maccontrol

Do you ever wish you can run all of your home entertainment stuff with your Mac and a remote? Well, the fine folks at maccontrol certainly hope that you do. They have two products that are designed to make this happen: the maccontrol connector and the maccontrol remote.

The Connector can control but to 4 infrared devices and can use 4 serial connections to control other things. It links up with your WiFi network and leverages the power of BonJour to autodiscover your Mac, other Connectors, and the Remote.

The Remote includes a 2.5 inch LCD and a scrollwheel which makes it very iPod like. The display can show a program guide, your iTunes library, or even RSS feeds.

The bundle will set you back $800 but they are currently running a Macworld preorder special for $649.

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Source: http://www.maccontrol.com/

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Macworld Accessories

Do you ever wish you can run all of your home entertainment stuff with your Mac and a remote? Well, the fine folks at maccontrol certainly...

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Thom Brooks

While this looks like a pretty clean solution, it seems a bit prohibitively expensive. Instead, if you're up for a little DIY, I would suggest:

A decent, trainable, universal remote like the Home Theater Master MX-500. I got mine on ebay for $81.

The IRTrans + iRed bundle. This is a USB IR sender and receiver, works quite well. I spent 105.50 euros (about $127 at the time of this posting.) http://www.irtrans.de/en/index.php

The iRed software is applescriptable and works very well with IRTrans. It came bundled with IRTrans, be sure to specify when ordering. http://www.filewell.com/iRed/details.html?presse-info.html

Finally, I'd get a KeySpan USB to serial port adapter if you need the ability to talk to devices. The USA49w is a great product. They cost about $134 online. http://keyspan.com/products/usb/USA49w/

All told that's under $350 for the same functionality, and it splits out the components a little more so they're separately upgradeable. Now granted, theirs is a standalone solution whereas mine requires another component - the computer. In my case that's a Mac mini. If you don't already have a nice small machine acting as an HTPC, you can buy a refurbed 1.25ghz mini for $379, and you've got everything that a computer can do.

For a look at my setup, see my homepage link.