Gareth Stokes did a brilliant presentation on how he uses a Mac Mini as probably the best home entertainment system known to mankind, using various bits of software including EyeTV and Toast 8.

If you missed it, you can see it now, in glorious Google Video format (non-HDTV):

Venue: Trilby Multimedia Studios, Birmingham, B4 6NR

What's the problem...?

As more and more people have 'HD Ready' LCD or Plasma TVs in their living room, there is a dearth of true high definition content available to really show these sets off to their full potential.

Every LCD or plasma display has a 'native' resolution at which the picture looks best. By sending any signal other than this native resolution you are relying on scaling electronics within the set that inevitably result in a loss of picture quality. 

Worse still, most people connect up these sets to various sources using poor quality analogue connections - including the humble SCART lead - resulting an blurry, muddy pictures. Even supposedly high quality "digital" sources like DVDs and digital Freeview TV set top boxes lose an enormous amount of quality undergoing an unnecessary conversion from digital to analogue and then back to digital for display on the LCD / plasma screen.

Adding insult to injury, LCD and plasma TVs show up picture defects more obviously than old cathode ray tube sets. If you're not careful you will find that you've paid all that money for a TV that ends up looking worse than the bulky old TV it replaced...

So what's the solution...?

The humble Mac Mini is capable of outputting a pure digital signal at virtually any common LCD or plasma TV resolution, allowing you to take advantage of that magic panel native resolution picture quality.

Straight away, viewing photographs or DVD video or Freeview TV will be hugely improved because no analogue to digital conversion is taking place. And that's before you take advantage of the "Sky+"-like Personal Video Recorder features to set your own Freeview TV schedule.

Better still, because any video scaling is done by the computer rather than the TV (and the computer's scaling capabilities are hugely superior to any TV's) you see a double improvement.

Finally, the Mac Mini is capable of displaying high definition video sources, allowing you finally to take full advantage of the full resolution of the TV for video viewing.

But I don't have a HD ready LCD or plasma TV!!

Even if you don't have an LCD TV you can still take advantage of the superior video and photo viewing software and use the Mac Mini as a Personal Video Recorder, and if you've not yet bought an LCD TV you'll see that with a Mac Mini you can save yourself £1,000 and get the same picture quality from a £500 32" LCD set from Woolworths as you can from a £1,500 set from a specialist retailer.

See you in April,

Gareth.