October 31st, 2009

We don’t have cable. Sure, it was part of the plan to get cable after we moved to California. But financial conditions conspired against us, and we’ve just never been able to afford it. Fortunately, not long after we got here, on-demand TV over the Internet was just starting to mature. Back in 2007, my sister gave us an old Medion computer she no longer needed. We were incredibly lucky that the computer’s video card included a composite video-out port so it could be connected directly to our TV. After adding a Wi-Fi card to the Medion, we were able to stream shows from sites like hulu (which was still in beta at the time). It worked well for awhile. But eventually, the video card stopped working with the TV. I gave the Medion away (to Andy Melton – I wonder if he’s still using it?) and, being an Apple enthusiast, decided to replace it with a used G4 tower. I performed some upgrades on the G4 to make it as powerful as possible. But its performance was always inconsistent. I blame it on the fact that the machine is just too old to handle streaming video over Wi-Fi. (I still have the G4 and have been trying to sell it.) From there, I moved on to using the PlayOn server software to stream online video to my XBox 360. And PlayOn isn’t a bad solution. But, like the G4, it tends to be inconsistent. Especially with hulu. (I really do like PlayOn, and I think it’s got great potential, and I’m not entirely giving up on it, yet.) Really, the best way to get online video on to a TV at this point is to have a good, fairly modern computer connected directly to the set. Late last summer, we purchased an ASUS EEE PC Netbook, as Jen was in the market for a laptop. It dawned on me a couple weeks ago that we could probably use the Netbook to do the video streaming. The challenge would lie in getting it connected. The Netbook has a standard VGA-out port, and our eight-year old Toshiba TV only has composite video and S-video inputs. Some type of signal conversion would be necessary to make it work. Some quick googling turned up a converter box on Amazon that I thought would work. I placed an order, and the converter arrived a few days later. Last night, I got the converter, the laptop and all of the cables together to get it hooked up.

The converter itself isn’t very big. Just a little bit bigger than your typical remote control.

The converter has connection ports on three sides and a bunch of controls on the other. It also came with three cables.

The cables are a composite RCA video cable, a USB-to-A/C adapter and a VGA patch cable. I left the video cable in its wrapper as the converter supports S-video, and I already had an S cable left over from the G4 setup. I originally connected the cables like this:

Keep in mind that none of the ports on the converter are labeled, and I didn’t know at the time that the VGA cable that runs from the laptop’s VGA-out port to the converter is supposed to be connected like this:

(Pro tip: read the manual!) Once I had the converter properly connected, I decided to restart the laptop, as I wasn’t getting any picture on the TV. After the restart, I saw the WinXP logo on the Toshiba.

This was good, as I knew now that the Netbook was communicating properly with the converter and in turn, the television. Unfortunately, once the laptop finished booting, my TV looked like this:

I consulted the manual (which, by the way, is not terribly comprehensive) and it said to ensure that, if you’re using a laptop, that it’s set to use the external display. I pulled up the EEE’s Display Properties, and after some trial-and-error, I discovered that I needed to make sure that the second display was selected in the drop-down menu, and that the check box next to “Extend Desktop across both displays” (or whatever it says, exactly) is selected. Once i did that (and clicked the Apply button), my TV looked like this:

(I tried checking the option that said something like “Make this my primary display,” but when I did that, my TV went black.) As I found out, my TV was displaying an “extended Desktop,” which made the laptop behave as though the TV was an extension of its built-in display, instead of just mirroring what was on the built-in display (which is what I had hoped it’d do). At this point, I launched a web browser, and by coincidence, it opened on the “TV side.” I navigated tu hulu and began streaming an episode of “Community:”

And while the low-quality nature of these photos doesn’t do it justice, the quality of the video was pretty good. And once the video was fully buffered, the stream was almost flawless. I should emphasize that this is a lo-fi solution for streaming video to a standard-definition TV. Not sure how well this’d work for an HD set. But it could be an option if the TV didn’t have a VGA-in port. This setup could also be used in conjunction with a projector, but since it doesn’t seem possible to get the converter connection to mirror the built-in display, that could be problematic for some presentations. I also noticed that, once the converter box was disconnected from the laptop, I had to go through the whole setup process again after reconnecting. A minor inconvenience, but something to consider. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this setup. Would even consider getting a second Netbook, just to have a dedicated computer for this purpose.

Tags: Amazon, Apple Computer, ASUS, Flickr, hulu, TV
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