Creeva’s World 2.0

I’m the type of per­son that likes to rip his own DVD’s and old VHS tapes onto the com­puter for archiv­ing. In the past I almost always had a com­puter hooked up to the TV and the net­work to watch these and stream audio through the home stereo.

My first com­puter that did this was 8 years ago when it was a nov­elty and now it’s becom­ing stan­dard in more and more homes across the world. Well my lat­est PC is a bit loud for my taste in my newest setup — what to do, what to do?

We recently can­celed cable ser­vice to the house — it’s not worth 50 bucks a month to watch Law and Order 7 days a week when Net­flix is a much bet­ter alter­na­tive for my lifestyle — I can get box sets and movies when­ever I want com­pared to the nor­mal cable service.

For my exist­ing movies — ripped and home — I tried hook­ing up my com­puter to an RF mod­u­la­tor in the base­ment — unfor­tu­nately the computer’s video out­put did not have enough juice to trig­ger the RF modulator’s auto­matic on switch. Well to work around this the com­puter goes into the video input of an old VCR I have — from here it hooks up to the house coax wiring where the main cable feed hooked to the rest of the wiring. Because of this the com­puter now streams on Chan­nel 3 to every com­puter in the house. I can remotely con­trol the com­puter via VNC from either the lap­tops or the PDA’s in the house — haven’t tested from the cell phones yet.

This whole sce­nario is another that shows the ben­e­fits of cen­tral cable feeds in a house. The qual­ity how­ever is about VHS qual­ity — not as good as it is hooked up directly to a TV via an S-Video cable. The ben­e­fits of this set far out weigh the loss of video degra­da­tion in my mind — but then again I’m not an HDTV junkie.