I’ve been using my Xbox 1 chipped with XBMC for over 4 years now, and it has served me some good times. But as the movie quality keeps improving, or increasing in size, the Xbox doesn’t have what it take’s anymore. For example, viewing a movie in 1080p quality is simply not possible. Mostly because the file format MKV is not supported, or weakly supported.

A friend of me was talking about his new HTPC running on Snow Leopard with XMBC and it got me thinking, running Snow Leopard om my TV sounds good to me anyway. And being able to finally view Full-HD movies on my TV (witch it has never done before) is something i really want, I’m done watching crappy DivX’s.

Of course it never comes cheap, for a reasonable priced hardware configuration you come somewhere near 400 – 450 euro’s. And if I want a nice casing that fits next to my amplifier it costs me even more. The same goes for ’sound reduced’ hardware. So I think I’m just going with the average hardware and put this in a basic casing, and hide it behind my couch Maybe put some sound reducing stuff in the casing to reduce the annoying fan noise.

- Edit, Turns out HTPC casings are not that expensive after all. Found one for 60 euro’s, Looks like it’s going to be next to my amplifier afterall

The configuration I have so far is priced around 400 euro’s. I will start the project once I have the hardware obviously.

Today I received the packages, even got better memory for free because the one I ordered appeared not to be in stock. I installed the hardware in the casing, all went smooth. Now im busy installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on the machine, but can’t seem to get it working.. i’ve tried the iATKOS v7, SnowOSX 3.6 but they didn’t work for me. SnowOSX did but sound was not working and the bios keeps resetting on reboot.

The fix seems to be in the Snow Leopard 10.6.1-10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD by Hazard package, but I downloaded the wrong version. Downloading the right version now but its going kind of slow. I’ll keep you updated on progress.

These are the options I used up till now:
- VoodooHDA
- NvENABLER
- Chameleon RC4
- ElliotForceLegacyRTC
- OpenHaltRestart

Turned out I have to patch the Snow Leopard 10.6.1-10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD by Hazard dvd first with an update, I wasted 2 good DVD’s on that! And my last ones, I ordered 100 DVD’s on cdrwinkel.com just in case. Now going to the store to get 1 or 2 DVD’s to burn the right image.

A few day’s ago I completed this project, but obviously forgot to update this post because I watched some 1080p movies That means the project was successful, but it was a pain in the *ss. Installing OS X on a normal PC is not that easy you might read somewhere. For some reason I got everything working except for my videocard. Strangly, a friend had the exact same card, but from a nother manufacturer and that one did work. Strange. We traded cards and now the HTPC is running Mac OS X 10.6.2 like a charm! Got XBMC installed, and placed the box in my livingroom. It’s looking kinda cool there! Btw, the DVD I used was “SnowOSX 3.6“. Some pics soon.

-Edit, some pics below! The HTPC is the one on the left.

Some people like to install other software like MAMP or XAMPP but i like to do it without installing other software other than Mac OS X shipped with, well of course we need to install some things but no all-in-one packages.

You may want to install the Developer Tools (xcode), you can find these on your Leopard DVD, or install the developertools from the apple site. These are required if we are going to compile extensions for PHP.

Lets start with enabling PHP, open up Terminal, and type: sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and type in your password. Find the line that loads the php5 module:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

And remove the # before LoadModule.

Save the file (ctrl+x) and restart Apache, you can do this in System Pref’s by unchecking the Web Sharing service (Sys prefs > Sharing), or you can type it in Terminal: sudo apachectl restart

Lets install MySQL, i dont exactly know why apple did not ship this too, but fortunately MySQL made a nice prefpane for this. Download the package (dmg) at the MySQL website Install it, and start it in your pref pane (Sys prefs > MySQL)

Only thing we have to do now, is connecting MySQL with PHP, type in Terminal: sudo nano /etc/my.cnf and insert:

[client]
socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
[mysqld]
socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock

and then:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo chown _mysql /var/mysql

All done, you now have Apache with PHP and MySQL, optionally we can install xdebug, there are a lot of known problems when doing this, so here’s what worked for me instantly:

Download the Komodo Remote Debugging package and extract the xdebug.so from the 5.2 directory, and move it to /usr/libexec/xdebug.so

Now open your php.ini file at /private/etc/apache2/php.ini and add this line:

[xdebug]
zend_extension=/usr/libexec/xdebug.so

Now, restart apache again with sudo apachectl restart, and you should have xdebug installed!
If not, or you come up with some errors, please comment and ill try to help.

Optionally, if you want to make local development a little bit easier you can follow my other tutorial: Making local development a little bit easier