- Joined
- Apr 24, 2011
- Messages
- 36
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte z170
- CPU
- Intel> Need model # > See Rules!
- Graphics
- Graphics > model # > See Rules!
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
I have been searching for the perfect Plex Hackintosh for a long time. In fact, I started hackintoshing in 2007 in an effort to achieve this goal. Unfortunately, my video collection is all very high bit rate stuff. For the last four years I haven't had much success in setting up Plex on a machine that can handle many of the videos in my collection. But none of the C2D systems I set up played video well enough, so until now I have been stuck using XBMC on Linux (a very capable system, but nowhere near as extensible or easy to use as Plex). All that changed when the sandy-bridge i-series processors came to the os x world. Now I want to share with anyone who is interested a low cost Plex build that, so far as I have tested it, plays even the highest bit-rate stuff as smoothly (if not better) than my XBMC set up.
The hardware is in my sig. My install procedure was pretty simple, but I did experience some hiccups along the way. Since I have a macbook pro, I installed lion directly to a hard-drive via USB. With a working 10.7.2 install I plugged the disk into my working hack (in my sig) and ran MultiBeast. My motherboard shipped with F2 bios so I used the DSDT from the database that already supported hdmi audio. This DSDT requires no further editing. In fact no part of this setup requires any editing of anything.
In MultiBeast, I selected UserDSDT, Lnx2Mac Ethernet, 3rd party SATA, and Mac Mini smbios. I installed audio from http://www.tonymacx86.com/Public/AppleHDA-2.1.1-889+HDMI.zip. In the BIOS, I made sure it was set to AHCI, HPET 64, and onboard graphics set at 384 + 2mb. This is what ultimately gave me a working system with HDMI audio.
I would be lying if I claimed that the process above went as smoothly as all that. In reality, I started out having the wrong Ethernet kext installed, the wrong smbios, and the wrong audio kext. So when I first fired the machine up, networking was totally unreliable, HDMI out didn't work, and the graphics looked like crap. After a few hours of trial and error I arrived at the above working configuration. I gave it the Avatar Blur-ay rip test (average bit rate of 26mbits/sec) and it all ran very well. Still doesn't do the lossless HD audio, but I am very impressed with the playback quality.
If anyone has any questions, I am happy to answer them, but since I have found very little about a reliable hackintosh that can run Plex with very high bit rate videos I wanted to post this for the record in case someone else wants to try it. I will update this post periodically as I improve this system with a remote, plugins, etc...
The hardware is in my sig. My install procedure was pretty simple, but I did experience some hiccups along the way. Since I have a macbook pro, I installed lion directly to a hard-drive via USB. With a working 10.7.2 install I plugged the disk into my working hack (in my sig) and ran MultiBeast. My motherboard shipped with F2 bios so I used the DSDT from the database that already supported hdmi audio. This DSDT requires no further editing. In fact no part of this setup requires any editing of anything.
In MultiBeast, I selected UserDSDT, Lnx2Mac Ethernet, 3rd party SATA, and Mac Mini smbios. I installed audio from http://www.tonymacx86.com/Public/AppleHDA-2.1.1-889+HDMI.zip. In the BIOS, I made sure it was set to AHCI, HPET 64, and onboard graphics set at 384 + 2mb. This is what ultimately gave me a working system with HDMI audio.
I would be lying if I claimed that the process above went as smoothly as all that. In reality, I started out having the wrong Ethernet kext installed, the wrong smbios, and the wrong audio kext. So when I first fired the machine up, networking was totally unreliable, HDMI out didn't work, and the graphics looked like crap. After a few hours of trial and error I arrived at the above working configuration. I gave it the Avatar Blur-ay rip test (average bit rate of 26mbits/sec) and it all ran very well. Still doesn't do the lossless HD audio, but I am very impressed with the playback quality.
If anyone has any questions, I am happy to answer them, but since I have found very little about a reliable hackintosh that can run Plex with very high bit rate videos I wanted to post this for the record in case someone else wants to try it. I will update this post periodically as I improve this system with a remote, plugins, etc...