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For those of you that just want to know if it works or not (see part 1), the answer is yes. Yes! It works! Gladly, I didn’t order the various hardware and software components for nothing. I can now watch digital (HD) television, movies and listen to music on the Mac mini using a single remote.
These are the ingredients I used:
Hardware:
- Mac mini
- Apple 23″ Cinema HD Display
- FireDTV for digital TV reception
- AlphaCrypt CAM
- Smart-card from Ziggo (my cable company)
- Keyspan Frontrow RF Remote
- and last but not least: a Firewire 400 to 800 cable
Software:
The Mac and FireDTV+AlphaCrypt were all delivered quickly. Unfortunately it took quite a while before the Ziggo smart-card ended up in my mailbox, so I had to wait a couple of tantalizing days before I could actually start setting-up the whole thing. Also, I didn’t realize that the new Mini has a firewire 800 port, so I couldn’t connect the FireDTV to it with the supplied firewire 400 cable. A quick bicycle trip to the nearest electronics shop solved that problem though.
Combining the FireDTV with the AlphaCrypt Classic CAM and Ziggo smart-card works great.
My only worry was the Ziggo smart-card / AlphaCrypt CAM combo. As I explained in part 1, the CAM module uses the smart-card to decode the encrypted digital TV signal. However, there’s no guarantee that my cable company supports my setup, I had to rely on the info I gathered from a couple of forums. Luckily, inserting the CAM + card into the FireDTV resulted – after a couple of “initializing CAM blah” messages – in perfect picture quality on the Mac.
For watching TV, I use EyeTV 3 from Elgato. EyeTV comes with support for tvtv.com EPG data and it also supports pausing live TV (by streaming it to Mac mini the hard-drive) and scheduled TV recording.
Besides EyeTV, I also installed Plex. Plex is a free application for Mac that basically turns it into a media-center. It also includes support for your existing iTunes and iPhoto libraries as well. However, the most interesting part of Plex is definitely the App Store. There are dozens of plugin available in the store that enable access to all kinds of online sources such as Southpark, Youtube, MTV etcetera. What’s even cooler, the Plex developers are currently working on integrating EyeTV into the Plex interface.
On a final note, as the Mac is placed somewhere out of sight, I needed a remote that works on radio-frequency instead of infrared. I opted for the Keyspan Frontrow RF Remote in combination with Remote Buddy software to program the Keyspan’s buttons.
