Do you have a laptop? (do I even have to ask) or even and old desktop laying around? Does your video card on it have an S-Video output on it? (probably does) If not then HDMI or VGA will also work.
Guess what I just figured out…for as low as $2 USD shipped on ebay or anywhere else online you can grab a cable that allows you to hook your laptop to your TV. No more watching HULU on the stupid laptop screen! I’m loving this. Either I’m just really slow, or this is just something not many people have tried. I’m one of those people that is too busy to have time to watch a lot of TV. I don’t feel like spending $100 a month on cable, either. I have basic and that’s good enough. Now that I have this cable, I can watch HD quality shows and movies from all sorts of websites. There is hulu or any of the networks like abc, fox, nbc, mtv and many more that have full episodes and movies.
My cable is Svideo and a headphone audio jack on one end, and that converts to the 3 rca plugs (white, red, and yellow) on the opposite end. S-video is only video, not audio. Hooking it up is so easy a kid could figure it out. Anyways, I’m not trying to recommend which hong kong retailer to get a cheap cable from, just make sure you get one that’s long enough to reach your laptop. Once the cable is plugged in, I put my tv in the proper video mode, hit function – F8 and the video transfers from the laptop lcd over to the tv. Piece of cake. The quality is amazing, on my older 32″ Toshiba picture tube set (480p) but I’m sure it would be even better on an HD set. This is also a very easy way for photographers to hook a laptop to any TV to show a client their images, whether you’re displaying them in Lightroom or any other way. I think I’ve been having more fun with the cable for entertainment purposes. The wife and I have been using the laptop to catch up on our favorite shows, and best of all everything is on-demand. No need to record anything. It’s like a “Poor Man’s” DV-R or digital cable. The one drawback is that you need to make sure you have enough bandwidth so that the video will buffer fast enough to play smoothly. If it doesn’t, just hit pause, go get a snack, and come back in 15 minutes. I just wish I knew about this awesome trick sooner.
