{"id":11912,"date":"2010-05-04T13:37:33","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T20:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=11912"},"modified":"2010-05-04T13:37:33","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T20:37:33","slug":"hdmi-and-me-a-mac-mini-turns-out-to-be-the-ideal-tv-set-top-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/11912\/hdmi-and-me-a-mac-mini-turns-out-to-be-the-ideal-tv-set-top-box\/","title":{"rendered":"HDMI and me: A Mac mini turns out to be the ideal TV set-top box"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> and Glee<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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. Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,212,19],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-casual-friday","7":"category-flourishing","8":"category-technology","10":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":15596,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15596\/how-to-solve-the-video-multiplexing-problem-you-didnt-know-you-had\/","url_meta":{"origin":11912,"position":0},"title":"How to solve the video multiplexing problem you didn’t know you had.","author":"Greg Swann","date":"January 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I love this news story, an exposition of the Supreme Court exposing its irrelevance:In an entertaining hour-long episode, Supreme Court justices on Tuesday considered the government's power to regulate expletives and nudity on the airwaves.Why is this amusing to me? Because along with many other twentieth-century electromagnetic phenomena, broadcast television\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flourishing"","block_context":{"text":"Flourishing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/flourishing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2561,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/2561\/no-joy-in-bloodville\/","url_meta":{"origin":11912,"position":1},"title":"No joy in Bloodville…","author":"Odysseus","date":"February 3, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The power supply on my Mac has bee acting flaky for weeks. Last night it finally died the true death, so I have to take it to the Apple Store to get it swapped out. So there are three special prizes in my CrackerJack box:No MacWindows insteadA delay in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Real Estate"","block_context":{"text":"Real Estate","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/real-estate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1957,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1957\/forward-into-the-past-now-you-can-upgrade-vista-to-xp\/","url_meta":{"origin":11912,"position":2},"title":"Forward into the past: Now you can upgrade Vista to XP","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 22, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"It's churlish of me to chortle, so I'll begin by saying that all Power PC (i.e, not Intel-based) Macintoshes running all versions of OSX through Tiger have the ability to launch OS9 in an emulator, running any OS9 compatible software side-by-side with OSX. I have a ton of software that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14668,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/14668\/peering-into-apples-new-icloud-service-to-be-rolled-out-tomorrow-to-see-how-much-closer-we-might-get-to-virtuoso-virtuality\/","url_meta":{"origin":11912,"position":3},"title":"Peering into Apple’s new iCloud service, to be rolled out tomorrow, to see how much closer we might get to virtuoso virtuality.","author":"Greg Swann","date":"June 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Steve Jobs is going to do the keynote presentation at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference tomorrow. Surely part of his motivation is to show Apple's shareholders that he is still in charge. But Jobs wouldn't be doing this if Apple didn't have some cool new toys to show off. Systems\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flourishing"","block_context":{"text":"Flourishing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/flourishing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13146,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/13146\/dear-steve-jobs-stop-jerking-everyone-around-with-a-goofy-set-top-box-give-us-a-real-apple-tv-a-tv-engineered-by-apple\/","url_meta":{"origin":11912,"position":4},"title":"Dear Steve Jobs: Stop jerking everyone around with a goofy set-top box. Give us a real Apple TV — a TV engineered by Apple.","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"iOS 4 can go there, no doubt. And the lame-ass \"web-enabled\" HD-TVs shipping now are no competition for what Apple can do. The iPad may be the actual future of video content, but there will be room in the home for big screens for a long time. An Apple TV\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flourishing"","block_context":{"text":"Flourishing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/flourishing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1303,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1303\/better-faster-and-cheaper-in-time-and-effort-software-for-managing-the-weblogging-workflow\/","url_meta":{"origin":11912,"position":5},"title":"Better, faster and cheaper in time and effort: Software for managing the weblogging workflow","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 15, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Robbie Paplin has a new weblog and he writes there and at Rain City Guide about the Deep Geek thinking underlying his decision-making process in selecting his new blogging platform. Very interesting reading. I spent my junk time yesterday doing fussy CSS tweaks on Teri Lussier's weblog, TheBrickRanch.com. This is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11913,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11912\/revisions\/11913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}