Macintosh - Mac Mini aficionados please help

PrPixel,

I've found many of those "Dummies" books to be quite good. That obviously reveals my level of learning and problem solving. Heheh.

Getting the SuperDrive was a good move. It will allow you to burn DVDs, something a ComboDrive won't.

Your MacMini should come with iLife which will include iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, GarageBand and iPhoto. Using that free stuff I am able to create DVDs with menus and chapter indexing on my Cube from my Tivo content. It's great for saving all those documentaries I love!

Have fun!

Gunbei,

I never thought of transfering content from my Tivo to the mini. I already have the Tivo hooked up to the cable modem using wifi. A friend transfered content from his Tivo to his PC; said it was a long and invlolved process.

Later,

PrPixel,

Your friend probably removed his Tivo hard drive and placed it in one of the bays of his PC, then used 3rd party software to make the transfer. There are some similar hacks for the Mac, but they involve going root and getting into the Unix terminal.

I use a little box called the Canopus ADVC100 which takes the analog output of the Tivo and has a codec for translating it into digital. From there, it's a Firewire hookup to my Apple Cube right into iMovie. I stitch everything together, set the chapter indeces[?], find some nice frame grabs for the DVD menu, then transfer it to iDVD and finish the DVD. Have a look at it here:

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ADVC-100/pm_advc-100.asp

I've compared the Tivo/iDVDs I've made on my Mac against the original digital video on my Tivo and it's very acceptable. The loss in sharpness is 5% at the most. There is a noticeable loss in overall color saturation, but if you don't compare them side by side, it almost doesn't matter.

It's a really nice little unit and the audio and video never get out of sync like some of the other similar boxes.

Something to look into maybe? Heheh

Dean

Dean,

Actually, he used the Tivo to go software and transfered it to his computer using 802.11B. The transfer took about 3 hours. Then he used Pinnacle Studio to burn it to a DVD.

The Canopus device looks interesting.

Tivo To Go is not supported by the Mac. However, I could transfer from the Tivo to the PC and then send it to the Mac.

I have a DVD burner in my PC. The problem is that the Pinnacle Studio software it more than I need. I tried using Pinnacle Lite but it was not that Stable. I'm hoping that IDVD is real simple to use. Afterall, Rosie O'Donald did a pretty good job with it. I don't have a need to burn many DVD's; about 4 a year. So, every time I fire up Pinnacle Studio, I have a little bit of a learning curve before I get up to speed. Also, just about every time I fire it up, there's an update.

Prpixel,

I'm sure iLife will come with your new computer. So you'll have all the goodies I mentioned above.

Overall, iMovie and iDVD are quite simple to use and after tooling around you may think all that is needed is common sense. I found the iLife tutorials at the Apple site very helpful.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/

I should mention that I am still using the previous version of iLife which I believe is 4.0. The new version is 5.0 and will have new features such as HD support.

One odd thing I did find when choosing photos to use as background images for my iDVD on screen menus is that I needed to import all my frame grabs into iPhoto before iDVD would see them. I don't know if this is still the case, but it may be something to remember.