Mac Mini and iMac home network setup help

[GSX]

Hi,

Sorry for the noobishness of this question, but I need a little help.

I currently have an iMac and I want to get a Mac Mini to use as a HTPC. I want to stream movies, music, photos, etc. to the Mini from the iMac, but I am a little unsure about how to achieve this.

The iMac and Mini both come with built in networking as I understand it. So can I just create a network connection and start streaming between them? Or do I need and Airport Express/Extreme?

I have never set up a wireless network so this is all new to me.

Thanks for any help.

 

[extrachrispy]

For streaming in high-definition, you're going to want to run a network cable between the two--wireless isn't yet fast enough to support streaming hi-def. For standard-def, you could stream wirelessly, but one of the machines would have to function as an access point (i.e., you'll have to share its network connection to the other). I've never had good success doing that.

With the wired solution, the machines can talk to each other with no other set up (provided you haven't firewalled one from the other)--they'll use private link-local addresses, and will see each other via adding the suffix ".local" to their hostnames.

 

[digitalmac]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7C144 Safari/528.16)

If you want to stream video off your iMac, it's better have a wired network. Gigabit Ethernet would be the best, it's real fast. For music and photo, 802.11n which comes with all the latest Mac should do u fine.
You have to first enable sharing in your iTunes and iPhoto, then you can use FrontRow to stream off your iMac.