Back in the spring I bought myself a refurbished Mac Mini from the online Apple Store. It's a great little machine with a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo, a couple of gigs of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. I put together an external hard drive with a 500GB Hitachi drive and a MacAlly case to plug into the Mini's FireWire port. I've used it since then as my main machine...until last week.
I watch a fair amount of video on it, like YouTube or other goodies I've downloaded. So I got to thinking that it couldn't be too hard to hook this computer up to our 42" Samsung plasma TV in the living room. So I did! It was really quite simple. I just needed a DVI-HDMI adapter and HDMI cable to get the video into the TV, and an audio cable with a 1/8" stereo plug on one end and dual RCA on the other to take the audio to the TV. The Mini, which is running MacOS 10.5.8 (Leopard), required no tweaking and treated the Samsung as just another monitor.
I recently discovered the joys of Miro, an application that can make use of RSS feeds of shows to automatically download new episodes of almost anything. It's available at getmiro.com. Using a list from ezrss.it I was able to add shows like NCIS, Mythbusters and V. I even have a feed of classic cartoons for the kids. Of course it can also get online-only things like shows from Revision3 such as Techzilla. There's also hundreds of feeds to access at miroguide.com. Much of it is in HD even!
One can watch videos in Miro, but most of the time I just use FrontRow, an app that comes with Leopard. It makes for a nice full-screen menu system that gives you access to all the content on your Mac. I've even used it to watch DVDs I've ripped to the drive and I've been downloading Australian V8 Supercar races to watch since Speed Channel no longer carries those. Carla has also enjoyed being able to use iTunes on the Mini to play her music through the stereo (which is hooked to the TV of course).
My main goal here is to try to get away from satellite TV subscriptions, which keep going up in price but which don't really cater to our families viewing habits. For the most part we don't watch regular network TV. We despise so-called reality shows. For me sometime like Survivorman is what reality TV should be, not Survivor. If I can get what I want online, why should I pay BellTV? So far we're still subscribing but hopefully not for long. Our internet access is only a 1Mb satellite connection which seems to work fairly well so far, but it's kept pretty busy downloading our shows. Hopefully someday something better will come along but for now it's this or dialup!
Now off to watch some quality TV on the Mini! The kids can't wait for Alf to finish downloading!
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