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.
Bryan McDonald says:
Very cool. We are doing the same thing in our house. We downsized our cable to basic and hooked up an old laptop to our TV. We haven’t missed any shows we wanted to watch. Next thing for me to do is download Boxee and install it on the laptop.
May 4, 2010 — 5:27 pm
Greg Swann says:
The full Rowmote app for the iPhone gives you a full virtual Apple remote plus a trackpad and a keyboard. Even though Netflix runs out of Safari, I was able to control it fully from my iPhone.
Thanks for the tip on Boxee. I just signed up for an account.
May 5, 2010 — 7:26 am
Cristofer Gross says:
Same here. Use a MacBookPro. PBS has a great library system (Newshour’s daily shows are available sometimes earlier than they appear on the West Coast.) There are commercials when watching thru Hulu or Comedy Central, etc., but they are less than 30 seconds as opposed to four or five minutes. And the quality of streaming video is generally pretty good. Occasionally some syncing problems, but it’s very rare. As I understand it, there are now televisions that incorporate the hardware/software to get wireless without the need for an outside box, and that those are starting to be a market factor.
May 6, 2010 — 6:04 am
Greg Swann says:
> As I understand it, there are now televisions that incorporate the hardware/software to get wireless without the need for an outside box, and that those are starting to be a market factor.
Excellent. All of this is very cool, especially using my iPhone as the remote control.
May 6, 2010 — 7:16 am
Paul Trippett says:
I have been using my MacBook Pro and Android Phone in a similar matter for a few months now and it works great, works better than any off the shelf solution for sure.
May 8, 2010 — 8:09 pm