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Coming up on Hands On Tech, let's take a look at the nitty gritty details of setting up a home theater using a Mac Mini. Stay tuned. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech, the show where I, Micah Sargent, take your tech questions and do my diddly doggone best to answer them. We have got gotten in some good questions and by the way, if you have a tech question that you have yet to ask me, or perhaps you've asked me in the past and it hasn't come around, be sure to reach out. You can email us Hot Twit TV with your questions. You can also email me micahit tv but it's easier those three letters Hot tv. This week's question comes in from Dawn. Don is actually referencing and an earlier question and solution. And I really like this one because Don says you mentioned using a Mac Mini for a home theater setup as an option. So could you please expand on this in detail? Thanks for all you do for the tech industry and making it simple for the end user. Great question, Don, and also very kind second sentence. So let's get into it. It's very easy to use a Mac Mini as a home theater system and depending on how you want to do it, the setup is a little different. Let's say you specifically, specifically want to use the Mac Mini as your home theater system and home theater sort of broadcast method. And by that I mean it is directly plugged into your home theater viewport of choice, whether that's a projector or a television or what have you. This is the way to go about setting things up in that way. And then I'll talk a little bit more about using it as more of a almost a network attached storage home theater system. So first and foremost, Mac Mini, you are not alone in considering this an option. It is long been a favorite for home theater enthusiasts. It's small, it's got a bunch of different connectivity options and it's got some great hardware packed in. So let's talk about what we can do. So first and foremost, the Mac Mini has an HDMI port and so you can plug in a projector or a TV. And with the Mac mini you can watch 4K at 60Hz. So you are going to get, you know, nice, crisp, smooth video. Whenever it comes to video, the higher refresh rates, the higher resolutions, we're typically seeing those for video games and therefore you would have, you know, a custom, a specific console or a special PC for running those things so you can get the video that you're looking for using a Mac Mini if you do have an older AV receiver. I was thinking about a lot of folks who have said up their home theater system in the past. And so they've got these older systems that maybe don't have HDMI as a means of getting audio, but instead have the optical audio input. It may be possible that you'll need an HDMI audio extractor which will essentially, as it says on the tin, take the HDMI and take the audio that is coming from it and filtering it separately into that optical audio input to your specific receiver. Now when it comes to sound, the best way to go about this is through the HDMI that's on your receiver. So you are getting kind of the all in one package. The video and the audio are coming together. But you can with a Mac Mini use the headphone jack. The headphone jack also supports toslink output if you have a specific adapter. And so that will allow you to route things to specific audio equipment that may be separate from the rest of the setup that you have. It does handle Dolby Digital Pass through. So no worries about that when it comes to viewing things from streaming services. Now let's talk about peripherals. Because if you are using the Mac Mini as your main interface and streaming device, then what you're going to need is some sort of method for controlling them. And I remember this kind of was a fun moment to look back. I can remember my dad having this little sort of oh, iPad mini sized device and on the left was this tiny little keyboard and on the right was a little trackpad and it was for the television because the television was essentially just a computer. And so he would, you know, browse around using those that single peripheral. Same thing applies here. Most people are going to use a wireless keyboard and trackpad like Apple's magic keyboard. The trackpad or mouse. You could also use one like the Logitech K400 I believe it is. Let me double check there. And that is, let's see. Yes, the Logitech K400 is essentially like what I just described where it is a keyboard and trackpad all together in one. It's available for 30 bucks. And it's also spill resistant, specifically made for doing this. So it is for having kind of a home theater set up right there. And then you may want an iPhone or an iPad which can use, you know, VNC or some other means of gaining access to the machine without needing to be directly connected to the machine. So you're able to access it and control it. From wherever you are in your home. Now that is one way of doing it, right? And what I recommend instead, and what I see a lot of people do is almost treating the Mac Mini as the center of a home server situation. Okay? So instead of it being, you know, part directly part of the home theater setup being plugged in that way it's kind of tucked away and has all of your content on it runs important software that we'll talk about in, in mere moments. And then instead your devices, your iPhone, your iPad, your television via Apple TV and even your, your Mac are all other Macs that you have are all able to access the media content that you then have on the Mac Mini. So let's talk about software that you can use on this system. Well, there's the one that I'm going to recommend, the one that's been a sponsor on the network, and the one that makes it possible for you to sort of treat the Mac Mini as a server tucked away somewhere. And that's Plex, very popular, lots of features. It organizes your media library. It will go ahead and automatically pull in your metadata, your artwork. It can find subtitles automatically. And what's great about it is, is you run this Plex server on the Mac Mini and then you can use the Plex app on any device that you have so that you are able to access this media library no matter where you are. Now you can also run it directly on the Mac Mini. So if you're choosing to use your Mac Mini as a direct connection to your home theater viewport, then you're able to just run the Plex app directly on that Mac Mini. But, but if it's tucked away and you just want to access it over your local area network, boom. You're able to use the Plex app to get connected and get rolling.