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#29: HDTV

nekoewen

on Feb. 10, 2012

I now own a 40" TV. It's fucking insane, but it warms my technophile heart. For a long time now I've made a point to always have my computer hooked up to my TV, and it's always been just a little more complicated than you'd think. I had intended to use a DVI to HDMI cable, but my computer's graphics card wasn't powerful enough to handle 1080p video properly, plus because HDMI is meant to carry sound by itself, I couldn';t actually connect my computer's sound card up to the TV directly. I wound up buying a $30 video card for a marginal upgrade (and for whatever reason the driver installation took a long time), but it worked nicely after that.

On the other hand I did end up getting a thing with Google TV, so it has a bunch of extra internet features and can run Android apps. The other day I watched Conan by bringing up the TBS website in the TV's Chrome browser, and since it has Netflix built in I ended up re-subscribing (and I've been watching Better Off Ted amongst other things). The remote control has a keypad too, which makes it vastly better for using Chrome and YouTube and such. I can see why Google TV has gotten mixed reviews (the interface is kind of inelegant in places), but I basically got it for free compared to the cost of a virtually identical TV without those features.

I do watch MLP (and Twilight Sparkle is my favorite), but I don’t really consider myself a brony per se. There's a whole fandom out there that I don't really bother with, but I do watch the show, and now I can watch it in 1080p. So I had the newest episode (wherein Rainbow Dash is hospitalized and learns the joys of reading) all ready to go for when I got the TV home. I don't really follow or get football, but since the local favorite team got narrowly beaten in the playoffs my football-watching friends were decidedly non-enthusiastic about the game this year. My big plan for putting the new TV through its paces was to watch the Captain America RiffTrax with some friends, but I'm weird like that.