Hi,
As I read in other post I think that there are people interesting for doing HTPC on a Mac. That means use a Computer to hook it to a Digital Projector or Plasma via VGA or even DVI. The benefits are that the good DVD image has not to be passed through a old-fashioned analogue cable like s-video or even YUV. If it is DVI, it is eve better. You pass the image all digitally to a digital device like a Projector or Plasma. You don’t have to do D/A conversion, pass it on a 5 or 6 meter analogue cable, the do A/D conversion again! In the PC world there are lots of solutions. With Mac there are bi problems. Probably we can solve them here:
a) 5.1 Audio Output: There is a solution from M-sonic bundled with VideoLan 0.4.6 or 0.5.0. The problem is that is buggy and you didn’t get DTS sound out. Apple DVD player doesn’t support multi channel Audio, so even with a sonica it doesn’t work. Why?? Don’t know. Ask Apple.
b) Specific resolutions. The people want to mach with the computer the exact resolution of the projector/plasma. There are lots of 16:9 projectors with special resolutions at a exact refresh rate. Like 848x480 at 54 Hz, or similar. On Windows there is a utility called Powerstrip, where you can build each resolution at each refresh rate you want.
c) Hardware accelerated DVD Playback. The software playback of G4´s isn’t that good….
So I think we can try to solve this problems to show the PC community that the Mac is still alive…