Ugh… »
Media-Centric
Quickly posting from work before I head home…
I’m looking into getting a media center station set up in our apartment, built around a 32″ LCD HDTV, a Mac Mini, and an Airport Extreme network (plus the requisite gaming console(s) arrayed around the bottom of the thing), and have a question or two for the readership at Myst Blogs:
I know the Mini doesn’t support HDMI or component out, unlike its little brother in media center-related crime, the AppleTV. As such, I’d need to hook the system up to the TV via a DVI-to-HDMI connection (there’s no DVI-in on the TV we’re looking at) in order to make it work. My question is: I know HDMI is designed to carry video and audio signals, so would I be able to properly hook up the Mini through HDMI and still get sound through a secondary input, or am I out of luck? I realize this may be something that’s fairly TV-specific, but having a starting point for interrogating the folks at Costco would be nice ;).
I wish I could set up an AppleTV, because it’s a bit less network-intensive, and would likely integrate well into any sort of rumored movie rental service from iTunes, but it’s just not quite what I need on the hardware side; I don’t want to have to buy a DVD player to put under the AppleTV, and a Mini comes with that plus a virtually identical version of Front Row and an Apple Remote, plus a decent hard drive for media mirroring and easier-to-implement support for extended codec playback utilities like Perian (I know you can install Perian on the AppleTV, it’s just a pain in the ass ;)).
Hopefully MacWorld won’t see the discontinuation of the Mini, or will see an AppleTV with a DVD player built-in (I’ll accept the techie solution to installing Perian if I could just have an optical drive!). If AppleTV gets exclusive access to any mystical rental service (which I doubt), I’ll be in an even deeper quandary, but for now, I just want to know if I can jack in a Mac Mini without losing audio or having to buy external speakers for my unit.
Anyone?