[Berman]

I'm considering buying one of the core duo mini's to hook up to my 60" hdtv. my two real reasons are that I want to run itunes through my stereo (and yes I know the airport express will do this, but my imac is in another room), and i download a lot of video files (tv shows and such) and want to be able to watch them on my tv, not on my imac.

anyone using one like this? seems made for it with front row and that new networking software (bonjour?).

i'm just leery of buying a rev A.

[vmarks]

I'm doing this with a smaller TV ( 60"?! dannggg, brother!) and a G4 mac mini. I think you're right to be concerned about a rev.A machine, but that on the whole it should work great.

I also think that the mini is probably not likely to be a victim of most rev.A woes that we see in machines like the original iMac, eMac, or laptops. For one thing, there's no CRT (curse of rev.A iMac and eMac) and the kinds of big rev.A woes for powerbooks don't affect it (battery, firewire, internal speaker hum, all things that date from the titanium powerbook range.)

[quiklee]

Hi, i think i have the same set up as yours . . . i'm running my Mac Mini CD to my 51 inch Sony HDTV . . here are some problems though

- If you're planning to connect External Hard Drives to your Mac Mini so you can have easy access to all your files, be ready to wait for FrontRow to load all your files. I suggest creating separate folders for each file so you don't have to wait too long for the whole Movie Folder to load.

- I suggest getting at least 1GB of Ram . . . I have only 512MB . . . which i think is the reason it takes forever to load

- Don't plan on displaying the Mac Mini anywhere while you play DVDs cuz that suckers loud

Other than that . . . it's still a good media center. I just put all the main shows I want to watch on the MM's Hard Drive . . . accessing music through Bonjour has been pretty painless . . . photos is a lil tricky, i still haven't figured it out . . . connecting to the tv - I used a DVI cable, but the image still comes out a little fuzzy. I wouldn't recommend it for surfing the internet or anything long term like that . . . video conferencing and playing media is all a BigScreen/MacMini setup was meant to do . . .

tell us how it goes and if you got an iMac, check out my signature - we need some activity on our forums too

[Berman]

Originally Posted by quiklee

Hi, i think i have the same set up as yours . . . i'm running my Mac Mini CD to my 51 inch Sony HDTV . . here are some problems though

- If you're planning to connect External Hard Drives to your Mac Mini so you can have easy access to all your files, be ready to wait for FrontRow to load all your files. I suggest creating separate folders for each file so you don't have to wait too long for the whole Movie Folder to load.

- I suggest getting at least 1GB of Ram . . . I have only 512MB . . . which i think is the reason it takes forever to load

- Don't plan on displaying the Mac Mini anywhere while you play DVDs cuz that suckers loud

Other than that . . . it's still a good media center. I just put all the main shows I want to watch on the MM's Hard Drive . . . accessing music through Bonjour has been pretty painless . . . photos is a lil tricky, i still haven't figured it out . . . connecting to the tv - I used a DVI cable, but the image still comes out a little fuzzy. I wouldn't recommend it for surfing the internet or anything long term like that . . . video conferencing and playing media is all a BigScreen/MacMini setup was meant to do . . .

tell us how it goes and if you got an iMac, check out my signature - we need some activity on our forums too

i'd be getting 2 gigs of ram for it you always max out the memory on anything running osx. going from 512megs to 2gigs in my imac made a very noticeable difference.

it's really that loud? that's not so good. i could always use my xbox 360 to watch dvd's instead as i do now, but that sucker is loud as hell too.

hold on. the image is FUZZY? that's a freakin deal breaker for me. how can it be fuzzy on a hdtv? can anyone else confirm or deny whether or not this is a problem for them? i'd be very upset.

when you play avi files and such, do they display clearly? that's my big concern over surfing the web, although it would be nice to flip over to the mini and check my e-mail quickly during half-time or something.

what keyboard/mouse are you using? i want a keyboard with a built in mouse device, but finding one that's formatted for a mac is an issue. worst comes to worst, i'll just get a windows keyboard and map the keys appropriately.

[Berman]

Originally Posted by vmarks

I'm doing this with a smaller TV ( 60"?! dannggg, brother!)

tv's are fairly reasonably priced nowadays. for $3500-$4k, if you look around, you can get a quality DLP or LoCos, which does 1080p, that is 65". my mother picked up a 50" DLP for $2500.

i paid more for the plasma tv on the wall in my bedroom than for the larger tv in my living room. go figure.

[quiklee]

text is fuzzy, but when I watch shows like Lost or what not, it looks really really clear . . . . so i guess it's a tradeoff . . .

i don't really use a keyboard or mouse on the computer unless i'm configuring stuff, so I just use the Logitech Wireless Mac Keyboard they just released with the USB dongle for easy transferring between my iMac and Mac Mini . . . . . i just use the frontrow remote to go through my media . . . .

do you know anywhere i can get 2GB of Ram for my MMCD for real cheap?

Good Luck and take pictures soon!

