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.
