Here's another that has switched (1 Viewer)

After reading here how much everyone has liked there macs, I have also made the switch. Last week I bought a Mini and just love it. I saw how everyone was saying how easy it was to set up and use and I was skeptical. The skepticism disappeared real quick. When I connected my router and printer it did everything for me. I was up in running in fifteen minutes and most of that was spent shutting down the pc that was being replaced.
I downloaded and installed a mini golf game and installation was a breeze. Hooking up my camera was so much simpler, I still can't get over how easy it was.
My son liked my Mac so much he went out and bought an IMac. He is into creating his own music and uses a software called ProTools. According to him everything is running much smoother on the Mac than on his PC. So it is safe to say that we are both happy with our Macs.

One question, I want to record some family video tapes to the hard drive, can someone tell me what I will need to do this? My goal is to have them on the hard drive and when I get an AppleTV to use that to view them on the TV. Thanks to all of your posts that have been most informative!

Calvin,

I am at a loss to answer the video tape question, however....

Congrats on your Mac Mini and your son's IMac.

I tell you, something must be in the kool-aid cause so many
people are starting to show up in this area touting how much
better they find their Mac over a PC.

Keep us posted on you and your son's progress here, Calvin!

Calvin...welcome!! I'm sure you've just touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the Mac will do for you. For converting your old videos, your best bet is probably either the EyeTv Hybrid or EyeTV 250. Both will let you import video into iMovie. The EyeTV is smaller and cheaper, but uses the Mac's processor to do the heavy lifting with the encoding. The 250 has a built-in hardware encoder so it won't tax the CPU as much. Keep in mind that digital video is a space hog so you may run out of room quickly if you got the Mini with the stock 60GB drive.

Of course, if your video camera records on DV tapes, all you need to do then is to hook up a firewire cable from your camcorder to the Mac and transfer those files.

Otherwise, you'll need extra hardware, like the EyeTV one already mentioned or specialized hardware like from Canopus. No experience with them, but they have a good reputation.

-Christian

Yep... works like a charm, If you have a DV camera it works as a bridge. You can record straight into imovie, do some editing and export to iDVD or quicktime for aTV use. Just be warned that DV takes up a lot of hdd space so be sure you have lots of room for the initial conversion into iMovie. Once you convert to quicktime the files sizes will drop significantly.

-EJ

Thanks to all the information. I havea 250 gig external harddrive on the way to help with the space. I wish I had thedigital camera but these were filmed before those become available. Thanks again!