Looks like Apple has finally acknowledged what drives probably a very large percentage of their mac mini sales: Techies who want a mac-based bittorrent box hooked to their home theater. Now, if only it had Blu-Ray...
I've also been looking for a HTPC sort of solution, and came across the Dune Player which looks promising - blu-ray drive plus network streaming running on Linux:
Never going to happen. You can buy an external one for $100+ if you're so inclined, but Apple is clearly gunning for a future where physical media are irrelevant. It's the content that matters, not the delivery method.
Modern Blu-Ray titles are stamped out using the cheapest methods available anyway, there's no experience when using their product. It's a disc in a case with some cover art work. Very thrifty, cheapening the product considerably.
This is nothing like the old Criterion-style treatment with a nice box, some accompanying materials, and a sense of owning a piece of something important.
The future is downloads, Bittorrent or iTunes store or otherwise. It's the only method that will scale to the future. When Red is making a 28K camera, when Apple produces screens with 300+ DPI, you know Blu-Ray is only a stop-gap.
I don't know if that's true. The bitrate of a low-end Blu Ray movie is about 15 Mbps. I bought Glee in "HD" on iTunes, and that has a bitrate of about 150 kbps. So we're talking a 100x jump in bitrate.
Bandwidth would be a big problem. But storage is an even bigger problem. And if you trade away storage requirements for higher bandwidth consumption, you have even more bandwidth problems and people are going to be pissed they can't watch their movie on the plane.
Now, you could argue that there's no perceptual difference between X kbps and Y Mbps, but I have seen articles that differ with you on that if that's the position you choose to take. Is there possibly some happy middle ground in there somewhere? For sure. I don't think removable media is going away soon though.
That's what I use, plus Vuze and FireFox (for Netflix watch instantly... because it's currently broken for me in Plex).
The only issue I have is most of my files are on an external FW800 drive, which isn't as quiet as the mini's drive. So, I put the drive enclosure into the cabinet under the TV. Also, Mac OS X is aggressive about putting the external drive to sleep, and because of this I had to set the cache seconds in Plex to 15 just to make there are no pauses in playback.
EDIT: forgot to mention that the superdirve in the mini is so loud that it can't really be used to watch a movie. Sounds like a 747 taking off. However, this is not a big deal for me, because I rip the DVD's to get rid of the menus and unskippable crap at the beginning of the disc.
