The last frontier.

As I’m clueless about the tech aspects, I have handed over this latest Hackintosh column to pseudonymous Hackintosh ace and all around good egg FU Steve:

“Thanks, Thomas. Your own recent upgrades to Blu-Ray capability in your HackMini make what follows especially timely.

A brief summary of Hackintosh creation shows that it involves two fields.

Hardware: The Hackintosh is made of cheap stock PC parts, available from many online vendors or from your local Fry’s Electronics. The hardware aspect of the ‘build’ has always been the easy part, and it’s literally no more difficult than making a Lego toy. If there’s a tricky bit it’s inserting those fiddly connectors for the front panel power switches and the LED activity lights, as those are not keyed. No smoke results if you get these wrong – just try again. As for the rest of it, all connectors are keyed and it’s impossible to get them wrong. For brands, the only ones which matter are Intel CPUs and Gigabyte motherboards, because that’s what the Hackintosh community favors. While ATI make some nice Radeon GPUs, if you are using a separate graphics card – increasingly unnecessary in these days of excellent integrated GPUs which come with the CPU – then nVidia is the way to go. It does not pay to be a pioneer here – stick with the GTX6xx series or earlier. Let the GTX7xx lads do the bleeding for you first. Other than those, nothing else is brand sensitive. Have at it when it comes to memory, power supplies, cases, keyboards, displays, speakers, etc. The world is your oyster. The only honorable exception is wi-fi where you simply must use the TP-Link wi-fi card. It’s $42, plug and play, confers full Airport capability and life is too short for the alternatives.

Software: Always the witches brew when it comes to Hackintoshes. Back in the OS Tiger days this was truly a job only for masochists and the terminally insane. Today, with Mountain Lion and superb free tools from Tonymacx86.com (time for a name change, guys?) hacking OS X to run on your PC parts has never been easier. Not as trivial as the hardware part, but follow the excellent instructions on that site and you will succeed, aided by an enthusiastic membership.

But there remains one aspect of software hacking which is still in the Dark Ages, and that is the process of getting the HDMI socket on modern builds to convey audio.

A brief history. A few years ago VGA (Video Graphics Array) was the way to go. IBM’s brilliant invention conveyed video through 15 pin connectors from the Hack to your display of choice. Sound was carried on a separate 3.5mm coaxial cable (or cables, for multichannel sound). VGA is robust, very easy to implement – nothing needs be done most of the time – and delivers excellent analog video.

Then along came DVI (Digital Video Interface) in a bewildering set of variations:

And one or more of these is what every Hack and most PCs use to convey video to a display with, once again, a separate cable for audio. DVI video can be analog or digital, depending on the connector, whereas the audio remains analog over the separate cable.

With the advent of large flat panel TVs the need to simplify things saw the creation of HDMI, the High-Definition Multimedia Interface, which conveys video and audio, both in purest digital, from Hackintosh to TV set. Getting video working requires only that an HDMI cable be connected between TV set and the Hackintosh. It’s audio which is an SOB. The problem is that getting HDMI working on a Hack is sheer bloody hell. There is no standardization, many software apps are needed, the hacking involves the most arcane changes to code in various files and the results are anything but guaranteed. Just look at the length of the discussion on this topic on the above referenced board and you will see they frequently stretch to dozens of pages and hundreds of postings, many issues remaining unresolved. So the Hackintosh community definitely needs to go where no man has gone before and come up with an app to do this for all but the code monkeys of the world.

But there is a simpler solution. Having tried – and failed – to make Thomas’s HackMini enable its HDMI socket audio (via his nVidia GT430 graphics card), I resorted to the easy fix. Using TonyMac’s Multibeast I added the Voodoo kext to his System->Library->Extensions directory and then moved the existing AppleHDA.kext to an applications directory for storage. The two do not coexist. Then I rebuilt permissions, just to be safe. Here’s what I’m talking about:

There are several versions of Voodoo – just keep trying until one works. The first did the trick for me.

Then you need to go into Applications->Utilities->AudioMidi Setup and dial in 48000 Hz as the Format, thus:

Restart and you will have working HDMI video and audio, the latter after going into SystemPreferences->Sound->Output and choosing one of the four ‘Digital’ options – try one after the other until it works. No need to restart for this step.

