![Hundie Jo [Dot] Com](http://www.hundiejo.com/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache2/7d6a910bbe08845c0836a517a70936d5.png){kind=small}
Henry Imler May 13th, 2008
Over the years I have tried a variety of different methods to watch TV shows on my TV. First I would download divx shows off of bittorrent, then encode and burn them onto a VCD and play them through my DVD player. The drawbacks? Time and quality - It would take a while for the show to download, encode and burn. Additionally, their were often encoding errors, which of course sucked. To top it off, you wasted a CD with each show.
Then came the Tivo. When Tivo added network capability, I found I could download the show, encode it into a format the Tivo could play and then upload it to my Tivo. After this was finished, it was easy-peasy on the T-Veasy. No longer was I wasting CDs with each TV show. However, this process suffered from the other problems that the VCD method had - encoding errors and time.
A few months ago a glorious thing happened. Microsoft added divx playback capability to the Xbox 360. This ushered in the golden age of TV watching. I could play any TV show or movie that I had on my computer on my Xbox 360 in my living room. I watched all 5 seasons of the Justice Leage this way. It worked great. There was no encoding or burning to worry about. The only time consuming thig was downloading the shows.
Tonight for the first time I tried something different. More than a few people have recomended Hulu to me for watching the shows that I have missed. Hulu is an ad supported streaming video site. I have no idea if they are authorized to show these videos but I will continue to use the site until it is taken down. Since the 360-divx method was working so well, I never got around to trying it out. I gave it a test spin today on my desktop while I was working on a paper; it worked really well. As Meredith and I were cooking an idea popped into my head. My lappy has a S-Video output. I wondered if I could hook up the laptop to the TV and play The Office through my laptop and onto the TV. So, as were were eating our broiled steaks and steamed green beans (had a really good supper tonight) we gave it a spin.
It worked - beautifully. I recomend trying it out. Additionally, if you have a Wii, perhaps you can get it to play though its internet browser.
- Media
- Comments(7)
I hear the next thing they’re working on is being able to send television through the airwaves. I don’t know if I believe it.
Hulu is owned by the networks, so it won’t be taken down. I watched the pilot of the original Battlestar Galactica on there. The quality is very good, but they don’t put the ads in the original commercial break slots, so they just pop in in the middle of a scene, which is obnoxious. On demand content is where it’s at. Who would want to schedule their viewing around when a show airs or even have to wait to Tivo a rerun.
You know, I was wondering about that - I remember hearing that the networks were going to start something like that - just did not know it was hulu. Have you watched a hulu show through firefox with adblock plus and the adblock updater on? That is how I have watched them and I did not see any ads when I watched the office.
On demand would be great - but aren’t there significant badwidth issues to work though?
How is the s-video quality on your laptop> I have an HP and it is really bad. Color is weird. What type of laptop do you have?
My Hp laptop is a dv2620us and it works great. I bought it at the turn of the year and she is running vista like a champ. We have used Meredith’s lappy, which is a dv6000 something or other and it works great there as well.
do you get the problem where the laptop widescreen is not reflected as ‘wide’ screen on your tv? For some reason, my TV eats up 1 inche of the widescreen. The s-video quality is also not as sharp as I had expected. I would have thought the quality would be so much better - being digital and all
I don’t have that problem E.I. But, then again, my TV is 4:3 and about 6 years old. The quality though the S-Video (which is not supposed to be high def, I don’t think) is sharp for standard TV for me.