I use mac minis as video players for museum exhibitions. We use dual channel video / 4k so we need something with processing power and the quicktime hardware decoding doesn't hurt.

I need the machine to turn on with one button and play a video file at full screen looped infinitely. Another press to the machine turns it off instantly. This makes it easy for museum staff to turn it on in the morning and off in the evening––no mouse or keyboard required.

Until OSX 10.8 I used an application called Powerblock that made the power switch instantly turn on and off the machine, and used applescript to manage the video file. Since 10.9 (mavericks) powerblock doesn't work anymore. I'd rather not have to get Mountain Lion just because of this issue.

Any comments or bright ideas? Thanks :)

Are you using the mac mini only for this purpose? It might not be a bright idea but why not revert to OSX 10.8 and leave it there? They do say that if it aint broke... :)

Yeah, reversion ends up being the solution ;)

I just reverted to OSX 10.8 and made a disk image from a clone of that drive, and saved it on a USB for future use.

It is a little crazy to use a mac mini just to play a video, Problem is, I can't use brightsign or other solutions because they don't decode the Prores HQ. We don't need to use prores hq necessarily, but this needs to be really, really sharp. Another application which I've mentioned before on the forums is linking two HD projectors over a 10 m long space and splitting a signal via a matrox dualhead2go ME from a mac pro or macbook pro, and other units definitely can't handle this. The file is about 28 minutes long and 96 GB in this case, 46 for the single channel version.