PC to TV for watching Internet TV: What's your setup?

Well I tried connecting my PC to the TV last night with an RCA cable. Didn't looks too good at all, but everything was being down converted too from the graphics card to the TV. It worked with Hulu but just a little low resolution on my LCD TV. Going to need to find an HDMI output graphics card on the cheap. Any suggestions?

They don't make very large monitors in my price range. plus i hate having both a TV and monitor when i can use one for all. there's a lot of recorded videos on my laptop that would be nice on the 20" in my console without having to be forced into a 15" CRT monitor. not as realistic plus with the TV connected and add internet i have a homemade Media Center PC. i use my netbook as a DVR. Radioshack has a PC-to-TV card where it converts inputs such as VGA or DVI to Composite or S-Video.

My TV is older and only has RF & RCA ports. I got a PC to TV converter box from Seawell that converts VGA signal To NTSC signal for $39.99. I've got it hooked up with 25' of RCA cable and i'm very pleased with the picture quality that I get, we stream netflix to the TV often. I had to get an adaptor for the mini headphone jack on computer to go to the regular RCA type, but all works fine.

You'll be amazed at how much you can get free to watch off the internet. Sunday nite football on NBC has a special web site at nbcsports.com that lets you watch the game in five differant angles, very cool. I watch a lot of live sports streamed free, ESPN 360, movies from netflix, hulu, guba, justin and many more. One of the best under $50.00 investments i've ever made.

Carl

That's great ccpl!

I have my eye on a digital media player box...like these. Word on the street is that Asus is coming out with a Wireless N router OPlay!

ASUS O!Play - TV HD Media Player

Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player

Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player

Brite-View BV-5005HD "CinemaTube" 3-in-1 1080p Full HD Multimedia Player/Streamer/Torrent Downloader

Originally Posted by cclc

My TV is older and only has RF & RCA ports. I got a PC to TV converter box from Seawell that converts VGA signal To NTSC signal for $39.99. I've got it hooked up with 25' of RCA cable and i'm very pleased with the picture quality that I get, we stream netflix to the TV often. I had to get an adaptor for the mini headphone jack on computer to go to the regular RCA type, but all works fine.

You'll be amazed at how much you can get free to watch off the internet. Sunday nite football on NBC has a special web site at nbcsports.com that lets you watch the game in five differant angles, very cool. I watch a lot of live sports streamed free, ESPN 360, movies from netflix, hulu, guba, justin and many more. One of the best under $50.00 investments i've ever made.

Carl

The Sunday Night Football 5 different angles thing on NBC's website is pretty cool. Tried that some time back. I kept it mostly on the floating camera angle, and it's funny because during huddles, they zoom in real close with that camera. You can pretty much see the quarterback calling plays which would seem like an unfair advantage for the other team if they hire someone that can read lips.

I've found that a direct PC connection to my television works fine, but since I have an older PC, I have issues with dropped frames and general image choppiness.

My current setup works relatively well, provided that you have a current generation game console like the Playstation 3, XBox 360, or Wii or some other DNLA compliant media client.

Basically, I run Media Mall's PlayOn digital media server on my PC. Then, PlayOn downloads and streams content like Hulu and Netflix to my Playstation 3, which displays the stream. So far, besides a few outages here and there, I've been pretty pleased with the results. If you have an older TV, it's harder to directly connect a PC to it. However, you can pretty easily connect any of these game consoles to older TVs.

The New York Times recently talked about Internet TV setups. I compared my setup to the NYT setup here.

Has anyone else tried a program like PlayOn? I've heard that TVersity Pro works as well.

Man, I'm behind the times with this stuff. DNLA. PlayOn. TVersity Pro?

Originally Posted by Aaron62

Man, I'm behind the times with this stuff. DNLA. PlayOn. TVersity Pro?

Heh... it's really not that bad, Aaron. In fact, there are programs like Boxee that add a great interface to allow you to control your computer from your couch, if you want to directly connect your PC to your TV. This makes access to all of that Internet TV content really easy to access.

Here's a couple of links to some of my favorite programs.

Boxee
XMBC
Miro