One of the things that makes the Intel-based Mac mini such an attractive media center is the slimmed-down desktop’s video output capabilities—just hook the DVI port up to a high-definition television set, and you can watch the high-def movies stored on your mini the way they were meant to be seen.
Would that it were that simple. Few HDTVs have DVI connections, so you have to find a way to connect your Mac to whatever port your television does offer (a High Definition Multimedia Interface port, more often than not). Then, there’s the matter of what to do if the native resolution on your HDTV isn’t one that Mac OS X offers. Some users wind up with a strip of unused pixels around the edge of the screen; others are treated to a picture that bleeds past the monitor’s visible edges. Adding to the confusion is that different HDTVs face different challenges—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
To bring a small amount of order to the chaos, we’re asking Macworld editors to share their experiences hooking up a Mac mini to an HDTV—what went right, what went wrong, and how they overcame whatever problems they faced. We’ll update this page periodically as we get the chance to test out more HDTV models.
And we want to hear about your experiences. If you’ve tried hooking up a Mac mini to an HDTV, just e-mail us a detailed account of what you did and whether you’re satisfied with your setup. We’ll include reader responses as part of our online Mac mini/HDTV guide.
Last updated: July 28, 2006
Panasonic TH-42PX60U 42-inch plasma TV: Christopher Breen
When I first looked at the Intel-based Mac mini as a media center, I did so with a standard definition CRT television. While it was possible to view DVDs—and, to a pretty marginal extent, the Mac’s desktop—on my Sony WEGA TV, it was time to see how the mini looked in Hi-Def.
I bought Panasonic’s TH-42PX60U 42-inch plasma TV based on reviews, recommendations from friends, and its price. The TV is equipped with multiple inputs—three composite, three S-Video, two component, and two HDMI.
The Mac mini includes a DVI video connector, and a DVI-to-VGA adapter comes in the box. To connect the mini to my CRT I’d used Apple’s DVI to Video Adapter, stringing an S-Vide cable between the adapter and my TV. With the plethora of higher-resolution inputs available on the plasma display, I knew I could do better.
I did so with a DVI-to-HDMI cable purchased from my local Radio Shack. The clerk initially directed me to Monster’s $100 3.3-foot Monster HDMI-to-DVI Cable. Put off by the cable’s high price I rooted around in the store’s home-grown cable section and unearthed the $25 Radio Shack 12-foot DHMI-DVI Cable. The Monster cable may have offered better-looking video but I wasn’t willing to spend an extra $75 to find out.
I connected the mini to my TV with this cable, chose the HDMI 1 input, and fired up the Mac. The gray screen and Apple logo appeared in glorious widescreen.
Checking the Displays system preference on my mini, the picture automatically resolved to 1,600-by-900 pixels at 60Hertz. I tried some greater and lesser resolutions—producing text that was either too hard to read or too bloated–and decided that the Mac had made the correct choice right out of the box.
Clicking the preference’s Color tab revealed a Panasonic TV profile automatically created by the Mac. I peered into the Options tab and found an Overscan option. Switching it on caused the picture to bleed beyond the edges of the display—the bottom portion of the menubar and its commands were still accessible but much of the text was cut off. Switching Overscan off revealed the entire desktop with an inch or so of black space around the edges. I decided to go with overscanning on, figuring that I could see enough of the commands to navigate around the Mac while also enjoying the merits of full-screen playback for movies, slideshows, and the like.
I wasn’t entirely pleased with the color profile. Metal windows displayed a distinctive pink cast and everything was a little too bright. The TV was set to its Standard display profile (rather than the Vivid profile which tends to be too bright) so I resolved to create a more pleasing color profile on the mini.
Clicking the Calibrate button within Displays’ Color tab I ran through the Display Calibrator Assistant and played with the settings. In the Select a Target Gamma portion of the Assistant I tried the 2.2 Television Gamma setting but found it a little too dark. Instead, the key to my Big Screen satisfaction was a setting in the Select a Target White Point area.
That’s where I chose the 9300 setting rather than the default Native setting. The 9300 setting is described as “Cool blueish white—standard for most displays and televisions.” On a computer monitor this setting turns the display far too blue but on the TV is was perfect. The pink cast vanished and everything else on screen became richer without adopting a too-blue demeanor. Clicking through the Assistant’s Continue buttons I finally saved the profile.
Before completing the setup I took note of this warning in the TV manual:
Do not display a still picture for a long time. This causes the image to remain on the plasma screen (“after image”). This is not considered a malfunction and is not covered by the warranty.
