There’s always something to howl about.

HDMI and me: A Mac mini turns out to be the ideal TV set-top box

I’ve known this was doable for quite a while, but last Friday I finally got around to doing it: I took an old Mac mini we had lying around, remapped it to OS-X Snow Leopard and then set it up as an HDMI set-top box for our very small big-screen TV.

Why? Because I hate TV — the censorship, the editing for content and for image size and especially the commercials. Lately, most of our TV viewing time has been either movies on-demand from Cox Cable or DVDs from Netflix. We’ve both watched Netflix on-demand, streaming movies to our desktop or laptop computers, so going the HDMI route was not a long leap.

What do we get for our trouble? The cabling is kind of a kludge, and for now I’m using a wireless keyboard and mouse to drive the Mac mini. But shortly I’ll use Rowmote on my iPhone to control the computer, connecting via Bluetooth. But by using the Mac mini as a de facto set-top box, we gain access to Netflix’ library of on-demand movies, along with the on-demand services available from shows like South Park and Glee.

That is: We get to watch only what we want to watch, only when we want to watch it. We can stop and start at will, as calls from clients and calls of nature demand. And we suffer neither censorship, editing or commercials.

The cost? I bought pricey cabling from the Apple Store, but you can do this for twenty or thirty bucks. And the Netflix subscription? Ten bucks a month, both for the DVD ping-pong and for unlimited on-demand streaming. The video quality is not Blue-Ray perfect, but it ain’t bad for ten bucks.

Plus which, we have a Macintosh driving our TV. If I need to look at an email or a web site, I’m there. If I want to play games from the sofa, I’m there. If I want to kill spam comments on BloodhoundBlog — Zap!

And think of this: Really good big-screen TVs are selling for $650. Mac minis cost nothing, and used Macs or cheapo Windoze boxes cost even less. In the long run, low-priced big-screen flat-panel TV monitors, driven by HDMI from cheap computers, are going to replace every painting and photograph in your home. This — true on-demand television with no commercials — is just the beginning.