Mountain Lion and Mac HTPC

I haven't had SIMBL installed in a while and just did a search for it using Spotlight and it was not found. I still have the stuttering problem with EyeTV despite having downgraded to 3.5.4.

Dennis

(only) slightly off topic, but Safari in Mtn Lion no longer has the option of "View all RSS articles". It just errors to, "No RSS reader installed, and Safari can't read RSS."

Unfortunately, Mountain Lion does not offer Front Row back; and apparently, the hack to install Front Row on Lion does not work anymore with Mountain Lion
And Mountain Lion still does not support Blu-ray (no surprise there).
So I still wonder about the true benefit (if any) of Mountain Lion in a HTPC environnement...
I suppose if a successor to Front Row comes in the future, it will be simultaneous with the rumored "Apple TV"...

I installed it on my Mac Mini media server. Installation was smooth, and so far everything seems to be working well with the exception of Airplay mirroring. I run the Mini without a display attached, and it appears that Airplay will not work that way. Although the computer sees the Apple TVs on my network, when I attempt to Airplay to them it tells me that it cannot detect any devices. I was really hoping that this was going to work.

So a headless 2011 Mini in ML can't Airplay mirror, can you regular Airplay to your aTV, say from within iTunes?

FYI, I read somewhere that if you have an aTV2/3 with optical running to your AVR (and HDMI directly to your display) that when you Airplay mirror from a Mac no audio is passed over optical, only HDMI.

Also, someone compare the same file 1) Airplay mirrored from a supported Mac to an aTV with 2) the same file live converted and then Airplayed to that aTV via Air Video on an iPad 3 when you get a chance.

Fred, do you get the Airplay icon to display in the menu bar?

Ted, can you confirm if the Apple remote will now wake a sleeping Mini in ML? (That's something Apple took away in Lion, and as a result, I haven't slept my 2011 Mini for the past year...)

Yes, I do get the Airplay icon. Everything looks identical to what it does with a monitor attached up to the point of actually selecting an Apple TV. I've been Googling like mad and found a possible solution:

Gefen DVI Detective Plus:
http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=4715

Do you (or anyone else) know anything about this and whether or not it would work?

Since I temporarily have the monitor attached, I'll do some testing to compare results to iPad Airplay. I really love Air Video and the iPad, but there are some thing that my wife watches that we can only get through Hulu or streaming through Safari. My goal is to be able to use the iPad to start Airplay mirroring and then use one of the iPad remotes to control the Mini.

Update: I tried a couple of videos played from iTunes, and the quality was excellent, really indistinguishable from playing them from with Air Video. Playing the video in Quicktime Player didn't seem quite as good, but I may be imagining that. I think that the reason that iTunes is so good is that it shifts into a full-screen mode that is just dealing with the video rather than having to render the whole Mac desktop. The doesn't look quite as good as having the Mac directly connected to the TV, but it's still pretty good. Full screen video in Safari looks awfully good as well, all things considered, certainly a much better experience than on the laptop. I think that this is going to do exactly what I wanted it to do, assuming I can get rid of the monitor.

Update 2: More testing: EyeTV, live and recordings, Hulu Desktop, and XBMC. Everything worked perfectly. It's just as if the Mac were connected directly to the TV except that it's in a closet. So far it's taking two separate devices to control things. I thought I would be able to get Airplay mirroring started with Splashtop Remote on my iPad and then switch over to Rowmote for remote control, but leaving Splashtop ends the Airplay session. So for now I'm just leaving Splashtop running on the iPad and running Rowmote on my iPod. I prefer Rowmote on the iPod anyway, so it's not all bad.
Edited by FredT - 7/26/12 at 7:06pm

So now, turn the monitor off but leave it connected, can you still Airplay mirror?

Yes, it still will Airplay with the monitor turned off. That in fact is my temporary setup, but it's not a viable long-term solution. The Gefen device is $85 from Amazon, so I think I'll give it a try.

I should add that I tried leaving the HDMI to DVI cable plugged into the Mini. The results were interesting: on the Mini it looked like it was working, that is the Airplay selection of an Apple TV stuck, but at the TV end the picture was just garbled mess. Same thing with a bare HDMI cable.
Edited by FredT - 7/27/12 at 6:56am

So I got the Gefen DVI Detective. It works perfectly, so now I can get the monitor out of my equipment closet. A nice benefit of this device is that it has some built-in configuration, so I was able to exactly match the resolution of my HDTV.

DVI Detective or HDMI Detective? Either way, congratulations, you're probably the first person to solve the AirPlay mirror with a headless Mac issue...

It was the DVI detective. I actually didn't know about the HDMI detective. I'd have gotten that if I had because the setup would have been cleaner, not having to use a DVI to HDMI cable to connect to the Mini. I already had that cable for connecting my 20-inch ACD to the Mini, so there was no additional cost. It looks as if either would work equally as well.

Upgrade to the latest Rowmote Helper and Rowmote. It handles the AirPlay launching. The ATV3 then has access the most apps of any streamer as you noted, and all from Romote.

The only thing I have noticed is the occasional stutter from XBMC when running 1080p stuff. Not quite sure why. Could be a networking issue on my end.

Philip

I primarily use my Mac Mini as my media server. But, occasionally will watch a DVD with it.

After the Mountain Lion upgrade, I get a weird effect when using a remote desktop connection to control it. If I'm playing a DVD and connect via VNC, the video is replaced by a checkerboard pattern. Once I disconnect, the video comes back.

I'm guessing it's some copy protection garbage.

Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't even noticed! Now it's all really easy. It's just fantastic how Evan Schoenberg keeps Rowmote so up to date.

Appreciate the feedback on Mountain Lion, from what I read decided to stick with Lion on my mini. Anyone else not so happy with Apple's decision to iDumbdown OS X?
If this trend continues, we may need to start looking more towards Linux or BSD to run our HTPCs in the future...

I'm not sure what in this topic made you come to that conclusion. Personally I never warmed up to Lion, but I'm very happy with Mountain Lion.

Yeah, I was curious about that swipe at OS X myself, I wonder seti1, what have you found about Mountain Lion in particular that has affected your personal home theater usage? XBMC, iTunes home sharing, recording with EyeTV, my remotes and various iPad apps, the most important HTPC aspects for me, all perfectly fine interacting in ML.

And looking forward, it also seems to me, when the least expensive Mac, the $519 refurb base model 2011 Mini, can "Airplay mirror" anything to any Apple TV in the house, that alone will be worth the upgrade for many--in addition to regular airplay and the recently added display mirror from the iPad, now if any content provider tries to restrict either of those you can just turn to the Mac. One great new feature like this is hardly a trend, but it's a big step forward in the right direction from a whole house home theater sense. It reduces both the incentive to hack your Apple TVs and why one might even consider an alternative OS in the first place. At least for me, with ML and iOS there's more convenience and more reason to stay within the Apple ecosystem, not less.

I just skipped through Braveheart without a problem. I do not have time to watch the movie, but I just clicked on various points in the timeline, then let it run for a few seconds at each click. On my MacBook Pro running Mtn Lion from my Mac Pro running Lion.

Using my Mac Pro 2008 to watch movies on my 46" LED. Don't think, given what has been posted above that I'll be uprgading to 10.8 any time soon.