The other day I was watching some national geographic clips on the net and a solution occurred to me… we could watch what is on my computer on our big tv and possibly more people (the rest of my family) could enjoy learning about endangered sharks off the coast of Australia as well.

This solution involves 3 simple chords in order to make your regular tv an internet tv! I have a mac book and if you have a pc I’m sure you can find a similar solution. Apple has a mini-dvi to dvi adapter (or vga if you wanna go that route.) and If you want to use your HD I reccomend getting the dvi to HDMI adapter which they might sell at your local electronics/apple store as well what will be helpful too is an headphone to audio solution for your surround sound or tv if you don’t already have this equipment. (so that is 3 chords for a full functional internet tv solution) which was $40-$50 total. If you really wanna get fancy you can purchase a wireless mouse and or wireless keyboard. this beats the apple tv which is running for around $230 not including tax and shipping.

The benefits of this solution are.

• Surf the web using your tv as a monitor.
• watch movies from netflix (try it out for a 2 week trial and see how you like it 8.99 a month unlimited movies you can stream)
• watch episodes of your favorite shows (you don’t have to buy them on itunes they stream!.. visit your favorite tv stations website ie. abc.com)
• but if you did buy them on itunes you can watch your podcasts and itunes stuff as well.
• if you are a designer possibly designing on there I’m not sure about the aspect ratio though and dimension distortion.
• play online games.
• record things from your tv laptop if you have a digital video recorder hooked up.
• share with others and not be huddled up on the corner of your couch with your lap top.
• it’s cheaper and more beneficial than buying an apple tv.

check it out it might be a better solution than even getting cable or sattellite you might be able to cancel that stuff. You might have to sacrifice a little bit of quality but who’s counting pixels anyway and has HD really affected your tv experience if your honest I think you will say “No, I get into the action just as much with a lower quality movie file than with the HD.” After the “…but it’s so cool wears off” I think you’d rather have the money in your pocket or at least give it to a better cause than overpriced media or an apple tv. Unless you have money to flush? I highly reccomend this easy, quick, and cheap digital tv solution. (If your hardware is different than what I’ve listed above you can surely find what you need on the web to make a home audio/video solution for your laptop or desktop computer at an affordable price.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.