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Transform an Old Mac Mini Into a

Formidable Media Server Using Plex
Steve Sande

14-17 minutes

The Media Server. From top, an Apple SuperDrive, the 2014

Mac mini, and an 8TB OWC miniStack drive

Old Macs never die, they just get reused. An old MacBook
becomes a school laptop for one of the kids. The old 21.5-inch
iMac becomes a FaceTime “videophone” for Grandma. Macs
have good longevity and older units are usable for a variety of
purposes other than day-to-day work. Read along to see how
we were able to transform a 2014 Mac mini into a home media
server.

What’s a Media Server?

Wikipedia defines a media server as follows:

 A media server is a computer appliance or an application
software that stores digital media (video, audio or images) and
makes it available over a network.

Media servers range from servers that provide video on

demand to smaller personal computers or NAS (Network
Attached Storage) for the home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_server

In this article, we’re using a Mac mini as the hardware and

Plex as the application to organize the media. Why Plex? It’s
the most popular media server app for macOS. Others that you
may wish to consider include Emby, Kodi, Stremio, and
Universal Media Server. NOTE: Several of these alternatives
provide third-party add-ons that allow free streaming of paid
video content. These are illegal and should not be used or
installed.

Why Not Just Use an Apple TV?

Why build a media server when an Apple TV can provide just

about every type of media you’d want? There are a few good
reasons:

1. You might be living in an area with very slow Internet service.

That could make streaming movies, TV shows, and music
almost impossible. With a local media server, there’s no delay
or concern about bandwidth.

2. Have you made a large investment in music CDs and movies

or TV shows on DVD or Blu-Ray? Don’t buy that again in a
streaming format – use that investment by copying the physical
media content to your server.

With fast internet service and purchased physical media, a

media server running Plex offers the best of both worlds. You
can stream online content and make use of the media you’ve
already bought and paid for.
Stream online content and make use of the media you've
already bought and paid for. Click To Tweet

Why a Mac mini?

Why use a Mac mini instead of a Mac with a built-in screen?

You probably have a large-screen TV to watch your content on,
and the mini can use that as a “monitor”. There’s another very
compelling reason to use a Mac mini – older models are
inexpensive. For the purpose of this article, we looked no
further than the OWC website to find a Mac mini. We chose
one with the ability to run modern versions of macOS (10.15
Catalina and 11 Big Sur in particular).

You don’t need a new operating system to turn a Mac mini into
a media server. The minimum operating system requirement is
macOS 10.9 Mavericks, so even an early 2009 Mac mini can fit
the bill.

Where can you find a used Mac mini? OWC often has pre-
owned minis available. Fairly recent Mac minis are listed on
Apple’s refurb page. eBay lists many Mac minis, and used Mac
stores do a bustling trade in these popular Macs.

We used a mini with fairly modest hardware to create our

media server. The specifications? A 1.4 GHz Dual-Core Intel
Core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 120GB SATA SSD. The Mac mini
is one of the few remaining user-upgradeable Mac models. A
large “hatch” on the bottom of the device makes memory and
storage upgrades easy to accomplish.

To provide sufficient storage for photos, music, videos, and

more, we added an 8TB OWC miniStack. This external drive
works great with any Mac mini! It matches the looks of the mini
and sits directly underneath the computer.

We had a spare USB keyboard and mouse, and connected to

an already-existing monitor. After a clean install of macOS
10.15 Catalina, we got to work setting up Plex.
Setting Up Plex

1 ) Download a copy of Plex for Mac (64-bit) from the

downloads page.

Begin setup of Plex by downloading the Plex for Mac app (64-
bit)

2) Drag the downloaded app to your Applications folder and

then launch it.

3) Already have a free Plex account? Just launch the app and
log in. If you don’t have a Plex account, no problem – you can
sign up for one in the app. To make things really simple, use
Sign In With Apple, Facebook, or Google.
No Plex account? You can sign in with Apple, Facebook or
Google, or create an account with your email

4) Once you’re logged in, the Plex Home screen appears in the
app. This displays:

Picks of the Week

Most Popular Movies and Shows

Recently Added

Featured Live TV Channels

Web Shows

Headlines (News)

Podcasts

Music

and, most importantly, Your Media.

