Well, the subject pretty much says it. I’ve got a DVD player on my Mac, but I’m getting sick of watching DVDs with their incredibly fancy sound coming out of a small little circular speaker an inch and a half in diameter. So, I was wondering if anyone out there would know how I could hook my computer up to my T.V. Here’s the facts:
I have a G-4.
I have a really old T.V. with only a single cable input on it.
I have a VCR with the red/yellow/white connector to it, so if I need those, I could route it through my VCR, no?
The Mac uses USB ports, whereas the tv and VCR do not.
I went to google, typed “mac tv out” and this is the first link that came up. There were others - ATI makes some video cards that you can use in a Mac.
Unfortunately, you will need to spend some money; you’ll need either a new video card with a/v outs (aka the red/yellow/white connectors) or a FireWire video bridge (you only mention USB ports, but I think all G4s have FireWire–correct me if I’m wrong).
The video bridge is probably overkill–it’s designed for video pros and can be pricey.
You can get an ATI Radeon card for no more than $200, much cheaper if you’re a good dealhunter. Quite easy to install. If you have one of the older G4s with the ATI Rage video card and you are running OSX, you may find one of these newer cards will give your computer a nice increase in apparent snappiness, so that would be a bonus.
If you got a new card, you would think you could then hook it directly to your VCR’s inputs. Unfortunately, there is a common copy-protection scheme called Macrovision, which is used in most commercially available DVDs and videotapes. When a Macrovision-encoded move is played into a VCR’s inputs, the color and brightness periodically fluctuate, making it unwatchable. So you’ll probably need a little doodad called an RF modulator, like this one. to get the signal into your TV.
One word of warning: if you decide to get an ATI Radeon card, and are running the lastest version of OSX (10.2.3), don’t install ATI’s drivers! All necessary ATI drivers are folded into the OS now, and running ATI’s standalone driver installer will break things. This info is not mentioned in the packaging or on their website: very sloppy on ATI’s part.
You don’t say which G4 you have, but many of them have native support for video mirroring. Check out Apple’s support site for your machine. Here’s the results for video mirroring
I don’t know nuts about macs so this may not help, but if you had a PC, what you’d be shopping for is either a videocard with tv-out, or a scan convertor: a doohickey for hooking a TV to the computer’s video-out.
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Thanks guys. Looks like expensive equipment may be needed, so it looks like I’m just going to have to buy a DVD player. Oh well, thanks for the advice anyways.
The incredibly fancy sound can be sent over to your amp and, subsequently, to your studio-blaster speaker system, without any substantial expenditures on your part. (It’s only if you also need to view the picture on something other than your computer monitor that you may be in for more serious purchases).
Buy a line from Radio Shack or equiv, stereo headphone jack on one end and dual RCA phono jack (one per channel) on the other. Insert stereo headphone jack into Sound Out port of Mac, insert photo jacks into some unused device port (“Aux” for example)of your amp. Select “Aux” as your sound source. Set system volume on Mac to something in the low middle area. Use amp’s sound level to make subsequent adjustments. Insert DVD and enjoy.
IF you do not happen to even so much as HAVE a Sound Out port on your Mac (I vaguely recall that Steve did this on a few later models), you’ll have to buy a relatively inexpensive USB device that plugs into your USB port and provides some kind of jack for connection to your amp on the other (this could be stereo headphone jack, in which case you continue as described above, or it could be dual RCAs in which case you get regular stereo equipment cables instead of the conversion cable I described previously).
ALSO – A few Macs (including my WallStreet PowerBook in which I’m typing now) have a port on the back labeled with an icon of a video cam. This is S-Video Out. If you have this and IF your particular Mac supports DVD video output to external video devices, you can hook your television to the S-Video Out port (there’s an adapter that should have come with your Mac if your TV video-in is one of those single-prong units instead of an S-Video plug); Using the Monitors (or Monitors and Sound) Control Panel, select the TV as your screen. (It will only be available at 640 x 480, that’s just how it is with TVs). Insert DVD and play as you normally would, except that now your computer’s screen is your television.
Not all Macs with S-Video ports will allow you to display DVD video to anything other than the main TFT but I think the newer ones do.