I thought I’d share my recent Mac Mini Media Center experience, I have owned an Apple TV since launch day and really like it, it streams HD content from my iMac over a G network fine once converted and placed in the iMac’s iTunes. I have EyeTV record TV shows and automatically export to iTunes too.
Using VisualHub to convert a 6 GB HD movie into something iTunes can read takes about 3hrs which is a pain but as I said once it’s there the AppleTV plays it just fine.

Fed up with waiting 3hrs for the conversion each time I thought I’d go the Mac mini route, I bought a 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (1GB memory 80GB hard drive) from the online store to connect to my Pioneer PDP-427XD which has a resolution of 1024 × 768.

Straight away I ran into resolution problems, using a HDMI cable to connect I could have the edges of the screen out of view so you can’t see the menu bar and dock or turn off ‘overscan’ and have black borders top and bottom and missing edges to the left and right. I spent hours messing with settings including DisplayConfigX but nothing sorted the problem.

I then purchased a VGA cable and decided to go analogue, this fixed the problem immediately but the analogue screen was not as crisp and the colours were not as vibrant as using a HDMI cable and was a real step down in quality compared to the Apple TV (which just works fine via HDMI).

The next issue was using it, everything seemed a bit fiddly, EyeTV would crash every now and then (not often but it would happen), HD content would sometimes drop frames on playback, the remote was sometimes fiddly to use and the whole system was not user friendly like the AppleTV. I imagined if anyone else in the family was watching TV and suddenly EyeTV quits they would struggle to get things up and running again.

So I decided to call Apple and ask for a refund on the Mac mini, they instantly arranged for TNT to collect it and gave me a full refund which I thought was excellent service.

I’m glad to be back watching live TV via the Freeview box and recorded stuff via the iMac’s EyeTV recordings and the Apple TV. The only downside to the Apple TV I can see is the encoding times.

You can’t have everything I suppose