The manual helpfully lists Typical Still Images; among them was Computer Image. With that in mind I dashed to the mini’s Desktop & Screensaver system preference and configured the screen saver to kick in after 5 minutes of inactivity. I also asked the Energy Saver system preference to put the display to sleep after an inactive 15 minutes.
The verdict: So, is it worth connecting your Mac to an HDTV? Given that it’s as easy as plunking down a couple of dozen bucks for a DVI-to-HDMI cable and switching on the Mac and TV, absolutely. It’s cool enough that you can watch HBO’s Deadwood and Rome in high resolution. It’s cooler still that with the push of a button that same television becomes a gorgeous 42-inch monitor.
[ Senior Editor Christopher Breen is the author of The iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press, 2005). ]
Pioneer SD-582HD5 rear-projection TV: Rob Griffiths
As part of the detailed look at the Mac mini Core Duo I put together earlier this year, I hooked up the desktop to my high-definition TV. This proved to be more of challenge for me than it might normally be for other users—you see, I’ve got a Pioneer SD-582HD5, a five-year-old three-tube CRT rear projector. The only way to connect it to a Mac mini is via an RGB cable.
Only one problem with that: the television conveys absolutely no information about what resolutions it supports via the RGB cable. So when I fired up the mini after hooking it up to the TV, all I had to show for my effort was a completely scrambled image.
After way too many hours on Google, talking with friends, and experimenting with more hardware in the living room than I care to think about, I managed to get it working to the limits of my television’s capabilities. Here’s what I did:
First, I made sure I had the following handy: The mini (obviously); a keyboard, monitor, and mouse I could move into the TV room (I found I needed the monitor to join our wireless network—your setup could be different from mine); a second Mac, preferably a laptop Mac of some sort; network connectivity for both Macs; and a male-to-male RGB cable.
On the mini, I installed DisplayConfigX. (Note that you’ll need the $12 registered version in order for this hint to work. You’ll have to decide if the price is worth the result, but in my case, it clearly was—HD video on the big screen looks great.) This program is the key to success for the whole venture; without it, I’d still be looking at nothing but an out-of-scan-range image.
On the mini, I opened the Sharing System Preferences panel, and made sure Remote Login was checked. Then, I enabled Apple Remote Desktop and clicked the Access Privileges button. On the next screen, I checked the box that reads “VNC viewers may control screen with password,” and entered a password. I checked the box next to my user name in the top left portion of the window; then I clicked OK. This enabled remote control of the mini from the other Mac. To actually control the mini, I installed Chicken of the VNC (CotVNC) on the PowerBook.
Before I unplugged everything to move it to the TV room, I tested the connectivity between the PowerBook and the mini. On the PowerBook, I launched CotVNC and entered the IP address and password for the mini. If you’re following along at home, you should be greeted with the mini’s screen on your PowerBook. Next, I opened the Displays System Preferences panel, and set the resolution of the mini to 800X600. This will simply make the VNC connection faster. I shut everything down, and moved the whole setup to the TV room, including the PowerBook.
Now it’s time for the actual connection and configuration. Because of the AirPort connectivity issue at startup mentioned above, I chose to boot once with the monitor attached, get connected to AirPort, and then sleep the system. If your mini connects automatically, you can skip all that.
Making sure my television was turned off, I connected the RGB cable between the mini and the television. On our set, this is a switchable input; there’s a toggle next to the RGB port that I had to flip over to activate the connection.
From the PowerBook, I launched CotVNC and connected to the mini. If you’re doing this yourself, you should now see the 800×600 screen that was set up earlier. From here on, I executed all listed commands on the mini via CotVNC, unless specified otherwise.
I opened Displays in System Preferences looked at the resolutions listed. Now you need to find out what resolutions your HDTV supports. Hopefully this information is in your manual, but if it’s not, searching Google with the model number of your set and available resolutions should produce some meaningful matches. In my case, our Pioneer supports 480i, 480p, and 1080i.
A brief aside on the “i” and “p” settings for the above resolutions. The “i” means interlaced, which means the TV draws every other line on one pass, then goes back on pass two and fills in the missing lines. The “p” means progressive, which draws every line in order. When used for displaying a computer screen, interlaced pictures are horrendously flickery, but when playing video back, you won’t notice the interlacing. So for my TV, a 1080i signal would give me the best HD playback, with a usable but flickery computer screen. 480p, on the other hand, would make a beautifully stable, but quite small, computer screen, and lowered quality for HD video. Since I mainly wanted the mini to play back HD clips, I needed to find a way to send a 1080i signal from the mini.
Enter DisplayConfigX. This program lets you tell the Mac to send any sort of video signal you desire to the attached monitor. It does this by installing customized resolution settings directly into the Displays preferences panel, through a special display Overrides directory. When you register, you can create your own settings from scratch, as well as use some predefined higher-quality settings that might work right out of the box. As noted earlier, you’ll need the registered version to make this tip work.
