[laslane007]

Anyone ever use your powermac with a home theater and a projector as your monitor? I'd like to somehow incorporate my powermac into my home theater, but I'm not sure how to do this exactly. I'd like to use it in a way that I can hit a button to switch to my computer, then another button to hit my TV, etc. I could then use the mac as my hard drive for recording TV shows (both HDTV and regular TV), to play DVDs, and for playing music through my speakers.

Any suggestions/tips? I know there is airport expres, but that is just for streaming music. Wondering what other options I had to integrate my mac into my living room.

thanks,
Nick

[macaddict0001]

Just connect it to your tv and then select video or line in when you want to see your computer. oh and it has to be connected directly to the tv when playing dvd's for copyright issues.

[johnpop]

Originally posted by macaddict0001:
oh and it has to be connected directly to the tv when playing dvd's for copyright issues.

Can you elaborate on this?

If you want to record TV shows, etc., you will need some sort of tuner card or a device like Elgato's EyeTV. Personally, I'd just stick with Tivo, but there are some decent Mac options out there.

You should definitely check out Roku's offerings as well. The SoundBridge is a fantastic network music player that connects directly to your stereo and lets you stream music from your Mac (or PC). I turned my old Mac into a home media server and haven't touched a CD in months thanks to my SoundBridge. Fantastic!

I'm now considering Roku's PhotoBridge HD. It will play video and photo files stored on a Mac or PC. The new version of the software will play back .ts files directly, so you can rip your DVDs to your Mac and stream them to your TV!!! And, as the name implies, the PhotoBridge HD supports HD video.

-Rob

[macaddict0001]

Originally posted by johnpop:
Can you elaborate on this?

If your powermac is connected through some sort of recording device such as a tivo or vcr The dvd will not play correctly on the external screen.

[tooki]

Honestly, the DVD playback quality from a standalone player will be superior.

tooki

[originalplaid]

I do think my G5 hooked via vga to a projector is better quality then a standalone dvd player on MOST dvds. There is problems with stuff shot on video and the fact that Apple's DVD Player App doesn't deinterlace.

VLC works better on these videos but lacks in interface.

I plan to buy a Mac Mini to use as a "home theater pc" for that reason.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by tooki:
Honestly, the DVD playback quality from a standalone player will be superior.

tooki

Would you care to elaborate on this? I was just discussing this with another guy earlier today who seemed to think a $30 DVD player hooked up to a standard definition TV looked better than playing a DVD on his 23" Apple LCD Display. I had to explain to him that the TV is so low quality that the pixels are bigger than the video artifacts created by the MPEG compression. On the computer, the display is so HIGH quality that you can see the flaws in the compression.

[tooki]

You basically said it: the computer display showcases the flaws.

But it's also important that a standalone DVD player is basically outputting the scan lines stored on the DVD 1:1 to the scan lines of the TV. When you watch a DVD on a TV connected to a computer, the DVD Player is scaling it to the virtual resolution of the TV output, and then the graphics card scales it again to the scan lines of the TV. Compare those two scaling steps to the zero scaling steps in a standalone unit.

Finally, a standalone player has a remote control, can output proper closed captioning (since Apple DVD Player does weird things to CC), and is generally speaking MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more forgiving of scratched or dirty discs.

tooki

[Detrius]

Originally posted by tooki:
You basically said it: the computer display showcases the flaws.

But it's also important that a standalone DVD player is basically outputting the scan lines stored on the DVD 1:1 to the scan lines of the TV. When you watch a DVD on a TV connected to a computer, the DVD Player is scaling it to the virtual resolution of the TV output, and then the graphics card scales it again to the scan lines of the TV. Compare those two scaling steps to the zero scaling steps in a standalone unit.

Finally, a standalone player has a remote control, can output proper closed captioning (since Apple DVD Player does weird things to CC), and is generally speaking MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more forgiving of scratched or dirty discs.

tooki

For me, watching DVDs on a TV would involve buying a TV. I watch my DVDs on my computer w/digital surround sound--and on a 1280x1024 LCD. I'm not watching DVDs on a TV hooked up to a computer. I don't see any reason to even try that. I would agree that defeats the purpose (except in a few cases where I have my laptop and I'm away from home).

On the computer, I sit far enough back that I don't see the flaws. Whenever the camera pans across a piece of paper with writing on it, I can read it on the computer, where on a TV, many times it's not readable--like if the person is holding a book. I like to see what the people are reading. In general, you get all of the detail that the DVD provides. You see the flaws because it is exceptionally high quality. This is like trying to watch standard definition TV on an HDTV. It looks miserable. SDTV really is miserable. You just don't realize it because it's better blurred.

[power142]

I agree, SDTV is miserable on many an HDTV set for the very same reasons Tooki describes - LCD, DLP and plasma are all fixed resolution devices, and few of them are the native resolution of broadcast, either SDTV or HDTV, so there is typically bad deinterlacing and/or lousy scaling going on (although to be fair, 1080i scaled down to 720p normally looks OK).

Isn't DVD Player supposed to be much improved in Tiger? I thought I had seen some screenshots on another site a while back showing a menu with deinterlacing options. This might bring its own can of worms along with it, since the DVD Forum/MPAA (can't remember which) forbids playback of DVD-Video via a digital connection at resolutions greater than 480p, and I can't see Apple breaking that rule. So what happens to our beloved DVI-output to HDTV then? We get stuck with a 480p output with the TV doing some lousy scaling again

I'm not sure that this puts us in more of a happy place than with a decent progressive scan DVD player (ie one that costs more than $30!), for TV-based home theater at least.... a large widescreen computer display could be a different matter - though I fail to see the difference between said screen and digital HDTV as far as Apple/DVDF/MPAA are concerned