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Anyone have any luck using a Mac as a HTPC? Here's is the situation. I've got a C2D Macbook hooked up to my Mitsubishi WD-52628 52" DLP HDTV. It goes mini-DVI to DVI to HDMI on the back of the TV. Right now I have the displays set to mirroring. The TV is 1080p, but supposedly it doesn't accept a 1080p input. The back of the TV says to set it to 1280x720 @ 60Hz. So I do it like that and the screen is pretty goddamn small. I try to use the TV to auto-position to no avail. So a goon who owns the same exact TV says this 1 input will accept 1080p, but it just bitches about it and to click through the errors to ignore them. So I did that and he's right. Now the problem is that the Macbook recognizes the monitor, but the TV displays it kind of lovely. When I compensate for overscan, the picture is too narrow and too tall, so I lose the Apple menu bar up top as well as some of the bottom while having black bars on the left and right. In addition, the text looks kind of lovely, too. When I turn off overscan compensation, text is a lot cleaner, I see the whole screen, but I have black bars on all sides. I've messed around with SwitchResX and it doesn't seem to play well with my monitor. I tried to create 1 custom resolution and it freaked my TV the gently caress out. Any ideas?
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Mar 28, 2007 16:33
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So I'm thinking of canceling TV and using a media server streaming to 2 different HDTVs instead. - How likely am I to be able to stream 1080p content via 802.11g? I'd like to keep the network equipment (Linksys WRT54G w/ Tomato) I have now, but if I have to upgrade to 802.11n I guess I would. If I have to upgrade to an 802.11n router, what is recommended in regards to supporting awesome third party firmware like Tomato? As for wired ethernet, it is possible, but I'd prefer not to as I'd have to drag a cable across the office floor to the wall jack. - I've got a P4 2.4 GHz w/ hyper-threading and 2GB of RAM. An old machine, probably 5 years old (doesn't even have PCI Express slots to give you an idea). Could this box act as a media server streaming content, or is it too old? - I'm going to need some device to connect via HDMI to the TVs to catch the content and stream it. What devices are recommended? As I mentioned earlier, these devices need to be able to stream 1080p content via HDMI. I have a wired connection, so wireless isn't necessary. They need to support as many codecs as possible, because my old machine probably won't be able to transcode on-the-fly. - It would be really nice if those devices could also do stuff like use my Netflix account and stream, use Hulu, etc etc. - Another thing I'm considering is getting an OTA antenna and hooking that up to a tuner in the PC. I'd obviously be able to watch TV on the computer itself, but what about streaming TV and guide data out?
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Jul 30, 2009 15:07
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So I did a little more thinking about a possible setup: Old rear end Windows machine auto-downloads content onto a mapped drive that is in a 1TB Time Capsule. HT media tanks for each TV to stream the 1080p content over the network via 1GB or 100MB hard-wired ethernet. A few questions about this: 1) Can Windows use the Time Capsule HDD as a mapped network drive using NFS? Just want to verify that I can use it in a non-OS X environment. 2) Will I be able to stream 1080P content from the Time Capsule while backing up to it? It says it is a "server-grade HDD", but doesn't specific the RPM or anything else for that matter. 3) Is the USB port expandable, I.E could I plug in a USB hub and use 2 external HDDs and a printer? 4) Are there other router/NAS devices instead of the Time Capsule that I can have my Time Machine back up to over the wifi network? 5) Is 100MB wired ethernet good enough for 1080p streaming? 6) What are some good ways to auto-check for new content? A friend of mine recommended sabnzbd to auto-check an RSS feed and download accordingly. 7) What media tanks are recommended? The Popcorn Hour seems nice, but for 2 of them that's $600+. I know it is hugely expandable, but all I need is 1080p content playback via HDMI of any codec I can throw at it. I'd like to do Netflix streaming, Hulu, etc as well, but it isn't as important. Zombie Dictator fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jul 30, 2009 |
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Jul 30, 2009 21:19
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