The upside of the Voodoo approach is that it’s fast and easy. The downside is that if you restart the Hack you may need to redo the AudioMidi Setup step, which takes all of five seconds. Further, you will be limited to 2+1 channel sound, not the 5+1 or 7+1 offered by the proper hack. Until the Hackintosh community develops a systematic hack to get HDMI audio working, this is the easiest way.”

Thank you, FU. Now my Blu-Ray experience is complete …. until I add a 90″ Sharp LED display and 7+1 surround sound, that is!

The Sharp 90″ newly listed by Costco – for all of $7,500.
Remember when the Pioneer 104″ was $100,000 not so long ago?

The other night I was watching the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West where the steam train idles while Charles Bronson gets off to meet the assassins. The breathing of the train’s massive piston is like nothing I have ever heard, and HDMI digital audio is to thank for that. I then changed to Steve McQueen’s Le Mans also in Blu-Ray and reveled in the sound of two of the greatest endurance racers ever – the brute Porsche 917 and the beautiful Ferrari 512. Though calling any Ferrari ‘beautiful’ is an exercise in the tautological. Just ‘Ferrari’ suffices.

If you have not yet done so, I encourage you to look into adding HDMI connections for video and audio to your TV. Beware that the colors are all over the place after using VGA so be prepared to re-tune things.

For those disinclined to build a Hackintosh, the only Apple solution is in the current MacMini which is the only Mac which an HDMI output:

Of course, you will have to add external storage and an external BluRay drive if you want to watch Blu-Ray movies and rip them for storage. Also hope the gadget doesn’t overheat. Apple claims the HDMI output delivers audio and video; I have not tested it, nor will I be. New MacMinis start at $600. The cheapest version with an SSD runs some $1,099 with 4GB RAM and no DVD drive, which is outrageous. Used mid-2010 (the one with HDMI added) can be found on eBay for $400.

Bigger is better.

When I wrote about installing a 4TB drive in the HackMini the other day, to store large Blu-Ray movie files, I added:

Well, it did not take long to admit I was wrong, and I have installed a second 4TB drive in the HackMini and given away all my Blu-Ray DVDs to friends. There’s nothing quite like direct access to a movie which has been stripped off all the junk they typically come with nowadays (sort of like Windows come to think of it, though the preferred path there is to avoid the product all together) and physical media deny ease of cataloging and retrieval, both easily added once the movie resides on a hard drive.

Two 4TB drives in the HackMini, plus the usual cable mess.

The cheapest 4TB drive currently at Amazon is the Seagate ST4000DM000, retailing at some $175 + tax. In fact you can get it in a USB3 enclosure for even less than that – $165!

Seagate 4TB drive with enclosure.

So if you need a 4TB internal drive, buy the boxed one and discard the enclosure. (A similar waste of materials applies to cheap and excellent Brother laser printers. Rather than replace the fuser at the end of its life, it’s cheaper to buy a new printer ….)

The full complement of drives driven by the HackMini:

The six 3TB external drives reside in two Mediasonic boxes – with room for two more drives. The SSD contains the OS and Applications, with a small Hitachi notebook drive backing it up. You can see the Blu-Ray player at the bottom of the list.

The pricing per terabyte for 2, 3 and 4TB drives is identical. Reckon on $45 per TB. 1TB drives are no longer economical at $65. A few dollars more gets you double the capacity.

Now storing data on so large a drive makes no sense without an identical backup drive. The thought of losing 4TB is not one calculated to improve your sleep cycle.

This piece gives a good overview of areal density trends in HDDs, suggesting we will be seeing 10TB HDDs – probably for a lot less than $45/TB – in 2-3 years’ time:

More than enough for all those D800 monster files!

I’ll report back in the event I have any reliability issues, but after one year of running four 3TB drives (2 Seagate, 2 Western Digital) in my Mediasonic box, I have not had one problem, so I’m optimistic all will be well.

Speaking of the excellent Mediasonic box, I can confirm that mine sees and formats the 4TB drives fine. By contrast, my ancient Aluratek drive cradle which holds a 1.5TB Time Machine drive for my main Hackintosh sees 3TB drives as 1TB and 4TB drives as 1.8TB, so it’s useless for these large HDDs. So if you propose using a 3 or 4TB drive in a drive cradle or older HDD enclosure, first check that the enclosure will work properly.

