sean brendan

I’ve been playing around with this project for about 6 months and thought I would share the setup and How To. 

My Goal: buy/build a clean, easy to use setup to make all of my media accessible through the HD TV that is the center of our living room. 

Options: Dell has a small pc that is up to the task, but I couldn’t stand their 80 option/add on check out to even find out what the machine would cost in total.  HP also has an attractive option, but in the end I was ready to jump on the Mac bandwagon (despite their annoying Mac vs PC advertising campaign).

Final Setup: Mac Mini 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo + 2 Gb RAM + 120 GB Hard Drive + Super Drive + Western Digital 500GB External hard drive + Elgato EyeTV 250 + Apple Wireless Keyboard + Panasonic 42 inch Plasma.

How To:

1. Panasonic Plasma TV Mounted to Wall. 

2. Purchased Apple Mac Mini. 

3. Purchased separately DVI to HDMI cable to connect the Mac to the Plasma.  The Mac botted up right away and figured out the display.  There was a small amount of overscan, which can be fixed with this tool: Switch ResX.  The dimensions of your specific plasma can be found through a Live.com search.

4. From there, the Mac is ready to roll.  I attached a 500gb external hard drive to store additional media (videos, photos, music mainly).

5. Installed Elgato EyeTV 250.  This turned out to be a fantastic purchase, and well worth the $199 price tag.  We used the Elgato to seamlessly capture old VHS footage and save as .mp4 files, which we then edited further within iMovie.  It took some time, but I turned a box full of VHS into 5 clean DVD’s that we are much more likely to watch at the next family get together.  The EyeTV 250 is also great for PVR type activities, but we already had this function through our comcast box and found it was just easier to keep it there.  Interesting sidenote - you can capture live tv by connecting your mac to a comcast set top box through a firewire cable.

6. MacTheRipper and Handbrake are indispensible tools for archiving your own DVD collection to hard drive.

7. I did install Vista using Mac Boot Camp, and the two operating systems ran perfectly side by side, and were even able to share the external hard drive.  This was particularly interesting to me, because Vista has a far superior Media Center Application.  Ultimately, I removed Vista to save hard drive space as my iMovie and iPhoto projects got a little out of hand.  A 40gb iPhoto library is a scary beast. 

8. A few of the sites that I found particularly helpful during this project: MacHTPC, 123MacMini, The Green Button, and Engadget.

Ultimately, we found that we used the setup in a different way than I thought I would.  Beyond having a Mac in the house to edit videos, archive pictures, and sync my iPod, we found that we enjoyed letting the 5 star pictures play as a screen saver most.  With a plasma tv in such a prominent location in our home, why not share your best pictures? We didn’t use the htpc type remote interface as much as I thought we would.  Most of the time we were ok operating the computer through the mouse/keyboard interface. 

Feel free to leave me questions in the comment section and I’d be happy to share my experience.