If you follow me on Twitter then you know that I’m a fan of American Football and the San Francisco 49ers. Outside of the USA, NFL is a minority sport, and if it is shown, only 1-2 games are shown by the broadcaster. I really wanted to watch as many 49ers games as possible, and the best solution for that was to subscribe to NFL Gamepass – basically an online subscription to all NFL games and the NFL network that is only available outside of the USA. It’s great because if I am travelling I can watch games live or recorded (latter without adverts) on a PC, laptop, iPhone or iPad.
Watching it on the laptop from the couch grew tiresome. That small screen is just too small. I bought my TV in 2005 and it’s a 32” CRT. It works fine but there was not way to connect a PC to it. I needed a change.
I did a bit of research and decided upon the Samsung UE40D5000 40" Full HD (1080p) LED TV. It has 4 * HDMI, 1 VGA, composite, and 1 * SCART sockets (and some others). The reviews were good; reasonably priced and the blacks are really black (great contrast). I picked one up today at lunch. And when I say “pick” I mean it … damn these are so light compared to my CRT TV. Next I picked up a HDMI lead.
I got the TV home and set it up. Then I propped up the Build Windows slate PC that is running the Windows 8 developer preview build. The base (docking station) has a full sized HDMI socket. I ran a lead between the base and the TV. Then I did the Windows + P trick to tell the slate to extend the display to a projector. IE was fired up (on the desktop for Flash), I logged into NFL Gamepass, and then I expanded the stream to fill the TV.
Oh .. baby yeah! It isn’t as good as native 1080p, but it isn’t far off, to be honest. Next up, streaming media from my Windows Home Server 2011 machine via the Xbox 360.
EDIT #1:
I swapped out my Xbox 360 lead for the MSFT supplied HDMI lead and have media streaming from the WHS. Nice!