What is most disappointing is how slow Solid State Drives have been to reap economies of scale. These are generally from makers who have no legacy HDD business, so they have every incentive to innovate and improve. Yet at the time of writing, 1TB SSDs cost an arm and a leg – over $2,000 which is plain silly – and 500MB ones run $400-500, or $1,000 per TB. That’s twenty times the cost of HDDs. It seems that every time prices of SSDs drop, HDDs make another storage leap, keeping SSDs uncompetitive.

HDD makers – from Wikipedia. Only three remain.

There are still great advantages to SSDs and all my three Hackintoshes use a small 64 or 128GB SSD ($60-90 today) as the start-up drive, containing OS X and applications. Start-up is so fast that there’s no going back to HDDs for this purpose, and while my Hacks run months on end, powered 7/24, the very fast application launching SSDs add makes them worthwhile. They run much cooler too, of course.

High definition at a bargain price.

These are the most exciting times for photographers, with 4K displays coming to market in the guise of LED TVs.

I wrote the other day of the $220 32″ Seiki TV I bought to replace two 21.5″ displays for my day job. Easily wall mounted it is working splendidly, delivering 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution, driven by my back-up economy Hackintosh using an ancient nVidia 9800GTX+ graphics card. The all in cost, with display, is some $1,000 and any failed part is replaceable same day – it’s called a short drive to Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley – with the costliest part being the $220 display. Try that with your iMac.

For comparison, the Retina Display in the MacBook Pro is 2560 x 1600. You can expect to see these on most laptops in the new future, as well as on the iPad mini.

Now a new breed of LED display panel is coming to market, generally referred to as ‘4K’, meaning 3840 x 2160 pixels, or four times as many as the current HD TV spec of 1920 x 1080. Sony will sell you 55″/65″ ones for $5-7,000 or an 84″ version for $25,000. But there’s no need to pay those silly prices when you can get the newly released 50″ Seiki – the same as the maker of my modest 32″ 1080P set – for much less:

50″ Seiki 4K TV.

Weighing but 49lbs, it comes with three HDMI inputs and offers far higher resolution than the overpriced displays from the likes of NEC (whose 27″ 2560 x 1440 sells for $930) or the Dell’s like-resolution 30″ U3014 which is $1250. The Seiki offers almost 3 times the display area at 50% higher resolution for $150 more. Optimal photographic use would be to tile the display into two or four tiles to allow, say, Lightroom Loupe/Develop views, as well as Photoshop, all running simultaneously on the one big screen.

Now I very much doubt whether current PC hardware (by which I mean Hackintosh boxes, as Windows is anathema here, though feel free to check back when hell has frozen over) can deliver the 4K resolution of which the Seiki is capable, but there’s good news. Just yesterday, Anandtech ran an article profiling the first Gigabyte motherboards which will run the forthcoming Intel Haswell CPU ($300 for the i7), and we can expect to see these at Amazon within a couple of weeks, probably priced around $100-200, depending on the external connections provided. A related article discusses Haswell and its 4K capabilities, specifically focusing on Home Theater PCs. Their test saw them using the integrated HD4600 GPU which comes with the CPU, but I imagine that an nVidia GTX660 ($200) would provide abundant power to drive the 4K display with no issues. Indeed, they used the same Seiki mentioned above to prove this. Anand specifically state:

They mention some connectivity issues with the Seiki, but I’m confident it’s not something that will remain unsolved for long. Further, they go on to say:

How does all this work for the Mac OS X devotee and Hackintosh builder? I believe we will see a new version of OS X, 10.9, at WWDC in a week’s time or maybe shortly thereafter, which will support Haswell. As for Gigabyte – the preferred motherboard maker for Hackintosh builders, those should be out by the end of this month and you can bet that the excellent software hackers at Tonymacx86.com will be all over the project in no time. These guys live for change! So things look promising, and the appeal of a 4K 50″ display for processing photographs is great indeed. Exciting times.

Will we see a >50″ 4K LED set from Apple in the near future? Who cares? I, for one, do not have the required $7,000 to blow on jewelry, especially when I can build something better for $2,300. Gizmodo has a review of the Seiki, but it’s written by 16 year olds for 14 year olds. You are better off with the comments at Amazon US.

4K on Blu-Ray?

Sure.