Hi
I have a (hardly ever used) Mac Mini. The 3.1 (2.53Ghz, 4Gb)
I have just bought a HD Projector which I have only used with my PS3 in the week that I have had it. As I hardly use the Mac Mini as a desktop PC and its powerful enough to output HD I would like to use it for media. I have just installed XBMC, currently with the PLEX integrated skin Quartz. (I am running PLEX Media Server on a PC)
I would like to use dual display from the Mac Mini, but they would need to be at different resolutions. This is because I have a small monitor (1280x724) which would sit nicely on top of my amp. If just playing music, I would not want to have to drop the screen every time.
Is it possible to XBMC running simultaneously on both displays, one VGA 1024x768 and one mini-dvi-to-HDMI at 1080p?
kevmic Wrote:Hi
I have a (hardly ever used) Mac Mini. The 3.1 (2.53Ghz, 4Gb)
I have just bought a HD Projector which I have only used with my PS3 in the week that I have had it. As I hardly use the Mac Mini as a desktop PC and its powerful enough to output HD I would like to use it for media. I have just installed XBMC, currently with the PLEX integrated skin Quartz. (I am running PLEX Media Server on a PC)
I would like to use dual display from the Mac Mini, but they would need to be at different resolutions. This is because I have a small monitor (1280x724) which would sit nicely on top of my amp. If just playing music, I would not want to have to drop the screen every time.
Is it possible to XBMC running simultaneously on both displays, one VGA 1024x768 and one mini-dvi-to-HDMI at 1080p?
Nope. If you select video mirroring I believe it will take the resolution of the smaller screen. You can output two different resolution windows, but XBMC will only have one window/screen. A better solution be to use two screens at two different resolutions, having XBMC play on 1080. On your smaller screen run a webUI (check the add-ons for some good alternatives. The default webUI is meh) in a browser. That will let you select music and everything on the small monitor without having to have the full XBMC video feet to it.
If you have a smart phone or tablet you can also do this with one of the several XBMC remote apps out there. They're great because you can totally control music without having to turn a TV screen on at all. Some even have some nice navigation methods that I would love to see be brought back as actual skins on normal XBMC video.
Thanks for the suggestion! I tried this and it worked fine.
But... It wasn't really what I wanted. It would have been great to see the full XBMC interface on both. I like the visualisations for music and it looks quite cool on the small screen when the room is in "audio-mode".
But your suggestion gave me my next idea... if I am going to have two interfaces why not have two instances?
This worked ok... and with a custom build and a bit of tweaking on the startup scripts I had two instances running with different settings (i.e. the small one started up in lowres fullscreen1 while the big one started up in 1080p fullscreen2)
but... then I fell in to the classic problem of the first XBMC to start grabbing the mouse and keyboard and not being able to control the second instance. I say "classic" because after reading the forums this has been a battled with for some time without a successful solution.
so... in the end I gave up. After two days of messing about I took the easy option. I have a bunch of spare thinkpad laptops from an old job... so now I have the Mac Mini running XBMC in full res on the HD Projector, and XBMC running on a small discreet laptop hidden away. They both use the Plex integrated skin Quartz so can both read the same library. The thinkpad is perfectly capable of playing music and I have disabled the video options from the menu so its nice and "clean", if you know what I mean
So I got what I wanted without spending money and also using some of the old kit I had which was only gathering dust, which is always a plus I guess. (We all hoarde old kit which we are damn sure we will use one day but it's rare to actually do so!
)
Thanks for the suggestion though... it started me off in my circular route to a solution.
Particularly thanks for the suggestion of using my iPhone as a controller. I have it set up so I can control either instance
Cheers
Kev
But.. In which scenario would you need to have it running on both screens at the same time? If you only have your desired screen turned on XBMC (or Plex) should appear on that, right?