Welcome EyeTV users!

Started by Marc, August 30, 2006, 01:48:39 PM

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Marc

Welcome to our new EyeTV and Mac media centre forum.
Please make yourself at home and feel free to ask any questions you might have. I'll be collating as much information as I can into one document soon, but until then, here's some handy tidbits for getting the most out of your Mac when using it as a media centre:


Problem: The Bluetooth mouse setup window appears every time you restart your Mac when there's no mouse plugged in.
Solution: Disable "Open Bluetooth Setup Assistant at startup when no input device is present" off in System Preferences / Bluetooth.

Problem: My Apple Remote controls more than one Mac.
Solution: "Pair" your remote with specific Mac(s). An Apple document with instructions can be found here. You can also disable the IR receiver from "Security" in System Preferences on Macs you don't want to use your Apple Remote with.

Problem: I'm having difficulty getting my Mac to display correctly on my TV.
Solution: There's several ways to fix this, depending on the situation. DisplayConfigX lets you tweak the output of your Mac's graphics card, as does SwitchResX. Another solution is to change the way you're getting the picture into the TV. Currently, it seems like some LCD and Plasma TVs have difficulty showing a picture that covers the whole screen when using the HDMI (or DVI) inputs. Although not the most elegant fix, using a VGA input seems to solve this in most cases. It's not going to look as good as DVI/HDMI, but it might provide a good interim fix until you have DisplayConfigX under control. To be honest, using VGA isn't a bad option at all.


Control your Mac with your Apple Remote.
There's quite a few small applications that let you use an Apple Remote to control various aspects of your mac, including playing files in Quicktime or VLC, changing system volume and almost anything you can normally do via the keyboard or mouse.

This is an essential add-on if you're looking to use your mac media center for anything other than the standard EyeTV features or even if you'd like to be able to restart, shut down or perform simple maintenance tasks without plugging in a keyboard or mouse.

Remote Buddy -- My favourite, and probably the most complete.
Sofa Control
Mira


Cheers,
Marc.

Marc

Another handy tip
I've actually been using Apple's Remote Desktop to remotely schedule (via the widget). It's complete overkill, but it works until we have something else in place.