Hey guys i have several questions in regards to the mac mini in general and its ability to function as a "media centre"

Now ill put it out there to keep in mind that iam not worried about 1080p 720p would be great but it would mostly be used for dvd quality video/streaming.

Now with that in mind what would be an ideal mac mini to hunt down on a budget of say 400? i had seen quite a few g4 mini's with 1.5 cpu and 1 gb ram on ebay for cheap and iam not sure about how this would perform? other questions i would like answered is whether or not these g4's would be able to run snow leopard? even lion? or are they reserved for the intel generations? (windows is intel only im guessing.. still fairly new to mac so never delt with the older machines)

next how difficult is a hdd upgrade/change on these mac's? these g4's have about 80gb on average which is fine because ill be holding my media on NAS but i was wondering if its possible to swap out these drives for say 64gb ssd to get a snapier machine.

lastly due to it not requiring HD video output hdmi out isnt such an issue so iam guessing i can run component output if i wanted to with the right mini display adapter? and how does this affect sound? are people simply outputting to hifi's?



if this is too much or if there is a guide out there i have missed that covers all of this i would be appreciative if someone could point it out

I bought an early 2009 mini from the forums for $400. Gotta keep an eye out for bargains Get one with a 9400m video chip too, for future proofing for decoding H.264 material.