The Plex user interface is similar to that of Apple TV

We’ll assume your Mac mini will be used as a full-time media

server. Put Plex in full-screen mode and keep the app running
all the time.
Add Your Own Media

Plex supplies a lot of free media in the form of movies and TV

shows. However, you may have classics that aren’t available
anywhere except on a DVD. You probably also want to add
your own photos and videos, music, or other media… For that,
you need another Plex app called Plex Media Server. Plex
Media Server is the software that works with macOS to make
your media available to the Plex app. That app browses and
plays the content.

Click the + Your Media button, then the Get Plex Media Server
button. Doing so launches Safari and a download page for the
app. As before, drag the downloaded app to the Applications
folder. Now launch Plex Media Server. Log in using your Plex
account, and then read the short explanation of what the app
does:
What the Plex Media Server app does for you

You may see an enticement to buy a Plex Pass. This provides

additional features, including:

Mobile Sync for watching your media offline on smartphones

and tablets

Parental Controls

A Server Dashboard for keeping track of what you watch and

how much bandwidth you use

Live TV & DVR (add a tuner and antenna to record free over-
the-air broadcasts)

Webhooks for connecting your server to your home automation

system

Can Plex pull data from Apple apps?

Everything has been pretty straightforward up to this point,

right? Well, Plex can’t grab your photos from the Photos
Library, which is one big file. It can’t take music from your
Apple Music account or even “see” your iCloud Drive. You
need to manually add your personal content to the server.
Aren’t you glad you have that 8TB miniStack attached to your
media server?

Your vintage Mac mini might have a built-in optical (CD/DVD)

drive. If not, get an external drive for ripping DVDs and CDs.
OWC has many external and internal drives that work with the
Mac mini. Most of these drives have better specifications and
lower price points than Apple’s SuperDrive.

Add photos

One feature of Plex is that you can use it as a “one-stop-

shopping” point for all of your media. Rather than using
multiple apps to view different media types, you can do it all in
one place. Let’s start by copying our photos to the miniStack so
we can view them in Plex. The source? The Mac’s Photos
library.

We created a “Vacation Photos” folder on the miniStack and

selected it as our library location. Next, we selected the images
we wanted to move to Plex. For this example, we didn’t create
any folders to assign photos to a particular genre or event.
Instead, we used File > Export > Export Unmodified Original
for [number] Photos. After selecting the folder as the place to
export to, we let the Mac copy the images.

Plex Server automatically and regularly scans folders

designated as libraries. Shortly after the images are copied to
the folders, they appear in the Plex Photos timeline (see
screenshot below).

Photos in the Plex photo timeline

At the top of the Photos screen is a “playback” button. This is

useful for viewing a slideshow of your images. Any videos in
your Photos library are transferred to Plex’s photo library and
play automatically in the slideshow.

Add movies and other videos

One compelling reason for having a media server is to reuse

your physical media. For movies and TV shows, that consists
of DVDs and Blu-ray Discs you’ve collected over the years.
Copying movies from discs to server requires an app that
reads the discs and moves the data to the Mac. This is called
“ripping” a disc. One of the best open-source applications for
ripping physical media is HandBrake.

Here, we’re ripping a copy of Blade Runner (Director’s Cut)

from DVD to a Movies folder on the miniStack:

Ripping a DVD in Handbrake

You may have issues ripping copy-protected DVDs and Blu-ray

Discs. Many studios apply copy protection to their discs to
prevent illegal piracy. Making a personal backup of a disc you
own is legal in most countries.

If HandBrake can’t rip a disc because of copy protection

schemes, another app might help. MacX DVD Ripper Pro
($29.95) is a commercial app that is often able to do the job
when HandBrake cannot. It also seems to do a better job of
ripping video at a higher resolution. MacX DVD Ripper Pro
takes advantage of GPU acceleration during the ripping
process and is faster than HandBrake.
Add music

You can rip CDs into Apple Music, but that won’t help you with
Plex. It wants individual music files, not one big file. If you’re
using Apple Music to store your tunes, you also have an issue
– those music files are copy-protected. Several dubious open-
source apps exist, but they usually won’t run on a Mac running
a newer version of macOS.

CD ripping apps were quite common before most people

decided to start purchasing their music digitally. One of the few
remaining Mac apps is Phile Audio ($7.99, App Store link).

