Mac mini media center

I had long been planning to buy a Mac mini to hook up to my TV and stereo replacing the DVD player and adding media center functionality, and I finally did just that. Last night I connected the mini’s DVI output to my plasma’s HDMI input and the digital audio output to my AV receiver. The short version of the story is that it pretty much just worked but with a few unresolved issues and some minor hiccups along the way.
As you can see in this poor picture of the Mac mini in my stereo cabinet along with the HD cable/DVR box, the mini is quite small. The 5 year old DVD player it is replacing filled the entire bottom shelf area. I hooked it up to the tv, the stereo, power, and an extra keyboard and mouse and, with much excitement, flipped the whole setup on! The Mac automatically configured it’s video output based on some information passed to it by the TV via the digital HDMI/DVI connection and I was greeted with the sight of a white apple logo on a grey background signaling the bootup process for Mac OS X. It continued to boot up into the initial setup. Here’s the language selection screen. It was actually a bit anti-climactic since I’ve seen a screen like this when setting up several previous Macs. It was just like any other, other than being on my TV.

I went through the set up process and noticed the first issue when the familiar Mac desktop came up. The edges of the desktop were chopped off! About half of the menu bar at the top, half of the dock at the bottom, and some from each side was missing. Here you can see an example. I have Safari open to a baby name website looking for a name for the new addition to the network. We ended up choosing ‘Lucy’.

After some research I realized it’s an issue common to pretty much all ‘computer hooked to a TV’ setups and it’s somewhat surprising that it hasn’t actually be resolved by these software developers by now. I guess it’s complicated because every model of TV is a little different. It’s called ‘overscan‘. I’ve tried several things, including the DisplayConfigX software, to potentially fix it but nothing has worked in my case. If you know how to get it working with my Panasonic 42″ plasma let me know!

UPDATE: I figured out the overscan problem and posted the solution.

Here’s a few notes for anyone thinking about one of these setups.

• Set up VNC first thing! It comes in very handy.
• Front Row is seemingly only launchable with the remote.
• To get playing DVDs to use the digital out and provide surround sound you have to set a sound output option in the DVD player preferences with no DVD in the drive.
• You have to launch iTunes once before you’ll be able to play music in Front Row. Also authorize it for any iTunes Music Store music you may want to play.
• Also launch iPhoto before the photo part of Front Row will work.
• Install the DivX player to add support for AVI and DivX files to Front Row (via QuickTime).
• When I boot the Mac mini with no keyboard or mouse plugged in, it wants to pair itself with some over bluetooth. I don’t know how to make it not do that so I just have a keyboard plugged in now and an extra bluetooth mouse paired.
• You can only access shared videos on other computers via the remote computer’s iTunes library and iTunes will not accept AVI files. I don’t know of a workaround.
• Front Row has crashed on me a couple of times, eating up all of one core in the process and essentially locking me out of it. A force quit works but that requires me to use VNC or the bluetooth mouse. Not ideal!