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.

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