SpiceWare's Blog

HDMI (or more to the point - HDCP) is a real pain. My guess is the Mini may be losing connection during handshake, and reverting to the other connection since that's all it sees at that moment. Double-check for EFI updates. Apple has pushed a few of them out to deal with Mac Mini HDMI weirdness.

I've read about issues with HDCP and one of my concerns was that iTunes wouldn't work because of the HDMI to Component converter box. I've only tried TRON: Uprising, Vol. 2 so far, and it played back OK.

 

I just did Software Update and none came up.

The new cable works, though it turned out to be a waste of money - when I extracted the existing optical cable out from the nest 'o cables I discovered there were mini plug adaptors attached to the cable

Monoprice is where I get all of our cables for work from. Cheap prices, good quality, fast shipping.

Wow - those are some awesome prices! I'll have to remember them for future cable needs.

Digital audio is interesting. If I have iTunes playing a song:

1. if I start up a game in MAME, I can hear the song and the game sound effects.
   
2. if I open a TV window, all other sounds get muted.
   
3. if I close the TV window, all other sounds come back.
   

I think what's going on is the TV sound is encoded, so to mix in the other system sounds the mini would have to decode the TV sound, mix in the other system sounds, re-encode the results, then send it to the surround sound receiver. And it would have to do that instantly as otherwise you'd notice the sound was out of sync with the picture.

 

Since it can't do that instantly, it doesn't even bother to try.

I don't think it's a resource issue. The Mac has plenty of power to run both. Rather, I think iTunes is just designed to play along with anything else, until told by another app to stop. There's probably an API call specifically for it so developers can shut it off if they want to monopolize your attention.

Could be, I'll have to run some more experiments to see.

 

The return box arrived this morning so I boxed up the old DirecTV tuner and dropped it off at the Post Office during lunch.

Just noticed that the mini's now showing 1024 MB allocated for video RAM. I suspect that happened when I upgraded to Mavericks.