Whichever way you go, your best bet is installing XBMC on it. At which point you might as well just do it with a pi and an external drive. There are premade XBMC distros for the Pi like open elec. After that all you would need to do is install the XBMC TTS extension, there's a whole thread about it on this forum. There are XBMC remote apps for iOS so controlling it from your phone won't be a problem either.

I don't advise rejecting external storage. Whichever way you go, you will end up connecting much disk, so you should plan for space and power, whether over USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt. Otherwise, as you said, you will end up building a monster, which while it is entirely feasible, leaves you with a hulking computer not very suited to shoving under the telly. At least a RAID stack will look nice supported by your TV stand.

The usual way to do this is to have a NAS, but  there are problems for us there, so probably USB. Then you use any OS (I use OS X on a Mini) to run your streaming server of choice, which could be XVNC, iTunes, daapd, or others. Apple TV is nice if much of your stuff is in Apple's cloud, or you have a sub to a streaming-only service, but otherwise makes no more sense than just controlling iTunes with the Remote app or the Apple Remote. And of course nothing says you can't run multiple servers at the same time, depending on which OS you are on.

Well, if you can manage with a single disk or maybe a couple depending on your form factor, but I would prefer to separate my "Disposal" collection from my proper data archive and OS installations, both because data loss is recoverable when you have the DVDs, and because for all practical purposes you won't be able to back up a constantly-evolving media library that you're filling up with multi-ten-gigabyte rips. So I prefer, when building a single basket, to make it as sturdy as possible. This is much easier for me since my desktop is already always-on and accessible over the network to an Apple TV, the Mac Mini is simply the file server with connected storage using software RAID1.

If you just need a MiniPC build, you could always try out PC Specialist; they make nice, chunky boxes that give out smoke in normal operation. They have a good range from fanless Atom to gaming I7s with discrete graphics, and you should be able to find the right balance of performance and power, although as we've discussed it before, I'm personally convinced that the Mac Mini hits the sweet spot for me, even if they are bloody expensive for the upgrades.

As usual, opinions are my own, I may be wrong, etc. In fact, I'm thinking about my strategy again in light of recent cloud paranoia, and the likelihood of my moving my mail server back in-house. So YMMV.

Yep, that case looks nice, but it's way too tall (37.5 cm) to go under your telly. On the other hand, at least right now, I have about 300 GB spare on my smallest disk (the MacBook Pro's hot-swapped 1TB SSD) including the media collection, so I can afford to use a simple USB enclosure with 6 TB in it and still use RAID1. And that makes an absolutely great solution for me, because I access everything using gigabit Ethernet. This will all change when I've finished ripping my DVDs though, and I'll have to scale up to one of those dedicated RAID controllers.

As to the yoof/celebs taking pictures of themselves, well yes, it's more a general distrust in cloud providers generally. Apple, for they're currently hosting my email, have shown themselves to be remarkably resistant, but I'd still benefit from having it at home all the same. It's also true that as an email sysadmin I'd like some of my flexibility back.

Edit: now I think about it, it goes much deeper. What I want is to live in a dream world where I never do backups, never worry about fire or flood, and where all my data--not just media, but everything--lives in a storage black box. So far, that seems illusive, and/or hazardous. RAID1 is great for uptime, but nothing more, so we still have old-world problems to deal with. That is unless you switch to ZFS; then you can forget using a Raspberry Pi, as you'll be on demand for much more memory and CPU to maintain consistent performance.

Ugh, no way I could afford a 1TB SSD. I'm not concerned about hard drive noise so much as fan noise. I also don't particularly mind about performance or graphics so long as it can run Windows with Jaws and iTunes comfortably during video playback. Max ram is a given of course though.

I built my steam/XBMC box in a corsair 250D. It's a squat little case at 29 cm high, It's damn near silent too with the exception of the graphics card which can make some noise every now and then. You will get 4 drives in this case, so it's outdone by the fractal node 304 but then again it's a bit shorter. Another case and one that I'm looking at for my next gaming build is the silverstone rvz 01. You can have this case sit horizontal like a console so it's ideal for under the tv use. You do need to pick up a SFX power supply to use in the thing though. and it only takes 3 2.5 inch drives.

the 250D can get 2 3.5 drives in it. So you could have a small SSD for windows, and something like 2 3TB 3.5 inch WD reds in raid for your storage. As for steam OS, I don't know. I never bothered with it. I figured it would be as about accessible as my xbox was so skipped right over it.

