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Turn iMac into TV?

poiihy

poiihy

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Aug 22, 2014
2,301
62
How would I go about turning my iMac into a TV? I have a comcast cable box; it is the most basic one (called a "Digital Transport Adapter") and it only has RF video out (the coaxial cable one). Too bad it doesn't have any HDMI or composite video at least :mad: . Well i'd probably need some sort of tuner to channel 3 or 4 coming from the box. And it would probably use some software in OS X.
Now what about the remote? Can I make the remote work with the iMac's IR receiver, and change volume and stuff? Power button could put iMac to sleep.
And this would be great as a DVR. How would that work?
This is an Early 2009 iMac. It has no target display mode :(
 
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So basically I need a tv tuner stick with a remote. Then program the comcast remote to work with the stick. Now how does the stick work? Does the stick use software which shows the video in a window? What would the power button do? Also the stick would be behind the machine so to get IR signals to it I would need a fibre-optic cable to it. I'd rather use the built-in IR sensor in the iMac but that seems out of the question.

Man it really sucks that the comcast box only has RF video out. They put an RF video tuner in their box so if you want to connect it to a monitor you need to get an expensive tuner to de-modulate the rf video! So inefficient.

The signal from the box is analog so i'd need an analog stick.

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What do you call the little coaxial cable connector for analog RF video? The one which you connect your antenna to your TV?
 
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If you put the tuner stick on a USB "extension cable", you can mount it wherever you wish. There is also a clever little clip-on USB extender designed for the iMac which plugs into a rear USB port and remotes it to the front of the iMac.

The cable connector is simply a RG-59 Coaxial crimp-on connector.
 
poiihy said:
I'm not buying any expensive thing if all I want is to tune to channel 3 in analog.
Click to expand...

The hardware for what you are wanting to do costs money and if you don't want to pay for the hardware then you won't be tuning to channel in analog then.
 
brand said:
The hardware for what you are wanting to do costs money and if you don't want to pay for the hardware then you won't be tuning to channel in analog then.
Click to expand...

I don't want to pay lots of money for a premium device with fancy software and many features when I only have one channel. I just want a cheap and simple device.
 
poiihy said:
I don't want to pay lots of money for a premium device with fancy software and many features when I only have one channel. I just want a cheap and simple device.
Click to expand...

Then buy Windows for a couple hundred dollars and install it. Then you will have your choice of cheap and simple devices. Seems kind of counter productive though if you ask me. I guess in the end though you would get the kind of device that you are looking for, albeit at the cost of running Mac OS X.
 
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