If you have a LAN you can actually stream the video across it to your laptop from your main tower (i'm assuming you have one) Since LANS are at LEAST capable of 100MBPS and you are streaming across a very short distance this shouldnt cause any lag. There are some programs out there that let you do this and give you keyboard controls and such, or if you have wireless keyboards and devices and are close enough to your tower that works as well. this is probably the cheapest and best solution.
if your tv has a cat 5 cable input you can also directly connect it to your lan and possibly stream it directly to the tv cutting out the laptop all-together.
I can't think of the name of the program I have seen before, sorry bro :(
if I think of it I will edit the post.
depending on how far your main tower is from your tv, you could also run a dvi or hdmi cable to it, this will probably cause some image loss though since they cant carry a signal very far. that would also be incredibly cheap, but again you would need wireless input devices :/
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I do have LAN (in every room), but I do not have a (working) tower. :)
Thanks for the tips, though.
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For a G73 equivalent maybe $400 to $500 if you put it together yourself? $100 each for a good case, decent budget motherboard and a budget GPU-on-CPU chip (the AMD A10 or Intel i3 with HD4000 for example).
Put another $100 towards an AMD 7770 or GTX 650, which are not far off the G73's 756M, and spend the rest on any peripherals / internal drives you might need. Consider a power supply upgrade but see how you get on without it if you feel lucky.
I have an SFF box along those lines and it's worked out well so far. You can save money on the case but getting it done for under $200 would require some serious salvaging.
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I need to dig around in my old tower and see if my power supply in there is acceptable for a repurpose. Depending on what kind of simple stand we get for the TV (insanely heavy to mount, IMO), I may even be able to re-use my tower and just get a new HDD, GPU, and CPU.
Dunno. I need to poke around some more...
Thanks very much.
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Did so last night. Looks pretty good. Only downside is not having any sound native to the TV. But that's okay.
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Okay...here's what I've got in the old tower...
Antec TPII-480 Blue 480W PSU
Asus A8N5X MB
Have no idea on the CPU. Obviously something AMD
2GB of some kind of Corsair RAM
eGforce 7800GT 256 GPU
Some HDDs that can't seem to behave. Hoping the data is still there.
Anyway, where'm my at here?
What's worth keeping and what's not?
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Hmm. Maybe the PSU and whichever HDDs are still good? Looks like the motherboard wouldn't be able to support more than 3GB of memory. You could save the 2GB stick, but if its about 6 years old then it probably won't fit a modern MB socket.
As it's a standard size power supply you might be interested in the BitFenix Prodigy case. Not quite SFF but smaller than a tower and can cram most components in there, hence its recent popularity.
If you decide to go with the laptop via HDMI you could use the Samsung as the primary display try using the laptop screen as a secondary for tabbing between favorite forums / sports scores / FB etc. :)
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Should add. Just grabbed a Chromecast unit to be able to stream YouTube/Netflix/(eventually)Hulu.
Now it's more about the gaming and (least important) recording.
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My wife and I recently received a second-hand Samsung TV that we're going to put in the bedroom. The television is a little older, but more than sufficient for us (1080p, blah, blah).
We're primarily planning to use it for Netflix and other streaming content. We also have access to "terrestrial" television at the house, which we capture with a good ol' Tivo. Mainly, this is used by the children.
But I'd like to be able to game on the thing, too, if possible.
Right now, I can just shoot an HDMI out from my laptop and it works well enough for a casual session. I'm still happy to do that, but am wondering what it's going to cost me to get a SFF box that might be able to run games as I run them now (2010 Asus G73). I'm more than satisfied with my GFX situation ATM.
Any thoughts?
Remember I'm completely ignorant to what's out there right now, but don't have a huge budget (think maybe double Roku's best box). I could cheat upwards a tough, but not too much.
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