What you need for an HTPC Mac mini
By now you’ve heard about Boxee and Hulu, two truly great applications for delivering television shows to a Mac. However, you may not know just how easy it is to take all of that free content and put it on your home’s big-screen TV. Here’s the stuff you need to get that done.
My family gets broadband via Time Warner Cable and, the price aside, we’re pretty happy with the service. We don’t, however, have a cable TV subscription.
A world of video
For about a year, we made do quite nicely with a digital antenna — Winegard MS-2000, about $250 including installation, made in USA — which delivers about 10 digital (U.S.) and 10 analog (Canadian) stations. And, we’ve been pretty happy with that.
Still, we have scores of TV shows and movies stored digitally. Although I can burn a DVD or copy the content we want to an iPod touch for playback on the big screen, neither of these methods is convenient let alone satisfying from a geek perspective.
Moreover, there’s a huge amount of either completely free, pay-to-play and advertising supported content out there. Manipulating this stuff into a DVD or touch compatible form is a major pain, and the results are often quite poor.
The right stuff
Enter our 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini, which recently ended a tour of duty serving piano and guitar lessons in the music room. With the following highly affordable adaptors and cabling, it’s now a fully functional home theater Mac that very ably delivers movies and TV from our iTunes, etc libraries, as well as Hulu and Boxee content:
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- • Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter (female) Cable, $9.25
— For current generation Mac minis• PTC Mini-DVI to HDMI Adapter for Mac, $9.36
— For previous generation Mac mini models• Apple Mini-VGA to TV S-Video & Composite, $19.00*
— For previous generation Mac minis• Belkin Audio Y Cable Splitter 1-Mini Plug/2-RCA Plugs (6ft), $5.01*
• S-Video Cable 6 ft. Gold Plated, $1.63*
* Items required for SDTV setup
The above items were sourced on Amazon.com, though you can likely find all of them locally, especially if there’s an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Reseller in your neighborhood.
For those of you with a standard definition TV (SDTV), you don’t have to use an S-video, a composite cable will suffice. However, the picture quality should be palpably better with an S-video connection.
Also, both HDTV and SDTV setups require an audio connection and the Belkin mini-to-RCA cable listed above will do the job quite nicely regardless of which type of TV you have.
Do you have a Mac mini HTPC rig? What’s in your setup?
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