{"id":146,"date":"2008-01-01T21:15:27","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T02:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.opticality.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/01\/hotel-tv-victory\/"},"modified":"2008-01-01T21:15:27","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T02:15:27","slug":"hotel-tv-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/01\/hotel-tv-victory\/","title":{"rendered":"Hotel TV Victory"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this<\/a> post, I mentioned that it wouldn’t be until January that I got to try out my new low-tech cable solution for watching our own stuff on the hotel TV.<\/p>\n

We just had the longest stretch in six years of not<\/em> being in a hotel. Our last stay ended on November 20th, and tonight is our first night since (we’ve stayed with friends for five nights during that stretch, so they weren’t all at home).<\/p>\n

Tonight I pulled out my low-tech cable<\/a> and connected it to the TV in the hotel. I then put two AAA batteries in my programmable remote and looked up the code for a Philips TV. After a moment of panic, when I noticed that there wasn’t a button labeled Input<\/strong> on the remote, I finally found (by trial and error) that there was a button labeled A->B<\/strong> which did the same thing.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, I was able to change the hotel TV to all of the inputs (S-Video, Front RCA, Rear RCA, something else, etc.).<\/p>\n

I then connected to my home DVR (the DirecTV Hughes HDVR2 that I’ve recently resuscitated) through my SlingBox, and we watched a two hour show that I had recorded months ago. It worked flawlessly!<\/p>\n

I enabled a second monitor and extended my desktop to it. I then ran the Sling window in that second monitor and maximized it (800×600) which was the perfect size for the TV. I was able to play Poker on the main laptop screen, without interfering with the show on the TV (also very cool!).<\/p>\n

But, there was one last problem. I like having the sound on for the Poker tourneys, so that if I look away from the screen, and it’s my turn, I hear the beep. But, to get the sound on the TV to work, I really have to crank the sound to the headphone jack on the laptop. That would make the Poker beeps way too loud on the TV.<\/p>\n

My solution is almost Rube Goldberg, but it worked! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I have a tiny USB sound adapter (I can never get the Microphone input to work, and the volume on the output is deafeningly loud, but, it works). So, I first connect the Sling when the normal headphone jack is enabled. Then I insert the USB sound device, and set that to be the new default sound device. Poker (and most other apps) immediately switch to the new default<\/em> device, but the Sling keeps playing through the device that was the default when it was launched.<\/p>\n

So, I listened for the Poker beep through earbuds that were connected to the USB sound device, and the low-tech cable was connected to the S-Video port and the headphone jack.<\/p>\n

Total Victory! Sweet! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post, I mentioned that it wouldn’t be until January that I got to try out my new low-tech cable solution for watching our own stuff on the hotel TV. We just had the longest stretch in six years of not being in a hotel. Our last stay ended on November 20th, and tonight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2,20],"tags":[115,1370,110],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4","category-2","category-tv","tag-slingbox","tag-tv","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}