How will you connect your Display?
If you are lucky enough to have a TV that supports DVI, you can go right out of the Mac Mini for the highest quality digital video. Others like me actually, will have to convert from DVI to Component and need to think about how to best accomplish this task. My searching has led me to several products you might find helpful…
Apple offers an adapter which will convert DVI to S-Video or Composite, but people are saying it might not have great quality… I don’t know why, just passing along the conversational info at this point. Until we are able to test things there’s no way to know.
A DVI to Component Adapter from Amazon currently sells for about $50, though you will find very similar looking (if not the same hardware) from Cyberguys and is $10 less. ATI also sells a very similar device for the same price as Cyberguys. Again, no way to know whether these will or won’t work, but they seem to be relatively inexpensive ways to get video from your Mac Mini source to your TV or Projector.
Please let us know if you’ve been found other ways to handle the video portion of the Mac Mini Home Theater.
– Jonathan Greene
January 17th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
DVI of course, Jon
January 17th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
Like you, I am considering a mac mini for my htpc. I already have a shuttle xpc, and was considering another, but am seriously weighing up the mac mini. Dont suppose anyone knows if it will be compatible with my current wireless network, be able to connect to my standard PCs, and, most importantly, read from my 250 Buffalo NAS server?
January 18th, 2005 at 12:01 am
I think it should work just fine. If you add the wireless, it will be 802.11G (Airport Extreme) which can work with 802.11b – what I assume you have.
I use a Ximeta NAS at home and it works fine across the network, you can either mount it directly or share via another system. In your case with the Mini, you’d probably directly mount it and share through to other machines…
I am not sure what the limitations are for multiple machines of different types doing simultaneous writing – the Ximeta can only have one at a time, but all can read.
As far as connecting to PCs… that is supported. You need to activate sharing and Macs can connect to PCs through smb:// or even FTP. You can also use DAVE (3rd party) which will give you more features if you need them.
August 9th, 2005 at 2:54 am
I just tried out the DVI to S-Video adapter Apple sells and I am not that satisfied, the picture shakes to the sides at the top
… Anybody else who tried the adapter?