04-25-2003, 07:28 PM

I've just arrived at iMac after a long stay with virtually every other PC available.

I started out in 1979 with a home brew PC and went through Sinclair, Apple II, Commodore (various), IBM-PCs, Acorn (culminating in a RiscPC) and now a 17inch flat panel iMac.

I also have two XP2000 PC's and a Linux box (P3-500) all networked btw (gotta have that Unreal fix occasionally ).

The iMac rocks and I feel similar to how I felt 10 years ago when I first purchased a Risc-PC, awesome piece of kit.

The selling point for me was the underlying unix OS but I have found the OSX (or is Jaguar the favoured name?) front end to be superior to just about everything I've ever encountered in the wierd world of IT (and I've played with top end SG machines before now!).

This beast just takes everything in it's stride, Real-Myst is amazing, DVD burning a sheer joy, Mp3 so easy it's a laugh and networking with no tears! I just wish I'd converted years ago.

My only problem is prising my childrens sticky mitts off the bloody keyboard long enough to get some enjoyment out of it myself!

Here's looking forward to many years of enjoyment from my "digital hub" now for a question:

What is the best way of connecting my beast to my Sky TV box? i.e is there a neat (but relatively inexpensive) box of tricks I can buy to do the job or do I need to fork out hods of dosh to do it?

What I'd like to do is import TV snippets (especially from the 24 hour news channels) and incorporate them into Mpeg streams for web use or possibly DVD authoring.

Cheers in advance for any advice.

btw, my iMac is one of the latest Jaguar ones with superdrive, 80 GHD and 512Mb Ram.

Amen-Moses

04-26-2003, 12:53 AM

OSX called OS ten. 10.1 is puma or cougar? 10.2 is jaguar. 10.3 is panther (not yet released)

Enjoy the mac world, ive been using apple since IIe, and they still surprise me.

Yes, there is a way to do this...
im not shur of the exact method thou, just that it is really simple.. im thinkin S-Video.. or one of the ports i never use on my imac

04-26-2003, 11:04 AM

What kind of output from the SkyTV ( I am assuming this is your "cable" company ) are you looking to utilize. There are TONS of video capture devices out there, starting from like $99 all the way to $20,000 ( I am guessing here ).

Are you looking to get coax into your mac or RCA connections?

RCA connections would be easiest, and virtually ALL the video capture devices utilize this. It would probably be a little harded finding one that support coax. But, you can use a VCR or something to convert the coax to RCA, or maybe Radio Shack would have something like this.

More specs / info would be cool. That way I could recommend a complete solution for ya

Welcome aboard, by the way!

04-26-2003, 08:14 PM

It looks like the only output from my Sky box (that's satellite TV btw) is SCART and that is probably composite only.

I'll check out my cable box tomorrow (it is in the kids room and they are asleep at present) to see what options it gives but I'm guessing it is also SCART only.

(yes I have both satellite and cable, in fact my cable box also gives me my broadband connection )

My DVD player gives RCA separate video outputs but I'm assuming I can rip DVD output directly with the superdrive and some appropriate software so that doesn't help much.

I do have another question though:

I have a USB -> Ethernet adaptor which when plugged in appears in the profiler as "AEI USB To LAN Adapter, vendor AEI" with some other details and from what I can gather it is an ADMtek 8511 chip. I downloaded the Mac driver from http://www.admtek.com.tw/download/nic/adm8..._03_0304.tar.gz but the instruction PDF file from the same site is corrupt. I ran the install package and everything seems to have gone OK but the adapter does not appear in any of the net config windows.

Any idea how I can get it working?

I want to use the Mac as a temporary internet router by connecting the 600Kb cable input though the USB adapter and have the Internal Ethernet connected to my PC's hub, is this a silly idea (I will be going wireless in a few months time so this is purely a temporary measure in order to retire my Linux box which is solely a router these days) and is it even possible?

At the moment the Mac is connected straight to the cable box and my PC's are without internet.

Btw I yanked off the bottom panel (gently ) and fitted a 30 UKP 256 Mb SO-DIMM Ram card yesterday, seems to work fine, not sure if I needed 512M just yet but for such a small outlay it seemed worth doing.

Cheers in advance,

Amen-Moses