Has anyone done this with a G4 Mac Mini?

If so what would be the best software to use and what remote do you recomment?

I haven't done it with a mini, but I have used a headless iMac G4 (17" 1GHz) and a 1.33GHz 12" iBook G4. Both work decently. I use Front Row and the Keyspan RF Remote for Front Row ($10 on eBay when I bought it). I have all my movies shared by NFS, and I use Directory Utility to create a mount point on my Mac for the movies. I then alias the mount point into my ~/Movies folder so that Front Row can find them. Works like a charm.

Of course, the alternative in my setup is to use iTunes, but I don't want 1TB of movies hogging up my iTunes library.

I've heard good things about XBMC, but Front Row works well enough that I haven't been tempted to try it.

FWIW, the G4 "i" Macs I've tried this with will play back Xvid and FFMPEG encoded (via Handbrake) .MP4 files fine, but H.264 is only marginal and they drop frames in scenes with lots of motion. Playback resolution is usually 1280x720 or so, media native resolution is whatever Handbrake sets it to. I suspect that having more cache would be beneficial as a PowerMac of roughly the same speed doesn't seem to have this problem (but it's also much louder).

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

I was thinking about using a mini for that but opted for an earlier G4 tower so I could occasionally boot OS9 for a couple of old games I liked.
I have it connected to a 46"" LCD TV and a set of Harmon/Kardon speakers. I'm not a huge music fan but the speakers do well enough. Mostly I play video files and sometimes foreign videos as my Blu-ray player won't handle either the the Pal video. Unfortunately I'm just a hair short of enough horsepower to play MKV files. A faster G4 Mini would likely manage that.
I have an Egalto EyeTV 250 Plus connected to a USB 2.0 card. It came with a remote. I generally use it for my cable TV watching as aside from being able to record , it caches what I'm watching so I can pause it or jump back and watch something over again.
It has wireless internet so I occasionally do streaming video. Sometimes it's nice to let iPhoto do a slide show when we're sitting around talking.

Great! Thanks for the replies. I am trying to find a cheap Keyspan remote on ebay but not with any luck so far. I will probably use a rollup keyboard and some mouse in the meantime. I already have the DVI-HDMI adapter and a HDMI cable. Now the problem is, how to connect the audio to my TV when the audio generally goes through the HDMI port.

My TV has one HDMI port that is associated with analog RCA-style audio in. It auto-selects between HDMI and RCA audio when that input is selected. My TV also has a VGA port and audio mini-plug input. Maybe your TV has something similar...

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!