I clicked on the Resolutions tab followed by the plus (+) sign at the lower left to add a new resolution. In the new window that opened, I selected a resolution that matches one my HDTV offers—HDTV 1080i. Clicking the Done button, I saw the new resolution at the bottom of the list. This process can be repeated for any other resolutions your television offers. (I added “SDTV-480p” and “NTSC-480i” to the list.) You can also, if you wish, uncheck any entries in the Resolutions tab that your TV does not offer; this will deactivate those resolutions. I suggest leaving 800×600, or whatever resolution you were currently using, in the list.
Now I clicked on the Install tab, then clicked the Install button. This copied my newly-defined resolutions into the Displays Preferences Panel. At this point, take note of the Uninstall button, and the directions underneath, just in case things go horribly wrong.
To see the new values in the Displays panel, I restarted the mini and then reconnected via CotVNC on the PowerBook and opened the Displays panel.
I turned on my HDTV. (If your experience is like mine, there probably won’t be a picture yet, just distortion patterns.) On the PowerBook, I selected one of the HD resolutions I just installed. My HDTV switched over to the new resolution, giving me a picture—and most importantly, the ability to click the confirmation button to retain the new settings. If you’re using a high resolution such as 1080i, you may find (as I did) that CotVNC can’t refresh quickly enough to show the confirmation button, hence the need to use the mini’s mouse to confirm via the HDTV image.
At this point, I discovered I couldn’t see all of the menubar and Dock or the sides of the screen. This is due to something called overscan, wherein the TV draws those images off the top and bottom of the display. To fix the problem, I re-launched DisplayConfigX and selected the resolution I was using (again, 1080i) from the Resolutions tab. Then I clicked the plus sign again. This brought up the New Resolution screen, with the selected values already completed. I clicked the pop-up at the top of the window, and changed it to Timing; that makes every field on the screen editable. I changed the Front porch (top or left border) and Back porch (bottom or right border) settings for the Vertical and/or Horizontal columns. To make the menubar and Dock visible, for instance, you need to increase the Front and Back Porch values in the Vertical column. In doing this, you also need to change the Active entry, such that the figure in Total doesn’t change. Total is simply Active + Front Porch + Sync + Back Porch. I’ll use my settings as an example, and hopefully that will make this bit clearer.
Here are the default settings for 1080i in DisplayConfigX:
When I worked on my overscan settings, after a few iterations (more on that below), here is what I came out with:
As you can see, I had to move the Front Porch from 24 to 62, and the Back Porch from 20 to 122. Since these values increased by a total of 140, that amount had to come out of Active, dropping it from 1080 to 940. These are large overscan values, and there’s apparently a service mode hack for my Pioneer that will reduce the overscan. I have not yet tried this, but if I can lower the overscan, I can reduce the porch sizes, giving back more resolution for the picture itself.
How do you find your ideal porch values? Lots of testing and rebooting, in my case. (You can try to use the Test Screen tab in DisplayConfigX to measure how many lines are missing, but I found it too hard to read on the 1080i screen.) The basic process is: duplicate the basic setup, and tweak the porch values a bit. Click OK to add the resolution, then click the Install tab and then the Install button to put the new resolution in the system. Reboot the mini to enable the new resolution, open the Displays System Preferences panel, and select the new resolution.
Once I did all that, I tested the Dock and menubar to see how much of them were visible. Since I missed badly the first time, I returned to DisplayConfigX and repeated the process—duplicating the resolution I just tested, increasing the porch values again (remembering to decrease the Active value by the same amount), saving the resolution, installing the resolution, rebooting, selecting the resolution, and testing. I did three iterations of this before I got the settings basically correct for my set.
Once you’ve got the Dock and the menubar, you’re done. You can try playing some HD videos, and they should look great. Of course, if you haven’t bought a “minijack to Toslink” audio cable, you’ll be listening to the crummy Intel mini’s speaker, but you’re on your own for that one.
If you ever move the mini to another monitor, you (probably) don’t need to worry about losing your display settings. DisplayConfigX stores your custom settings as the values for an unknown monitor. I moved the mini back and forth several times, and never lost my custom setups. You could, however, lose your settings if you connect another unknown monitor, as it seems that OS X keeps only one set of settings for any unknown monitor.
The verdict: Hooking up the mini to an older HDTV set is a bit of a challenge; newer sets don’t pose the same sorts of obstacles. However, if you want to watch HD content on a big screen, it’s worth the effort—Apple’s movie trailers never looked so good!
[ Senior Editor Rob Griffiths runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site. ]