Using your laptop as a Tivo


Recommended Posts

I've always chosen Thinkpads for my laptops which means that over the years, I've collected an increasing number of obsolete models. My first one was a Thinkpad 755, a 486 based ThinkPad that weighed around 9 pounds and was used to demo our OS/2 software. That was back in 1995. Since then, I've replaced my ThinkPads at a rate of one every other year. My previous ThinkPad was a T20, a P3-700Mhz laptop. And the first one that is powerful enough to make its after effective lifetime as a portable demo machine interesting.

You see, most reasonably new laptops, including the ThinkPads, come with an S-video out cable. This, combined with 802.11G creates the opportunity for these laptops to have a new career. That of the PVR. Here's how:

You take the laptop and hook the Svideo out along with the sound outputs to a decent receiver. On your "modern" dekstop PC you use software such as Snapstream 3.0 and get a remote control that can control the computer from remote (like StreamZap or the X10 remote) and use the ThinkPad to grab movies, songs, whatever, from other machines and play them on your TV or stereo.

Now right now, I have a TIVO so I'm only in the preliminary stages of this. But I am slowly becoming convinced that if the electronics industry does't get its act together, what is going to likely happen with HDTV is that Windows Video Format (WMVs) will end up the "Standard") for HDTV video. For instance, today, right now, I can watch Terminator 2 in true HDTV (1080p) from a single DVD by playing it with Windows Media Player (it's in WMV 9 format). Now special blue laser DVD stuff here, just today's tech. So what will likely happen is that ifthe hardware guys don't get their act together, PCs will start making more sense for those who have a good HDTV set. I'll talk about HDTV a little bit in my next article.

Suffice to say, while the ThinkPad T20 isn't powerful enough to encode (i.e. to use snapstream to encode without special hardware) it is powerful enough to play the completed videos over an 802.11g wireless network. Hooked up to a receiver to your TV and stereo system and you have something that can do the job quite nicely and if you're like me, it's saving you money -- rather than the old laptop just collecting dust it's become something quite useful.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.