Mac Mini Media Center

Last week I finally caved to peer pressure and got cable TV installed. Instead of actually watching any TV shows, I went right to work on getting the TV signal hooked up to my computer so that I could record and watch TV on it.

Unfortunately my computer is very loud and heats up my room whenever it's on, so I couldn't imagine leaving it on all the time in order to record TV shows. So I looked around for a small & quiet, yet still somewhat powerful computer. I decided to get one of the new Intel Mac Minis:

So far it has been pretty good. It has its pros:

• Small
• Quiet
• Intel Core Duo processor
• DVI & digital audio out

and cons:

• Weak integrated graphics
• No CD eject button
• Some of the hardware doesn't work under Windows
• No expansion capabilities (i.e. for a TV tuner)

Surprisingly, it was fairly easy to install Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 on it. I only had a couple of problems:

• I had to burn my own install DVD since Apple's Boot Camp software only likes XP Home & Professional
• I hit the infamous and deceiving "Setup cannot find the EULA" error message, which was caused by the large hard drive getting formatted incorrectly by Mac OS X, so I had to re-partition it by hand

For the TV tuner I got a Hauppauge Win-TV-PVR-USB2-MCE:

I thought this would be a good tuner (even though it's USB), but unfortunately I was disappointed. The video quality is noticeably blurry when compared to component output from the cable box. I haven't figured out yet whether it is the fault of the RF encoder on the cable box or the USB tuner, but it could probably be either one (or both).

The tuner quality was not supposed to be a problem in either case, since I was planning to grab the raw digital video directly off of the cable box using Firewire and Tim Moore's set-top box controller software (recommended by my friend Mike). Unfortunately that plan didn't work out so well either, because Comcast gave me the new cheapo Motorola DCT-3412 STB, instead of the good DCT-6412, which included an MPEG2 encoder and could output any channel over Firewire:

So I can only record analogue channels using the blurry tuner, although digital (and HD) channels should work fine over Firewire, once the kinks are all worked out.

Ultimately it didn't work out as well as I had hoped, but it should still be OK since I can always record analogue shows on the Comcast box and watch them there. Here's a picture of the final 'Mac Mini Media Center':

And here is a screenshot at 720p (linked to full version):