A few months ago I was looking at my DirecTV bill. I have it set to auto-pay and, I have to admit, this makes me really lazy about checking it. This is why I was surprised to note that the bill was for $65. A quick look through prior bills showed that they too were all in the $65 neighborhood (sometimes as high as $75 if we'd ordered a pay-per-view movie or two).
"$800 dollars a year?! Holy crap! That's as much as I pay for auto insurance! And that doesn't even count the electricity to keep the TiVo running 24/7*! For what?!"
Digging into what we're paying for I find ~250 channels, 95% of which we don't watch and will never watch. We pay $1 per channel for East Coast feeds of the local affiliates. We have a half dozen sports channels. There's an entire collection of "MTV" variants that we will never, ever watch. There are the Spanish channels. There's the ~100 "radio" stations. There's a few shopping channels. There's a lot of content we're paying to receive that we don't actually want. There's no way for me to tell DirecTV "I want these ten channels and will pay you $2 a month for each one." To make things worse, this is all for "standard definition" (SD) content. If I want my HDTV to actually display things at its full potential I'll need to get a new digital video recorder (DVR) that is not TiVo (I am rather loyal to TiVo - they make a good product), I'll have to pay $6 a month more for the "DVR service" (when I bought my current TiVo DirecTV had a "lifetime subscription" option that got me out of this monthly fee). I'll also have to pay another $10 a month for HD signal. That puts us at $81 a month, or just shy of $1000 a year. For a bunch of channels we don't watch. AND I'd have to pay $199 for the HD DVR receiver.
So what's this mean? It means that DirecTV has pushed me to a harder-to-set-up but more-geek-happy solution. They've pushed me to a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Why? Because I can pick up a refurb 2009 Mac Mini for $429 and can connect it to my receiver and TV. I can 100% legally watch the content I want over the Internet. Sites like Hulu provide free (though ad supported) recent episodes of most programs I want to watch. What they don't provide I can get from Amazon or iTunes for ~$1.50 per episode. Toss in a $10 a month Netflix account and (nearly) all our viewing needs are taken care of. All that's left is a high gain antenna for local digital channels (for those "channel surfing" evenings) and we're all set. The system will pay for itself after six months.
Enough of the background. What are the moving parts? What problems did I have to solve?
Hardware
- Refurb Apple Mac Mini 2009 (1GB RAM upgraded to 3GB, 2.0GHz multi-core CPU, NVIDIA GForce 9400M)
- HP MediaSmart SL4282N 42" tv (1080p, plus other stuff I don't use or care about)
- Pioneer VSX-47TX receiver
- Mini-DVI → DVI → HDMI adapters
- Mini-optical-audio → Optical-audio adapter
The TV and reveiver were gizmos I already had on hand. The Mac Mini is new. The mini-DVI → DVI adapter came with the Mini. The DVI → HDMI and the mini-optical → optical adapters came from Amazon.
Software
In addition to what came on the Mac (Mac OS X 10.6.2 or "Snow Leopard," Safari, iTunes, etc) I needed these various packages:
- Plex Media Center - A nice way of playing media on the screen. It has a large number of "applications" that allow an integrated interface to viewing various free online content (The Onion, The Daily Show, South Park, The Colbert Report, CNN, etc) as well as locally stored media. It's a far cry from TiVo as far as ease-of-use, but with a little practice it provides a nice experience.
- Perian - the "swiss-army knife for Quicktime." This allows Quicktime to work with all the media types that, for some reason, Apple hasn't bothered to make work out of the box. AVI? Really?
- Candleair - an alternative driver for the Apple Remote. It works around issues that people have found using Plex, the Apple Remote, and Mac OS X 10.6.*.
- Black Light - Does many things, but is useful here specifically for the HDTV luminance issues sometimes seen when sending a DVI signal through an HDMI adapter and ending up with overly dark and saturated colors. Basically Black Light adjusts the image for the 16–235 luminance range that is evidently preferred by many HDTV displays.
- SwitchResX - Resolution software. See below.
For the most part everything Just Worked out of the box. Within minutes of unwrapping the Mac Mini it was displaying a desktop on the HDTV and software was being installed. What took the most time to wrestle with was resolution. Apple and HP both failed on making this easy or accessible. Mac OS X 10.6 nicely detects that it's talking to an HDMI device and pre-selects a "HDTV" resolution (1920 x 1080). Unfortunately this resolution doesn't easily map to a large number of HDTV displays and the user is left with a Over-scan problem (a certain number of pixels are off the visible edge of the display causing things like menu bars to be lost) or an Under-scan problem (there is a thick black border surrounding the entire desktop and causing an inch or two of your expensive viewable real estate to go unused).
Apple's answer to this (other than an "Over-scan" checkbox under Display → Options to toggle from Too Big to Too Small) is to say
If the Mac OS X menu bar is off the edge of the television screen, try adjusting the television's controls to center and size the desktop within the borders of the screen.
If the television's built-in adjustments do not suffice and you are using a DVI or HDMI connection, try the following steps. (An s-video or composite connection will disable overscan by default.)
[...]
This will reduce the size of the video output from the Mac mini so that there will be some empty space around the edges. Once this option has been set, try again with the TV's built-in controls to size and center the desktop within the borders of the television screen.
HP's advice on the matter (page 118):
If the image is from a PC DVI or HDMI connector, you may experience over-scanning or under-scanning, where the image is larger or smaller than the screen. Consult your PC manufacturer display drivers about how to resize the image settings, if they are available.
In other words Apple threw their hands up and said "not our problem. Fix it on the display." HP threw their hands up and said "not our problem. Fix it on the PC." Apple is (in my opinion) more right than HP, but both are ducking the issue. Apple should make tools available to the user that help to work around the problem and HP should have a "1:1 pixel mapping" or a "scale image" feature (which many, many other HDTVs do in fact have).
I used the well-made and poorly documented software SwitchResX (note that this program is shareware and costs $20 - there's a free resolution switching program out there, but it felt much less well put together) to fix the resolution problem. This software gives you the ability to clumsily poke around with numbers and make screen resolutions that won't work on your display. Perseverence will pay off when you find pages with alternate documentation. Pages like this one. I was able to create a custom resolution for the H P MediaSmart 42" SL4282N TV. The magic incantation is:
Creating this custom resolution and restarting the Mini magically allowed the entire desktop to fill the HDTV screen. It's a little disconcerting to lose more than a hundred side-to-side pixels and seventy vertical scan lines of resolution, but in the big scheme of things it's un-noticable. Fixing the resolution problem was many hours more of pain than it should have been. Apple and HP both get a "D" on this one.
I have not yet programmed the Harmony remote to understand Plex and this configuration. I'll get to that though. Also on the horizon is a slim-line bluetooth keyboard and touchpad for use when the Mini wants to be an actual computer instead of a fancy TiVo.
* The TiVo, a 2000 vintage DirecTivo ingrated unit, uses 60W of power continuously. That's 1.4kW hours per day, 525.6kWh per year. I live off the electric grid and get my electrivity via a combination of solar panels and diesel generator. If we ignore the cost of solar equipment and ONLY measure out electricity costs based on what we pay annually for diesel vs our daily kWh consumption, we end up with ~¢36/kWh. That means the TiVo costs ~$189 a year in power/diesel. The Mac Mini seems to be using ~20W while in use (and ~3W while in sleep mode). For the sake of easy comparisons I'll pretend it's a constant 20W. That's ~$63/yr in power/diesel, an annual savings of ~$126. Sweet!
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