Mini Media

For those of you out there who were interested in how the whole Mac Mini media center thing was going to work out over here, I can report that it seems to be working out pretty well, but it wasn’t without its hiccups.

In the States, the most common video connections for peripherals like VCRs and DVD players are through the standard cable connector or an RCA video plug. The cable antenna doesn’t work at all for computers, and the RCA connector yields fairly marginal output results. Within the last 5-7 years S-Video has become much more popular as a higher quality video connection. More recently, component video (separated Red, Green, and Blue channel cables) and HDMI (for high definition TVs) have come around as better options, but S-Video has been incorporated into a lot of computer graphics cards and adapters. Consequently S-Video was the means I was using to do this at home.

In Europe, however, S-Video is the redheaded stepchild of video connectors. In its place a connector called SCART has taken its place as the most popular fairly quality video connector. SCART supports both of the RCA and S-Video types of connection along with RCA type audio all bundled together in one very large, completely unrelated connector cable.

Fortunately, after a good deal of research, I figured out that I could get a SCART adapter that would support both S-Video and RCA video connectors along with the RCA audio (which is how I typically output the sound from my computer).

The result is not perfect, but very watchable on the small TV that I have in my room. We will have to wait and see how things go with whatever kind of TV we end up buying when we get our own place (though many apartments in Ireland come furnished, a TV is not usually part of the deal).