The Netflix Watch Instantly feature is pretty cool. There are a bunch of interesting documentaries, some good foreign films, and loads of kids shows on there (including Doggy Poo). Since we have decided to see how long we can hold out before paying for cable or satellite TV, I thought I'd ease the pain a bit by rigging up a Watch Instantly setup for our TV. Here's how I did it.
First, I already had an old PC with a Radeon 7000 in it. So I had RCA video out. I also had a sound card. I needed the two cables: one RCA video cable to go from the video card to the VCR or TV, and the sound card-to-RCA splitter cable. This has a headphone-like plug on one end (for the sound card) and the red-white RCA cables for left and right audio on the other end. I plugged these from the computer into the VCR, because it was more accessible.
Next, I had to get network to this box. I was so tired of wireless dropping out when the neighbor microwaved their popcorn or whatever that I actually wired Cat5 to my entertainment center. Once that was working, I verified I could play the netflix movies on the TV. I set my resolution down to 800x600 to be truer to the TV's 648x486 or whatever it is. If I had a decent TV, I could have left it at a more readable resolution I'm sure.
The final step was finding some way to control the PC so that I could browse movies and select the one I wanted to play. Reading text on the TV was extremely difficult, so I wanted a better screen.
I realized that since Elly always has her laptop going, I could just set up VNC between that and the TV's PC. The laptop would be a really big, but versatile, remote control. So that's what I did. RealVNC on the PC and Chicken of the VNC on the laptop. It works like a charm:
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May 29th, 2008 at 07:31 AM Dude. sounds sweet, yet tough. We are probably going to drop cable and other things. This would be a sweet way to still watch stuff. Since everything is online anyway. Do you guys use this a lot?
May 29th, 2008 at 08:56 AM Yeah we use it all the time. Cable was ok with Tivo, but now that The Office is on nbc.com and we have all these NetFlix movies, I don't think I'd use the actual cable very much if I had it.