I know this isn't entirely relevant if you've decided against the Mini, CX2, but I'll just mention it here regardless for whosoever benefits as it's been driving me bloody mad for the past week. What follows is a whinge …

Apple released a 2014 Mac Mini along with some other recent announces (iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 3, iMac 5K, Yosemite) with Iris graphics, Haswell CPUs, dual Thunderbolt 2, PCIE Flash up to 1TB and 802.11AC Wi-Fi. They've also moved the Mini to the glue-everything-in-and-solder-it-tight model of non-upgradability; now the disks are all you can upgrade, at a pinch. But they did not release quad-core high-end BTO configurations, nor a "Server" edition.

This is relevant because while the Mac Mini has never been a better buy for the average consumer, perhaps even an excellent media server, it sucks donkey balls for server workloads, virtualisation, or transcoding. I'm fairly sure the media centre applications won't make a blind bit of difference in practice, even with HD4000 graphics you'll do fine, but the fact of the matter is that the top end Mac Mini will give you less multicore CPU performance than is possible with the 2012 Mac Mini for the same cost, and you won't be able to avoid Apple's penny-pinching upgrade pricing. So, if you were thinking about a Mac Mini, you might like to secure for yourself a 2012 model for use as your all-purpose server while you still can to get decent performance for the price you're paying.

I like the Mac Mini. Well, I liked it. Now I have to deprecate it. It's too bad. I nearly got the new model--I was excited, because it was time. But I'm hanging onto my trusty 2012 model, and my sister-in-law can buy the new model at top specs and learn to love it.

There's speculation about the reasons. Some say it's the socket requirement for the Haswell chips in use; Apple would have to use two separate board designs to accommodate both dual- and quad-core editions. And Intel has been flailing around just trying to stay relevant, and missing deadlines. But really it's all just bollocks. I've no doubt Apple would like it very much if you bought an iMac or a Mac Pro instead, because the Mac Mini quad-core, which I think is really awesome, had low-end pro potential at extremely low power consumption. Lots of useful applications benefit from multicore performance, and while more single-core speed is great, we've realistically reached the point where common workloads are already acceptably fast and going a bit faster doesn't help much. But when you effectively halve the available processor speed, some applications aren't even realistically possible--like virtualisation, transcoding, or a 100-person workgroup server.

So in summary, if you want a powerful Mac Mini that's worth the money, you might like to snap up a refurb 2012 quad-core while you still can, if you can.

Yeah, you've got to admire the slight of hand there, where they announce the Mini after talking about the actually upgraded (though not by much, TBH) iPad Air.

I really, really hope Apple hasn't turned to counting beans before considering the user experience, rather than--as under Jobs--afterwards. Though the latter had problems, it didn't result in this nonsense.

Indeed.

Turns out my Mac Mini 2012 no longer has Apple support behind it, so it's time to put in a couple of decent SSDs and run them in RAID0, then maybe swap out OS X for Linux. It's all fine by me.

I wouldn't mind paying Apple's upgrading pricing if they actually maintained the specs. I mean it'd be annoying, but it wouldn't make any less awesome of a server. Sadly I don't think Apple really care about my kind of person any more; the Mini is now just a low-end Mac intended to get you into the cult. Tragic.

Ah. Well it makes no odds either way; you can't replace the memory without destroying the machine. I'm just not going there. Shame.

I suppose this really depends on what Apple thinks the future of Macs and OS X really are. In spite of the Mac Pro, it's not clear to me that Apple is at all inconvenienced by hardwiring components. Indeed, a high-end iMac is a professional workstation, too; Macs are clearly just good for doing your general computing work, and a "Pro" is someone who knows how to use FinalCut or Logic. And in that light, it all makes perfect sense. The Mac Mini is no longer a server; now only the Mac Pro qualifies, in any kind of conventional sense. OS X Server has long been trivialised to the point that it makes Windows Server seem positively useful; all the bundled software means nothing if you can hardly manage it in the Mac way, or have to run logged-in sessions over graphical desktops or ssh (the latter with much less flexibility than one would normally expect from a command line). It's a wonder there isn't an "iServe", which would be a box with server functions built into it, like the very excellent Time Capsule, controlled using an iOS app …

I'm now moving this Mac Mini to Linux. I don't anticipate it dying for a while yet, but I'll cross that bridge when I reach it. Should be fun; a new home gateway and mail server and NAS, shaped exactly like a Mac Mini.