The Desire for a Mini

Posted by stephen on Friday, 29th July, 2005 @ 02:16

Off they've gone again, Apple have updated the Mac Mini and just when David M sent me a link to TivoTool, a bit of software that makes the whole experience of watching stuff off my TiVo on a Mac entirely more pleasurable.

Add to this my recent move of a couple of now redundant LCD screens to my "boy box", also known as my spare room. Made redundant now that the G5 is attached to my lovely lovely 27" LCD TV (burglars out there know who to target, though you'll have to get through the cats first).

Add to that my recent habit of acquiring televisual content a little in advance of the usual UK showtimes, the resultant of which requires more than just your normal TV to display and I feel like the universe is leading me to the inevitable conclusion that I should purchase a Mac mini, set it up in my bedroom with one of the spare monitors and watch TV from multiple sources whilst laying in bed.

While it's arguable that I should have better things to do in bed, I still find the whole thing rather too exciting. Especially with the addition of another little toy Tom Coates recently brought to my attention on his blog, the EyeTV for DTT.

I'm currently bored of switching between AV inputs of my main TV from the Mac to the TiVo etc. With the addition of a proper remote control (and maybe bluetooth keyboard and mouse for completeness sake), TivoTool and some work with WebCore and AppleScript, maybe I can make some kind of unified interface to All My Stuff®.

There's a much cheaper alternative at hand however, at least for the bedroom box. With a little more leg work and some less attractive boxes, I already have a tiny mini-ITX PC laying around that could serve equally as well.

Incentive to develop some kind of cross platform TV interface application? Maybe. Incentive to spend lots of money? Definitely!

Thing is, we already have things like MythTV and Freevo, so maybe I should think about just trying to bring the TiVo data into them? Especially as there's a MythTV client for the Mac. Then again, wouldn't it be great if the interfaces where HTML driven, especially given the power of AJAX (not the kitchen cleaner mind you).

And at the same time as thinking about this, my mind is buzzing with thoughts of Social Software for Set Top Boxes. Those of you who know me will know this fits in rather nicely with my day job right now.

Our client platform is rather limited unfortunately, but a big part of me is dying to waste hours of my life developing a PC-based STB with interesting interfaces and applications.

I shall continue to dream. And maybe if the inspiration comes, make a little reality...