/D/D/products/...c/mini_pc.html
My situation is that: I have one TV in my room and some PCs around plus one dreambox sat-receiver. I only have one of the first models they build, 7000S. My N5200 plus my main PC and the dreambox are all time up (7x24 except some scheduled downtime or loss of electrical power). In the living room is a further dreambox, but no TV anymore. Instead, we use a beamer when we want to watch a movie or pictures. We do not want TV playing all day long and it is easier to handle without giving the kids a chance to watch whenever they want. Than, I have PCs in the living room and two kids have their own one in their rooms, the third has only one account on my wifes PC. She also has a MAC-Book. All PCs run GNU/Linux or FreeBSD and the dreambox has busybox/Linux and the MAC-Book some OS-X. All PCs are connected over wired Ethernet, 100MB almost, only between my PC and the N5200 I have 1GB LAN.
My collection of mp3 is what I converted from my own CDs, I don't load files over WWW or listen Internet-radio. The dreambox is a digital sat-receiver and can play radio in CD quality and there are plenty of stations that have nice programs, plus, I could also record this music (mp2) as well as movies. The dreambox can play mp3, ogg and mpg1 and mpg2 (that is DVD like quality) via hardware decoder. It cannot play mpg4, DivX, XviD, X.264, ASF, WMF. But, all the movies that I keep are stored in one of the higher compression modes, almost XviD and X.264. To play that on the dreambox, I operate VLC on my PC and use a plugin for the dreambox, that can access that VLC as client and chose the movie I want and play that. Conversion takes place on my PC and the stream gets send to the dreambox that asks for it. That is necessary, because the dreambox is pretty week as PC and can not do software decoding. Quality is acceptable, with some smaller jumps in some movies (of course, that's no good idea taking the movies from NAS (over LAN), decoding them and send them back in the web. I would better want the VLC run on the NAS directly).
One further plugin for the dreambox can show pictures in jpg. I mean, the box can that itself with no plugin, but as with music, where a “jukebox” exists as player-plugin, these are more comfortable to use and offer further options.
My music and movie collection is hosted on the N5200, what is one NFS-server in my network and dreambox is client to the music share, as are the PCs. Some PCs are client to the movie share also, not the kids PCs. The dreambox records to the NAS, where my PC takes the files for conversion in mp3 or XviD.
So, basically, my dreambox is my “mediacenter”, even when it has some powerful file conversions and storage area not build in, but takes that from the network. The dreambox has 250MHz PPC and I believe 32MB RAM, you may easy find its limits by reading those numbers. It runs and is stable (busybox/Linux), but it could well have got some faster architecture. There are better such boxes available today, but my oldies still do their job.
Thats why I basically once bought that little mini PC from Transtec, because I wanted to add it in a way you want to use the mini-MAC. Compare price to hardware relation and consider my love for Free Operating-Systems and you see, why this and no MAC. I once found one further product of that size and even cheaper, but I can tell from my experience, that Transtec products are high quality in view of construction and parts used inside. I never used that mini-PC in the way I thought, my wifes PC died just at that time and she took the small device and made her point clear: I never got it back. It runs GNU/Linux and could also serve the beamer as file and picture player easy, but the dreambox got a cable to the living rooms sound engine and is therefore easier to handle. Oh, I use only stereo sound, but the box could handle AC3 also. Instead of both, mini-PC or dreambox, my wife likes presenting pictures directly from her MAC-book, hooked on beamer and over Lan to the NAS. I don't remember how I realized access with the MAC, but I think not as NFS, but with a MAC-share. Don't remember, but it works.
What I put to the beamer now from the dreambox had earlier be on the TV screen, so that worked good and needed no extra cabling, just pressing switches on the remote control to either watch Satellite TV or listen radio or playing mp3 or recorded movies, even converted to XviD or DivX or X.264, or seeing pictures from a given folder as slide show. From all that, the later offers the poorest performance, sometimes conversion from high resolution images to TV-norm needs long and sometimes it even hangs, specially when images have to be rotated also.
When I tested the usage of a PC directly connected to TV, I found quality not as really good. Best worked the DVI connector. I don't know, why this is, but considering the common resolution of TVs, they are low compared to todays PC-graphic and thus, probably not optimized. Results on the even lower resolution beamer is better, also with DVI. But generally, you could use any PC to do all of that, what my dreambox does, but you would have to get a remote control working with it to get it comfortably done.
But I thought about this too, as you see, only hadn't found the time for further testing and than, dreambox still does it...