Cussedness

1080p Mac Mini Mayhem

I have caved in: after over three years of voluntary exile from normality, I have dragged myself back up to the technological heights of the twentieth century, and bought myself a television.  Indeed, I’ve gone further that that, and splashed out on a shiny, 32″ Full-HD LCD job, because I think if you’re going to do something, you may as well buy nice gadgets with which to do it.  Naturally, the universe being the contrary and complicated place that it is, my new telly didn’t actually work as desired, and I was required to perform varied rituals in order to appease the gods of consumer electronics so that it would play nicely with my Mac mini.  For the sake of other lost souls like myself, those doomed to a lifetime making things that should Just Work actually work, I record below the various problems encountered and the solutions I used to overcome them.

I originally opted for a Sony Bravia KDL32W4000, which claims to accept 1080p input from any box that speaks Full-HD, but which is actually restricted to the lower resolution of 1360 x 768 when fed a signal from a PC, both over VGA and via HDMI.  Presumably Sony are worried that I’m going to watch illegal 1080p downloads, and by stopping me from connecting my computer up at full resolution, they will scupper my evil piratical ways.  No, I don’t follow the logic either, but it’s the best explanation I can come up with.  Anyway, after much grumbling and tinkering, I gave up and returned it to the shop, and whilst I fear that I may have thrown in the towel too soon and admitted defeat before I had exhausted the possibilities, I have retained my sanity and health, and only wasted a few days of my life wrestling with Sony’s crippled hardware.  I shall gloss over the unpleasant experience of returning the article in question, and leave the drivelling morons on the front desk of the TV shop in obscurity, where they belong.

After a little dithering and much tedious trawling of boring audiovisual forums, I decided to try my luck with the 32″ Samsung Series 5 LE32A559 which, according to its manual, is able to run 1080p from a PC over both VGA and HDMI.  The LCD panel is not quite as fancy as the one in the Sony, but, crucially, this telly has not been deliberately broken by the manufacturer.  It’s also cheaper, so I now have eighty-odd quid to spend on other things that are also not made by Sony, like pirated DVDs of Sony Pictures movies, and pirated PlayStation 3 games.  No, I don’t own a PS3.

The Samsung does plug-and-play 1080p over VGA and worked out of the box, but the picture was rather shimmery because of noise picked up over the cheapo VGA cable I used.  A fancy shielded cable would probably fix this, but I have been using VGA cables since my first monitor, and I’m rather bored of them.  HDMI is new and funky and digital, so obviously I had to try to get that working instead.  Mac minis don’t have HDMI ports, but they do have a DVI port, and because HDMI supports DVI natively all you need is the right adaptor.  I splashed out on this fancy little box which merges digital audio with the video signal (the Mac mini audio out is also a mini-TOSLINK port*, which is rather smashing).

It is too much to expect things to run smoothly just because the standards say that they should, though: the correct screen geometry information for the Samsung isn’t available over HDMI, or if it is my adapter box messes it up, so you end up with a nasty stretched 1024×768 desktop, which looks rubbish.  Fortunately for Apple users like me, the broken settings can be overridden with the excellent SwitchResX control panel program, but it is not easy figuring out the custom timing numbers you need to do this.  One can get rather tired of typing different permutations of “Samsung HDMI HDTV Mac mini Modeline 1080p Aaargh” into Google, so to save the sanity of any other Samsung Series 5 owners, here’s how I made it all work:

1. Connect the TV to the Mac via a DVI-HDMI cable or adapter and turn everything on.
2. Download the control panel part of SwitchResX from here (direct file link).  Unzip that file and run the SwitchResX Control application within.
3. Select “Custom” and click “+” at the bottom of the empty window to add a new custom resolution.  Make sure that “Use simplified settings” is unticked, and then enter the following settings:
   Pixel clock: 148.5
   Horizontal active: 1920
   Horizontal front porch: 86
   Horizontal sync width: 44
   Horizontal back porch: 150
   Positive horizontal sync
   Horizontal sync rate: 67.5
   Vertical active: 1080
   Vertical front porch: 4
   Vertical sync width: 10
   Vertical back porch: 30
   Positive vertical sync
   Vertical sync rate: 60.053
   These numbers are all interrelated, so you only need to type some of them in for the others to pop up automatically.
4. Click on “OK” and then click “Apply”.
5. Reboot, and wish really, really hard whilst thinking happy thoughts, and the magic technofairies might protect your telly and computer from bogons for the next few minutes.  If they do grant your desire, your telly will come up with a 1920 by 1080 pixel wide desktop in pin sharp digital crikeyvision.

There is, I discovered, a logic to those numbers up there, and I was able to arrive at them by a process of deduction rather than trial and error.  But I forgot to write down the method I used to figure it out, and for the life of me I can’t remember how I did it, so they’ll just have to stand as they are. Perhaps they’ll work for someone else.

Of course, my Mac mini is almost certainly unable to actually decode 1080p video and output the resulting 6 megapixel images at 60Hz without dropping about half the frames, thereby rendering the whole exercise gloriously, spectacularly pointless.  My iTunes visualisations do look lovely though.

* As it happens, I connected the mini-TOSLINK port to the HDMI converter using an old mini-to-standard TOSLINK cable that came with another, now-obsolete bit of Sony junk I wish I’d never wasted my money on, a Minidisc player.

For the search engines, here is a list of Samsung Series 5 model numbers as detailed in the manual, for which the above instructions should work: LE32A556, LE37A556, LE40A556, LE46A556, LE52A556, LE32A557, LE37A557, LE40A557, LE46A557, LE52A557, LE32A558, LE37A558, LE40A558, LE46A558, LE52A558, LE32A559, LE37A559, LE42A559, LE46A559, LE52A559.

11 comments • 2008-08-26 13:21 • Categories: Computers, Geek Stuff, Rage • Tags: Apple, Fix, HDMI, HDTV, Mac Mini, OS X, Samsung, Sony, SwitchRes X