family visit and technology

[cellio]

We went to my parents' house this evening. (Their holiday, not mine, but the gift thing is a strong family tradition.) During dinner someone mentioned a gift gone wrong from yesterday: my sister, not understanding the technologies involved, had bought my mother (a dedicated Elvis fan) an SD card with photos and some MP3s. She had thought that she was buying a means to play them, but no -- and since she doesn't know this space, the pricing didn't tip her off. They were talking at dinner about hooking this up to my father's new iMac somehow so she could view/listen, which is more work than anyone intended. (I assume the iMac doesn't have a direct interface and they were going to go through a camera via USB to copy files to disk, or something.)

The digital photo frame we gave my father an hour later made that much easier. :-)

I am now in possession of a Roku box for streaming Netflix to the TV -- yay! There's a bit of delayed gratification, however; due to a bug [*] and connection-type limitations in our TV, I need to go buy some component-video cables. So tomorrow I will be able to set it up (and finish rewiring the TV cluster because, hey, if you have to wade in anyway...). I promised Dani a wiring diagram in exchange for setup help. (This is help of the "hold this" and "plug that in there" variety; actually figuring it out is my job.)

[*] If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video. Neither the documentation nor Google has been able to help me figure out why. I sure hope component video has no such complications. (Currently the Tivo (series 1) and DVD player are both connected via composite; I'd like to upgrade the DVD player to component and move that composite connection to the Roku box.) The TV does not support three composite connections, only two -- so the third has to be component or s-video.

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video."

Could this have something to do with that, uh, "selective output control" anti-piracy thang? (Tho' if 'twere, it should've been in the manual...)

[geekosaur]

More likely it has to do with dumb switches/devices that get confused when they get input on both composite in and S-video in (since S-video doesn't handle audio, you need to run an audio cable as well — and it's usually most convenient to just use the composite A/V cable with the S-video alongside).

[cellio]

I don't mean on the same input. I mean s-video plugged into input 3 messes up video on input 2. :-(

[cellio]

Revision: the specific thing I said was true but the generalization was not. An s-video cable plugged into input 3 messes up composite video on input 2. However, an s-video cable plubbed into input 2 doesn't mess anything else up. Weird! But ok, I can work around that.

[geekosaur]

That sounds like a short somewhere.

[cellio]

This TV is too old for anti-piracy measures. :-) (It's an analog TV bought in approximately 2002. Someday we will upgrade but it works just fine and replacing it would leave us with the problem of finding a home for this one, which is bulky and hard to move.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I am now in possession of a Roku box

Excellent! Now, quickly drop your subscription down to the bare minimum and get most of your stuff through that. You can also do Amazon video on demand with the Roku, although that's a pay as you go thing.

Alas, I think it is going to be obsolete in a year or two. Not as in non-functional, but a lot of new TVs and DVD players are sprouting ethernet jacks so you can stream things from your computer, which could theoretically be easier.. and when hacks come out could offer quite a few more sources of content.

[cellio]

It pays for itself in approximately 10 months (by dropping the membership level). So yes, that's already in the plan, and if in a couple years we get a TV or DVD player that deprecates it, oh well. (We just replaced the DVD player this year, so probably not that.) I don't see streaming from a computer being a primary interface for us just because of where the TV and computers are. (So wireless streaming from the computer for stuff that can't be gotten directly via the device, maybe, but not probable otherwise.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Oh, I'm not saying it was a bad purchase, since I love mine. Just that other content acquisition methods are starting to hit the market. I'm hanging onto mine, and a year's worth of entertainment is worth at least the cost of a couple of pairs of movie tickets.

Hmm. I wonder if you could set up two wifi routers as a tunnel, allowing wired devices in two rooms to talk to each other. It seems entirely feasible, yet I know of nobody who has done that (perhaps because getting that inner layer piped out to the world would require holes). Next device I get, maybe I'll try it.

[(Anonymous)]

It IS possible to set up two routers as a tunnel, but one of them has to be set up in "bridge" mode. Linksys will happily sell you a device that can do this for a whole lot of money, or you can hack the firmware on the classic WRT54GL with DD-WRT or Tomato and do the same thing for about $50.