My Macintosh's quirky irksome way of allowing connections

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So. Lemme lay this out.

Mac Mini. Perfectly capable of :Mirroring: a signal and sending to our Roku Streambar/ t.v. monitor. Done it before.

We went to watch a Nebraska football game yesterday by logging into our account on my mac, finding the game on Fox Sports 1, and sending via HDMI cable over to the t.v.

Except…that yesterday I got a note on the t.v. followed by a random still frame from the broadcast, and FULL real-time audio.

Don’t have it word for word but essentially it read,

“Game Console Connection: Your gaming console has been chosen to connect to this device”.

I don’t game. (Don’t get all up in my grille. Unca Cecil didn’t game either, nor did TubaDiva !)

I tried a half-dozen times. No love. Unable to make the connection work on the video side. Went poking around on the Mac. Found no relevant settings. Went poking around on the Roku “Settings” menu. Nothing.

So…and-- I have to add- no OSX updates recently on the Mac. No clue if the Roku automatically does updates or not.

How to get back to seeing video as well as hearing audio???

2

My first thought is: it’s some type of HDCP protection.

Can you AirPlay it to your TV? That shouldn’t trip IP protection.

3

AirPlay didn’t connect, weirdly. It DID show up on the t.v. and that menu loaded but I could not get it to fully engage.

Should circle back later today and try doing all of that again. I might have missed something on the AirPlay side of things.

Thanks !!!

4

Did you reboot the Mac?

[Of course, it goes without saying … except when the answer turns out to be “No.” :slight_smile: ]

5

I agree it sounds like an HDCP hiccup. HDCP is a finicky protocol. I’d reboot all involved devices (Mac, TV, etc).

6

I had a land-line phone issue about a month ago. I checked at the demarcation point outside the house and got no dial tone. So I called Bell and despite starting the conversation with this information, the rep insisted on going through a check list, one step of which was to unplug the cable from the wall jack to the phone, swap ends and then plug it back in.

I mention this because your issue may be with the HDMI cable, and while swapping ends is very unlikely to do anything, swapping the whole cable might.

7

Ooooooh, god. DUH.

The late great Ted Churchill was noted for many things, notably: “Don’t freak out. 90% of the time the problem is in the cable. Just own three of every cable.”

This HDMI was run 10 years ago. It does have a protective vinyl cover strip that reduces wear as large adults trod near or over it.

Time to buy a new HDMI.

AND noooooooo. Restarting the Mac makes way too much sense. Didn’t do that either.

–slinking off in technological shame–

8

As we say (or at least used to say) in our business, “Two is one and one is none.”

9

Yes !! Ha- I’d not heard that in a long time. Completely relevant.

When discussing required accessories for doing Steadicam Operating work on live broadcast shows, if one must be tethered, the subject of lightweight Fiber jumpers comes up.

They are a necessity. Each one goes for 750- 900. I tell the person, this is how it goes. If you buy one it will get damaged on your first gig, your work will immediately suffer because of it and they will want to fire you. If you buy two, you will never need the spare.