So Easy, It’s Hard…or Not
The past week I’ve spent a great deal of time researching how to go about hooking up one of our old computers to our HDTV. As I mentioned in my Friday post, this is partially to accomplish getting Tivo-like functionality upstairs but also to play back media stored on a server that will be living out in our garage (my parents didn’t seem to like it in the places I stashed it in the house). I did all my research, found out things about resolutions and timings, and downloaded all the programs I needed. I take the computer in next to the TV, hook it up, and…it worked. It defaulted to a widescreen resolution, so all I needed to do was bump it up a little and then bring in the corners of the desktop to fix the overscan issue, and everything was done. No problems, no hassle, and video plays back fine (haven’t tried the TV tuner yet though). I can’t decide whether to be happy that it was so easy or ticked off that I did all that research for nothing.
In related news, I think I’ve found a good software package that will allow me to accomplish the goal of streaming live TV down to my dad’s study without having to do some crazy tweaking. Of course, we need to get an ethernet jack in the room where the HTPC is going to live, but that’ll probably come this summer. For now, progress has been made, and the future is bright.