Networking your Home Theatre experience with Your Mac

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easy way to get all of those videos, music and pictures off of your computer over to your Home Theatre system? Many of you out there, know of the extremely easy process of using a Windows Media Centre based PC to stream your media to your H.T. What if you have a Mac?

My Brother and I both ran into this situation earlier this year, we both decided to take the plunge from a lifelong usage of Windows based PC’s to the Apple side of the world. All of a sudden, we were left with many downloaded movies, home videos, music and pictures stranded on our Macs, several feet away from our Home Theatre systems. What were we to do, run a cable across the floor? This is entirely possible as far as music is concerned but what about all of that video and photo.

After doing some searching we found an easy solution. An application called Connect 360 is the solution. Once downloading the application which has a $20 Dollar fee, it will allow you to wirelessly stream your media* from your Mac, to your XBOX 360.

In order to achieve this I have assumed that you have the following

1. A Wireless Router
2. An XBOX 360 Wireless Networking Adapter

You will now be able to browse all of your music, view your pictures, and watch any video content that is on your Mac through your Home Theatre system. This is very convenient if you want to display pictures from a trip on a large TV to a group of Guests.
There are ways to do this with a Playstation3 which will be discussed in a later post.

* As an amendment to the above post. I wanted to mention as it was brought to my attention that the XBOX 360 will not play any music that has been purchased through iTunes as of yet. The reason for this as I am sure some of you are aware, is that music previously purchased on iTunes has been encoding with DRM. I am happy however to inform you that there is already DRM free music on iTunes, and that Apple is likely going to strip all music from the iTunes store from its DRM. I will keep you posted as I learn things.

TO HDMI OR NOT TO HDMI THAT IS THE QUESTION

I know that many of you out there are curious as to how much of a difference or even if there is a difference between using Component cable (Red, Green, and Blue) or HDMI cable. I won’t go into the many differences within the cables themselves. I also won’t talk about shielding or how the cable is constructed in this post.

This post I want to pose a very simple thought to all of you. You went out and you spent anywhere from 1000 dollars to a few thousand dollars on a beautiful digital HDTV. You have probably seen HD and realize that hey this looks pretty good. And being the informed person that you are, you understand that in order to get it looking the way you seen it at the store, you need the HD BOX. So you call up your cable or satellite provider and they either sell you, direct you where to buy, or rent you either an HD Box or HD PVR. When you get this glorious gateway into superior picture and surround sound quality television programming, you open the box and there are three RCA cables of a different colour than you are used to seeing.

You remember the salesman telling you that you should get an HDMI cable but just as you thought, there is a cable in the box and it will do just fine. Worse still you had your service provider come to your house and tell you to return your HDMI cable, that these component cables will do the same thing....but will they?

The box you just got, is what is known as a digital box, because it's job is to receive a compressed digital signal and then uncompress it. This is easy for those of us on cable signals to understand as our provider calls this service “Digital Cable.” But even if you are on Satellite this is still a digital signal. The new TV that you have is as mentioned above a digital television. The component cable that you are about to use for your no doubt expensive investment is an analogue cable. This means that your digital box has to convert the digital signal to analogue (DAC) to send through these component cables. It just keeps getting better though, because now, your digital television needs to convert the signal from analogue back to digital (ADC) to display this picture. Friends, anytime you convert anything you lose quality.

Why would you want to lose quality on the main purpose of your purchase, just to save a few dollars. I am not saying that you need to go out and buy the top of the line Monster HDMI cables for your television viewing. No as of yet, a simple entry model monster cable, or even another companies HDMI cable will suffice. I am however saying that it makes much, much more sense to leave your signal digital the whole way through. That way you have no quality loss, and you are ensured the greatest high definition picture for your Fringe, House MD, or Prison Break that you can get at the time.

immaculatae Plasma misconception

I wanted to get a post out there immediately to stimulate the thinking populous out there. I deal with a major question everyday at work and its almost always asked with the client thinking about a particular side of the answer. "What is the difference between Plasma and LCD?" I am not here going to go into technological differences between Plasma and LCD, I will do that in other posts. I want to focous in this post on the typical answer to the said question. "Plasma's reflect light"

Although this is true, that Plasma does reflect light, it is not as though it cause reflection. In most cases the client is replacing a CRT television, and in some it has a curved glass screen. The amount of reflection differs considerably between these. A plasma as a flat Glass will automatically cut down on the amount of light that it is going to reflect. And as a technological feature of the product, most Plasma manufacturers have put UV filters in the glass that actually breaks down the amount of light rays that are able to reflect from the screen.

Consumers should consider this, although YES a plasma does allow light to reflect the amount is minimal and considering most viewing takes place in the evening on in to night, there would be little if any reflection at all. Another thing to keep in mind when considering the reflective aspect of plasma is which direction your windows face.

Innauguration Day

Hey there,

This is the first blog that I have ever attempted to create. It will be a simple blog in regards to anything and everything that I want to blog about. Generally speaking though, this will be my main conduit for getting my expertise and opinion on electronics, both Home Theater mostly, and Apple out to the world. I hope that anyone who reads this blog not only enjoys what they are reading, but finds it useful as well. I also hope that if you have any feedback, you will feel free to do so. In addition to giving me feedback on any number of posts, I also want to encourage two things. If you have a desire to hear my thoughts on a particular subject, feel free to email me. I will try my best to respond to your email, and create a post dealing with the subject theme, as soon as I can. I also want to encourage anyone who feels like writing a piece for this blog and site, to feel free to do so. I have no problem having correspondence working on entries. After all we live in the information age.

Jeffro