Phile Audio ripping a music CD to the Music folder on the

miniStack

This screenshot shows Phile Audio copying music from a CD

and saving it to the Music folder on the miniStack. Phile Audio
gathers the track info, album genre, and year of the release.
However, you may need to do some searching to find album
cover art. Wikipedia is a great source of album covers.
Download the art, then drag and drop it to the Phile Audio user
interface to add the album cover.

Back Up The Content on your Media Server

Readers of The Rocket Yard know that we tend to emphasize

the importance of having a good backup. It’s especially
important with a huge media library you’ve spent a lot of time
digitizing from the original discs. A good idea is to make an
exact copy of your storage drive. Whatever storage drive you
use, be sure to purchase a second one for backup purposes.

To automate backups, use a proven backup utility like Carbon

Copy Cloner ($39.99). Install the app on your mini, and then
set up a schedule to have your data drive cloned at least daily.

The RAID alternative

One other way to guarantee the safety of your media is to use

a RAID array as your primary storage. RAID uses a number of
drives in a redundant array. The array can withstand the loss of
one or more drives without losing data. A good example of
RAID storage is the OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini (see image
below). It’s available in Thunderbolt 2 and 3 versions, has four
drive slots, and supports fast SSD drives. Most importantly, it
can be set up with RAID 5 (AKA block-level striping with
distributed parity). Set up a RAID 5 array with four drives, and
any one of the drives can fail without data loss.

The OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini is a compact Thunderbolt RAID

drive that supports up to 16TB of storage

Connect to your TV

Now that your content is loaded, connect the Mac mini media
server to your TV. Since 2010, all Mac minis have provided an
HDMI-out port. HDMI is your gateway to connecting the
computer and TV since one cable does the job for sound and
video. The HDMI port on 2014 and later Mac minis supports 4K
resolution at 30 frames per second. There is also a 3.5mm
stereo audio port for connecting an amplifier or speakers other
than those on your TV.

Usually, you’d place the Mac mini and external drive onto a TV
stand shelf. If space limitations make that an impossibility,
consider something like the NewerTech NuStand Alloy
($17.99). It hoists the mini into a vertical position that takes up
less room.

The NewerTech NuStand Alloy holds the Mac mini vertically so

it takes up less room

Remote Control

Now, how are you going to control that Mac mini from the
comfort of your recliner? You could use a Bluetooth
keyboard/trackpad combo, but that’s clumsy to hold while
enjoying your media! Our solution? Use a VNC app on your
mobile devices to browse the Plex media library and enter
search terms.

There are many solutions that are available, but one that we
recommend is Screens for iOS/iPadOS. The app is installed on
the mobile device, and a companion app called “Screens
Connect” is installed on the Mac. Screens doesn’t have the
distance limitations of Bluetooth since it works on your Wi-Fi
network. It’s simply one of the best ways to control a “remote”
Mac that we’ve seen. Since you usually have your iPhone with
you at all times, it’s easier to find than yet another remote
control!

The Plex dashboard as displayed on an iPhone running

Screens as a remote control

In the screenshot above, you can see the Screens toolbar at

the bottom of the Plex screen. This is a powerful and easy way
to control Plex without the need for a full keyboard and pointing
device.

A Plex alternative

As an alternative to using Plex, you can use the various Apple

apps on your Mac mini instead. Want to watch TV or movies?
Use the Mac TV app. Want to listen to music? Just use Apple
Music, or the Podcasts app if you want to listen to or watch
podcasts. Want to read the news, books or magazines on a big
screen, something you can’t do with Plex? Use the Apple
News app. For YouTube or Vimeo videos, Safari (or your other
favorite browser) is a great portal.

This allows you to have a Mac dedicated to media, hooked up

to your big screen 24/7. You won’t have all your media in one
app, but can still control the Mac mini with our Screens
solution.

Conclusion

A Mac mini makes a wonderful media server, regardless of

how you set it up. Plex is a good all-in-one solution, or you can
use the built-in Mac apps to organize and view your media.

We’d love to hear from readers who are using a Mac mini (or
any other Mac) as a media server. Tell us what you use both in
terms of hardware and software. Just leave your comments
below!