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A week with “the dude”
By booyaabooyaabooyaa | July 8, 2006
We agreed to name the new computer “the dude” as a tribute to the great man in The Big Lebowski.
I should first thank Lou for being very patience and playing the role of PVR widow very well. Hopefully it will have been all worth it!
So it’s almost been a week since our new mac mini arrived. To date I met a few goals I had planned for this new computer:
- The mac mini is connected to our High Definition TV via a DVI lead.
- We’re kinda recording stuff on PVR (more on this later).
- I’ve imported my music and photos into iTunes and iPhoto respectively.
- Got MAME (MacMAME), ScummVM and Snes9X to run.
The first part was surprisingly easy to set up. Whilst buying my PVR/DTT (Freeview tuner) device spotted a DVI 2 DVI cable. Now normally I wouldn’t touch Monster, because I think they have too much of a mark up, but I had to buy this cable it was originally £70 (GBP) and had dropped down to £30! The mini has DVI-I output and I wasn’t 100% sure if this would work on the HDTV, but the Apple guys said I could have a full refund if I returned it back in 14 days.
My Philips 26″ LCD TV has a dedicated PC input which whilst also accepting non-PC HDMI devices i.e. HD-DVD player whenever they come out can work out what signal is being generated. I think my ability to connect DVI-2-DVI made the whole configuring the mini to work with the TV a breeze. Before I connected the mini to the TV I was still using our 19″ LCD monitor at 1900×1200, so I dropped it down to 1024×768 before connecting to the TV. I’m pretty certain the mini would’ve switched to the correct resolution, because it created a new display device profile (HDMI).
I originally was using 1024×768, but I switched to 1280×1024 after realising reading the text was too small to read from the sofa. I’m currently writing this blog on 1024×768 and I’m about a foot away. This is mostly because typing on your lap whilst using a mouse is teh s0×0rz (translation: bad).
I had originally planned to buy a Miglia TV Mini, but after discovering the Elgato for DTT was around £15 cheaper I promptly went for that instead. Perhaps there was a price mix up, but I always understood the Elgato devices to be considerably more expensive and the Miglias covered the low/budget market. The Elgato for DTT comes with EyeTV 2 software that allows you to scan for Freeview channels, schedule or record ad-hoc; and allows provides an electronic programme guide. You also get a year’s subscription to tvtv.co.uk which is like the radiotimes website, except you can do fancy things like schedule to record programmes via the web. The last bit requires you to EyeTV to wake your computer (found in System Preferences > Energy Saving) to either record the scheduled programme or pick up the next batch of programmes to record. They even have a little mobile website http://mobile.tvtv.co.uk/, but at the time of writing it didn’t like my Blackberry browser so I’ve been unable to test in anger.
The portable aerial that came with the Elgato for DTT (PVR from now on) is useless, but could be a novel magnetic media eraser at work. Stick to a real fixed aerial otherwise your TV viewing will be impaired. I hope when we finally drop analog broadcasts, this bandwidth issue with DVB-T will be resolved.
Scanning for channels and then the subsequently filtering of crap like BidTV and QTV is a bit confusng at the moment. I’m also not 100% confident in the scheduling of programmes to record. So far I’ve tried to limit my scheduling to the use of tvtv.co.uk’s interface rather than the native EyeTV. The tvtv.co.uk interface has a nice bar graph type disable that shows your scheduled programmes in time slots, if there’s a conflict (the PVR can only record one channel, because it only has one tuner) the bar shows up as red, otherwise it’s green.
My biggest gripe at the moment is my recorded programmes aren’t displaying full widescreen, in which case I’m getting the letterbox effect. I’m not entirely sure who’s to blame at the moment EyeTV or OSX. So I’m stuck with letterbox for now, which is crap - it’s like I wasted four inches of my twenty-six inch TV!
Just a few minutes ago, we finally used the EyeTV to watch the seasons finale of Dr. Who which rocked! Whilst we had the option to time shift (pause or rewind the live footage) we didn’t.
That’s it for now, I’m gonna leave the emulation and Front Row experience for another post.
[tags]media centre, mac mini, eyetv, elgato, doctor who[/tags]
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July 11th, 2006 at 8:06 am
[...] This is part two of my blog post explaining what the experience of having a Mac Mini as a media centre is like. To see part one go here. [...]