8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

I thought it would be great to have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV so I could have “Front Row” on the big screen. Well, this turned out to be a more complex (and more expensive) project then I had originally imagined.

After getting the Mini, the first thing I did was snag the right cables and accessories. This included a DVI <–> HDMI cable, the Apple wireless keyboard, and the Apple Mighty Mouse. With these gizmo’s, I was ready to enjoy some couch-browsing. This is when the first problem arose. I realized I was out of HDMI ports. This problem was compounded by the fact that my receiver doesn’t handle HDMI switching and was out of digital inputs. After a great deal of searching, I found a company called “Octava” that makes this wonderful product. The fantastic thing about their HDMI switcher is that it switches digital-optical signals as well. I ordered one immediately.

After the switch I arrived I got everything hooked up and was ready to rock. Actually, I wasn’t. You see, the DVI-to-HDMI setup was causing severe overscan issues (where the pixels extend out of the visible area of the screen). In order to correct the overscan, I had to spend way too many hours tweaking with SwitchResX. I finally found a custom set of settings that corrected most of the overscan. Alright, so now I was ready to sit back and enjoy some quality Front Row time.

All of my machines are now running Leopard, which features a fantastic VNC-style client built in called “Screen Sharing”. I was using this feature to manage my Mac Mini while watching my PVR etc. This caused another problem. Apparently, when the Mac Mini senses that it has lost a video output signal, it automatically goes to sleep. This meant that every time I switched from the Mini’s input on my TV onto any other input the Mini would go to sleep, kick me off remotely, and have to be revived via mouse to work headlessly. I also use this Mac as a fileserver and a webserver, so this was not an acceptable solution. After some great tips in the Apple support forums, I was pointed in the direction of this product from Gefen. The “DVI Detective” fools a computer into thinking that a display is always connected precisely to prevent this kind of problem. I went ahead and ordered it, and hopefully this will solve the last of my problems.

Despite these setup woes, it is really fantastic having a HTPC. Front Row rocks on the big screen, and it is like having a super-useful Apple TV. I set up some automated backups, and it mirrors my complete iTunes library. Now I can finally catch up on my backlog of “TED Talks”, and thanks to the excellent codec pack, Perian, my Mini can handle most any audio/video format you can throw at it.

Well, enough blogging. Back to enjoying some excellent music courtesy of Jack Rose.