Mobile Dad

I do not have a cool Roku box (would like one though) or an xbox 360 (will never happen), so for my family to enjoy Netflix streaming in the living room, I took an old laptop I had and rebuilt it with the most basic installs of Windows XP (Netflix at the time did not run on anything else). Connecting the lappy to my 52″ LCD through VGA and setting the external display to 1920×1080 60Hz, I had a nice looking computer desktop! Using a bluetooth keyboard, wireless G connection on DSL, and mini-rca audio out to the TV, I had a functional Netflix/Hulu/Joost player for the fam.

Lately we have been watching a lot of streaming movies (makes sense since we do not have cable/satellite just OTA), and starting to enjoy the higher bitrates Netflix has been pumping out, especially newer films at 3400 Kbps.  The sharpness is very similar to DVD and nicely saturated with minimal motion artifacts.  It makes watching ‘The Office’ or ‘Heroes’ episodes we missed just a bit more enjoyable.  Below is a futile attempt at showing a sample clip of LOTR using my Zi6.  Keep up the good work Netflix, looking forward to more content like this!

My Optoma HD72’s bulb is acting up.  It has about 780 hours on it and now it cuts out within minutes of powering up.  I love this projector and hope to keep it going for what I paid for.  It rocks on 1080p material from Blu-ray (scalar is not bad) and just kills on 720p stuff.  Color is rich and the image is vibrant.  Blacks are better than expect, though not as good as my Sony’s 52XBR4 (ridiculous blacks levels).  It looks like I am not the only one with this problem.  I will contact Optoma and see what my options are.  In the meantime, it looks like I may be upgrading my projector any ways.  Check out TI’s latest tech bump on DLPs!  Can you imagine owning a PJ that does not use bulbs, is 50% brighter AND have true black levels (500,000:1)?  All this in a quieter and energy effiecent box.  My HD72 is fairly quiet now, hardly audible above the dialog but to go LED on 106″ just makes me shiver.  I may not have a hard time conviencing Keyla to let me jump on board when these bad boys hit the market.  She really loves our theater room and do enjoy belting out tunes in SingStar on the big screen.  God I love her!

I complained a lot on why anyone would stream movies over the Internet, especially services that claim to stream true HD (the key here kiddies is TRUE HD). Well, over the last couple of months, I took a very old laptop that had a decent video card and hooked it up to my Sony 52XBR4 set. I have two wireless access points, one upstairs in the master closet and one downstairs in the office to ensure I have no dropouts. I hate to admit but the quality was actually not that bad on the set and there were no buffering issues streaming Netflix movies over a wireless connection on the LCD. I also love the fact that any movie we stopped midway through to watch at another time will start where we last left off. As much as we enjoy the convenience of streaming our movies, I am not sure a Netflix stream would look good blown up to 106″ but I will like to give it a try. It seems I may have the opportunity as there is some talk out there that Netflix may be thinking of giving PS3 owners a disc to fire up the movie stream. I know Sony is about to release their own service so I am curious on how this will all pan out. It may just noise but if it does turn out to be true, I will be first in line to pick up a disc.

There is a home that has a theater that not only blows everyone’s personal home theater out of the water but also any movie megaplex as well. How would you like to entertain your friends with dinner, enjoy an after dinner drink and then usher them all out to your patio that over looks all of LA to your Drive-in-like theater for an evening of movie bliss. Not only is the theater just absolutely beautiful but so is the decor of the home. Ultra modern living at it’s finest. What a sight.