Mac Mini early 2009 and your old TV
Not having jumped on the LCD or Plasma bandwagon, I still have a fine three year old CRT television in my living room. When I recently bought a Mac Mini (early 2009 edition), I could not get it to show any output on my TV. According to the Apple support tech: the newest Mac Mini’s do not support this combination anymore. As my previous PC was a Windows machine, I tried to Bootcamp in XP and try there, but even then I could not get it to work. I guess it’s the combination of the new GeForce 9400 graphics and the Mini-DVI to Video connector Apple sells.
Plasma and LCD TV’s usually have a DVI or HDMI input. However CRT TV’s usually only have S-Video or Composite inputs, which is a problem as the official connector does not work. However I found a solution by buying a special device that converts any VGA signal to S-Video, Composite or RGB. It’s the Konig PCTV adapter, and works like a charm:
- Resolutions up to 1280×1024. Even though a CRT TV does not support resolutions like this, this is important if you want to run your TV in mirrored display mode with a normal computer monitor.
- Outputs S-Video, Composite, RGB or YCbCr
- PAL or NTSC
- On Screen Display (OSD) to change various settings
- It even has a remote control!
Found this device for €59 online, and had to buy a €19 Mini-DVI to VGA adapter from Apple. Way cheaper in any case than buying a new TV 