Your living room entertainment

And there I sit, a world at my fingertips and all but the drawings of what to do sitting in my hands.  Alas, I have an idea!  Why not do what I’ve wanted to do for so damned long but have been too lazy to do!  Hooking a PC to my television and enjoy a little bigscreen computer video output.  For videos downloaded, Hulu, South Park/Family Guy, etc of course.  Not for computer USE.

After purchasing a 32 inch HD flatscreen, I’m introduced to HDMI connectivity instead of coax or RCA.  HDMI = DVI + sound wrapped into one connection.  Unfortunately, my desktop system only has VGA which is all that anyone needs unless they have a good monitor 😉  Well, I use Linux and I don’t want to putz around with making some new DVI card work proper, or having SVideo being native, etc.  Why screw around when you can just make something work from the beginning and go on with life?
So, my first thought… converting my Video to HDMI, which would also mean that audio would be tagged into the same cord.  I ran across an awesome converter on the net that I ordered and am waiting for Fedex to ship to me.  It’s a VGA to HDMI converter that accepts audio from the computer, and upscale converts to 1080p.  The converter is created by a company named Sewell Direct.  I have a 720p television (since I didn’t feel like ponying up another couple hundred bucks on more resolution when I’m replacing a TUBE tv that I bought for $75 and placing it in a room that isn’t 20 feet long 😛

This is a link to the item I purchased: http://sewelldirect.com/Component-VGA-to-HDMI-Scaler-720p.asp

Of course they have a 1080i converter for more than double the price of the 720presolution but you buy what you need.  It hurts, but it’s  one time deal for me and saves the separation of computer / Internet / television.

Imagine how a webcam would look.  *jk*

UPDATE:

After recieving the device, and setting my resolution to 1280×960 everything goes great!  The only downfall I can see is I could not use any non-X11 interface. (e.g. pure text-based, without X-Window)  But, this isn’t a problem for me in this situation since my it’s easy enough to open an xterm.