In fact, many such TVs come with an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) port which connects to the HDMI port on your satellite or fibre TV set top box, a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) port perhaps and quite often, also with a VGA (Video Graphics Array) port found on almost all desktop PCs and on many notebook PCs. All you need do is to switch the input on your TV to either the HDMI or VGA port to which your PC is connected. On some TV remote controls, you press the "Source" button and select the input.
One of my friends connected his Hisense large screen LED TV to his compact desktop PC (under the TV stand), which in turn is connected to his Unifi fibre-Internet router and he controls the PC using a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Thus the TV can be used to play You Tube, Vimeo and other streaming videos, listen to online streaming radio, podcasts, etc. in any language from around the world, it can play downloaded video and music files as well as view photos on your hard disk, send and receive e-mail, access social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc., all from your couch and who knows, you may even end up writing letters, creating spreadsheets and presentation graphic presentations all from your couch.
You can also install the open source Kodi (formerly XBMC) media available for Linux, Mac OS, Windows, etc. and turn your Into -- well a media centre.
http://kodi.tv/download/
And when you're done with running the PC, you can always switch your TV back to your satellite or fibre TV provider.
At first, he was running Windows on the PC and I found it's response rather sluggish and advised him to install a Linux on instead and after trying out a few Linux distributions, he settled on Pearl Linux with a MATE user interface.
Pearl is designed to have a Apple Mac look and feel and being based upon Ubuntu Linux, it readily supports devices such as his Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse.
However, it appears that Pearl and several other Linux distributions do not have a suitable graphics driver for the graphics display of his particular model of compact office desktop - which by the way is a Compaq (no pun intended) or these Linux somehow cannot recognise the higher resolution capabilities of this PC's display adaptor. Hence it's display resolution is limited to 1024 x 600 pixels (or something like that), instead of the full 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution of his TV.
I faced a similar problem with another compact Compaq of about the same age and had to run the Xrandr command in the terminal and manually configure the etc/X11/xorg.conf file to make it display 1366 x 768 resolution in this case and would perhaps have to replicate what I did on this PC to get it to display 1920 x 1080 resolution of full high-definition (HD). Anyway, my friend is OK with 1024 x 600 resolution, so I'll leave it at that.
However, such less than maximum resolution problems rarely occur with Linux on most makes and models of PC.
These compact office desktop PCs are not new but mostly are corporate assets which have been written off and disposed of and which still have much useful life ahead of them.
One of these can be bought for RM280 to RM380 from used PC dealers.
If you want to be adventurous, you may want to experiment with turning your TV into smart TV and media centre.
Cheers
Charles
No comments:
Post a Comment