Mac mini flips out when HDTV is powered off?

[kalisphoenix]

I've Googled, Wikipedia'ed, and MRoogled about this, but I haven't been able to find any useful information.

I have a CD Mac mini, which of course has DVI out. I recently (Friday) bought an RCA HDTV and connected the two using a Belkin (sigh) HDMI <-> DVI cable. The display worked fine, aside from the annoying "Either two inches of black space around the image or overscan" dilemma because of the 1366x768 (or w/e) resolution.

The bigger problem, though, was that whenever I powered off the screen, the Mac mini would crash. It would become completely unresponsive to network connections and any audio playing at the time would stutter until I powered the machine off. It would not respond to any other input, whatever the source.

I switched to a VGA connection, which has visibly less brilliant colors but fixes the image size problem and the annoying crashing problem. I still don't understand the crashing problem, though, since I thought that DVI only carried display information, nothing likely to crash the Mac mini.

Sorry if this is answered somewhere else or is painfully obvious. I've never heard or read about this, so I find it kinda puzzling.

 

[cruzrojas]

I have almost the same problem with my mini. If I try to disconect the vga monitor to connect another one the mac mini crashes. And when I connect the second one there is no way to get the mini back to work, so I have to restart the machine. Maybe it has something to do whit the TV disconnecting all the inputs when is turned off.

 

[kalisphoenix]

I have almost the same problem with my mini. If I try to disconect the vga monitor to connect another one the mac mini crashes. And when I connect the second one there is no way to get the mini back to work, so I have to restart the machine. Maybe it has something to do whit the TV disconnecting all the inputs when is turned off.

Weird. VGA works for me just fine. By which I mean that I can turn the monitor off without crashing the Mac mini I haven't tried unplugging the cable, though.

I've never had that problem with any other computer, though. I thought it was bad enough for it to misbehave this way with DVI, which I thought might be excusable because of added complexity or something... but VGA? WTF? That's just creepy.

 

[JAT]

I've been hotswapping my DVI and VGA cables with no problems. That's weird.

To the first guy with the color problem: Can you calibrate it properly? VGA shouldn't be worse than DVI.

 

[kalisphoenix]

I've been hotswapping my DVI and VGA cables with no problems. That's weird.

To the first guy with the color problem: Can you calibrate it properly? VGA shouldn't be worse than DVI.

It's not *much* worse than DVI, but it's noticeable. The blues are tremendous through DVI, and less bright through VGA.

 

[JAT]

Did you calibrate it properly? They both keep a PC video signal in it's base components for transport, which is the proper way to maintain quality. But video cards and TVs will look different with both.