TV Recording

One thing I was not able to definitively find out today was if the Apple TV acts like a TiVo and records TV for you or not. It didn’t look like it. All those TV connectors look like they are for output TO your TV, with nothing going in. I’ve been planning a Mac Mini based DVR for a while now, but wanted to see if they came out with a complete, integrated package first. Basically, my Mac Mini based system would use something like EyeTV to digitize the video signal so the Mac Mini could save it as an MPEG, which I could later watch in iTunes or on my iPod video, as I already do with TV shows and movies I already downloaded from iTunes (Firefly and Battlestar Gallactica). You can also "rip" movies and put them into your iPod as well.

The movie The Great Raid took up about 1.42GB on my hard drive, so you should be able to fit a fair number of feature length movies on the smallest iPod. The quality was just fine, and my only gripe is lack of subtitles (for when you are in a noisy environment).

I travel a lot with kids and we lug around a case with about 40 DVDs in them and a DVD player with two screens for them to watch. It would be kind of neat if I could unplug the core of my Mac Mini system (maybe with an external hard drive to augment disk space), and maybe even use it in my car. I’ve read a couple of articles where people put a G4 or a Mac Mini into a car for various reasons including playing movies, so it should be pretty straight forward. I’ve also run computers in my car for years off of an AC converter. My reasoning here is that the Mac Mini system could replace all those DVDs and prevent me the headache of worrying about every disk change. I could mount it so it is fairly well protected during the trip. One aspect I am doing more research on with this is game playing. I hooked my son’s PS2 up in the car with a TV/VCR combo to play DVD movies and games one time a long time ago (before the portable DVD players got cheap enough). Both my son and daughter got ferociously car sick and my wife abruptly ended the experiment. I was hoping that something more interactive would do them good versus passively watching a movie. The real motive here was that I was going to use the Mac Mini system to get them to play educational games on the road, although both of them have now pretty much outgrown Reader Rabbit.