My PC free obsession has made it into the living room. A while back I decided I wanted to hook a computer up to my TV. I started out with a Video iPod and an Apple iPod AV Cable I got from the Apple Store. This works great, my only complaint is that it takes so much time to convert the videos into m4v files and sometimes weird things would happen, like the sound track would become increasingly out of sync with the video towards the end of the file, or the sound doesn’t work at all.
The next incarnation was the Apple DVI to Video Adapter that allowed me to plug my MacBook Pro directly into the TV. This worked great and it was cool to be able use my apple remote for something. I used the iPod cable to get the audio so I didn’t have to buy or find a 1/4″ phono to rca cable. That worked good, but I’m addicted to the computer and sometimes I want to be able to watch TV and use my computer at the same time.
After that I got a beater x86 pc with the idea of installing MythTV. I got the media browser to work kind of, once. The idea was that I could have MythTV’s backend on the linux box and use the front end on my laptop. I couldn’t ever really get the codecs to work correctly. The whole idea of MythTV’s server/client model is that you are accessing videos off a shared network drive, which I can already do on my Mac and use whatever I want to access any type of file. I don’t have a TV tuner yet, so I can’t speak to it’s Tivo-esque abilities.
After screwing around with all of this I thought I should just run this off of a Mac. There just happened to be a pile of G4 towers gathering dust at work, so I got permission to snag one and took it home. It ended up being a G4 1.4Ghz PowerPC with 1.56GB of RAM.
I put a couple of 80GB hard drives in and a 20GB for the OS, which is Tiger. I picked up wireless card, a Radeon 9200 which came with an S-Video to RCA adapter, a cheap wireless mouse/keyboard and I was good to go. I’m using Chicken of the VNC for “remote control” – it’s a little slow while I’m downloading torrents, but works well enough.
For playing files I’m using DivX Player, RealPlayer, VLC and QuickTime. There is also a pack of OS X video codecs for QuickTime I download form Twenty08. I access Video Podcasts, YouTube, Google Videos and Yahoo videos with Miro. I’m using iTunes for music and a couple of audio podcasts I listen too.
For torrents I’m using BitRocket. I’m not 100% happy with it, the linux torrent client I was using choked my cable modem connection to the point of non-use for any other computer on the network. BitRocket on the other hand seems slow and unable to find seeds with over a dozen downloads going. I haven’t tried any alternatives, for all I know it’s the best choice on OS X. As soon as few more things finish downloading I’m going to see what else is out there.
I’m currently trying to get FrontRow working, waiting for some extra dough to get a TV tuner device of some sort and will be trying out BitTorrent clients so check back for more posts on my media Mac.
Tags: Media