[Berman]

Originally Posted by quiklee

text is fuzzy, but when I watch shows like Lost or what not, it looks really really clear . . . . so i guess it's a tradeoff . . .

i don't really use a keyboard or mouse on the computer unless i'm configuring stuff, so I just use the Logitech Wireless Mac Keyboard they just released with the USB dongle for easy transferring between my iMac and Mac Mini . . . . . i just use the frontrow remote to go through my media . . . .

do you know anywhere i can get 2GB of Ram for my MMCD for real cheap?

Good Luck and take pictures soon!

how do you have it hooked up and what resolution are you using? do you have the dvi to hdmi, running in full 1080p? i've done a lot of research now on hooking computers up to tv's, and if you use a dvi to vga converter, it just doesn't look as well. also, you need to have the mini output to a native resolution of the tv, so 740p if it can't support 1080p (or i for that matter).

thanks for the replies btw

[quiklee]

so far I have a DVI to DVI connection . . . . the max resolution it says on the screen is 1920 by something . . .is that right? I have a Sony 51in HDTV Projection Screen . . .

I also have my iMac G5 hooked up to my 37in LCD via S-Cable and the max resolution output on that is 1024 . . . . still fuzzy

am i getting this all right?

[power142]

Fuzzy text could be the result of some image processing that the TV is enforcing on any image, and it's not always possible to disable it. Your best bet is to try feeding it an image at native resolution, which varies depending on your display. For CRT rear-projection sets, you can vary this and see which looks best. For digital displays (LCD, DLP, LCoS) scaling the image to a non-native resolution will almost always give fuzzy text and/or jagged edges.

As I said, even then you might not be able to eliminate all image processing. My HDTV is exactly that way - I can't get everything disabled so that I just end up with an image that hasn't been mangled

[Berman]

Originally Posted by power142

Fuzzy text could be the result of some image processing that the TV is enforcing on any image, and it's not always possible to disable it. Your best bet is to try feeding it an image at native resolution, which varies depending on your display. For CRT rear-projection sets, you can vary this and see which looks best. For digital displays (LCD, DLP, LCoS) scaling the image to a non-native resolution will almost always give fuzzy text and/or jagged edges.

As I said, even then you might not be able to eliminate all image processing. My HDTV is exactly that way - I can't get everything disabled so that I just end up with an image that hasn't been mangled

well that's crap. i hope my tv doesn't pull that...

[mac128k_1984]

I have a mini running into a Panasonic DLP HD set. Works great, have it dual booting both OS-X and Windows Media Center MCE 2005.

Image is sharp as a tack, perfect pixel mapping at 1280x720. Due to overscan on the TV some of the desktop is not seen about 50 pixels or so on each side.

MCE 2005 looks the best as the fonts crisp, OS-X is using its smoothing and I find it just makes them look somewhat softer.

The mini makes perfect small quiet media center, and now that we can run XP MCE 2005 its even better!

[quiklee]

Jay Mac - So, you turned on Overscan? My desktop enlarges to such a large size that it gets ridiculous to read anything . . . . Did you run any kind of program to adjust your resolutions?

[mac128k_1984]

I just set the resolution to 1280x720 and the HDTV sync with it, as mentioned I lose about 25-50 pixels around the edges, but its still very useable. Not sure what you mean your desktop is large? What resolution is it at?

[dannyillusion]

I'm using my G4 Mac Mini as a mediacenter and gotta say it works really well.
Can't remember the last time I used my Panasonic DVD-player...
Right now the only thing I'm waiting for is for EyeTV type hardware to come down a bit in price and work well with Swedish cable operators. Would be great to run the TV-signal through the computer.
It's hooked up to a 26" (1366x768) Philips LCD with a DVI cable. I used this 3rd party software to make the Mini display correctly, forget the name but can check when I get home.
I know this is a lot smaller than what you plan to hook up but for what it's worth I haven't had any problems with fuzzy text. Maybe it's got something to do with font smoothing?
The Mini of course has 1GB RAM to make things as smooth as possible and the system is on a 7200rpm external FW HD to speed thing up even more.
Not having FrontRow I use the Apple BT keyboard and mouse.

The above works great for my surfing, e-mailing, video/dvd playback and of course iTunes.

Cheers

[KeilwerthSX90R]

This is an old thread - I know. This may also be in the wrong forum, if it is I apologize.

I am thinking about buying a Windows Media PC or using my Mini as a media PC and getting an iMac and I have a couple of questions:

My main purpose for this move is that as nice as my TiVO is, it sucks at archiving shows. I have the DVD burner version but it takes forever to burn anything and it's not HD and I don't want to store DVDs, I'd much rather get a large HD and store them there.

So, how well does a Core Duo Mini run Windows Media Center 2005? How does this compare with EyeTV? Which has a better TV scheduling guide?

I'm going to be using either HD Digital Cable or DirectTV, how well will the Mini work with those inputs and scheduling shows and changing the channel to record shows?

One last question. How will the formating look if I were to burn a show using toast to DVD and then play it on a TV with a regular DVD player? Will it look just like a normal DVD?

Thanks in advance for all the help.

Josh

[jakbrud]

If you look at the thread with the user setup pics, plenty of people are using the mini as a media center, personally i use it on my 20 inch samsung lcd and it does a great job at 1680x1050