DVD player died, Ubuntu / NVIDIA TV-Out saves the day!
January 5th, 2010 | by Sean |The complaints from the kids were finally overwhelming. Their VCDs and DVDs kept ‘sticking’ and restarting, but seemed to play OK in our PCs. I couldn’t bear the thought of replacing the DVD player, I can’t help thinking it’s next week’s antique. We have an old LG TV for the kids. We’re not confident about replacing it with a flat-panel: the glass screen copes with some awful abuse!
Ubuntu TV - Choosing what to watch next!
A cousin recently gave us an old PC (I’m an old-PC magnet!) they said was ‘too slow’, so I thought I’d use it to drive the TV instead of a DVD player. Most of what we watch is downloaded anyway (shhh, don’t tell anyone, this is just between me and you, ok?), so it would also cut out the task of converting and burning files onto disks.
The old PC that was too slow turned out to be a 3 GHz Pentium – easily fast enough to cope with movie playing! All it needed was a video card and a wireless card. I had a cheap Edimax wireless card lying around, which works great with Linux. The PC had an AGP slot, so I found a GeForce 6200 with TV-Out cheaply in a local store. After installing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Kipper) on the PC, it just worked straight away!
It needed some fine-tuning with nvidia-settings so that it drove the TV at 800×600, and I bumped up all the fonts to 14 point, as they’re not otherwise easily readable. One last job was to set the PC to auto-login, so when it’s switched on it boots straight to a desktop.
Our 4-year old daughter can open the ‘movies’ folder and start her own movie. I much prefer this style of using a TV. I didn’t have a TV in my house from 1989 until 2006, after Emily was born. I really don’t want to receive someone else’s ‘feed’, and don’t really want to plug my kids into one either.
The kids seem happy with the new setup. In some ways it’s better than the DVD player – some of our discs had 8 hours of video on! With the 1-click, 1-video model, they’ll choose a movie, it’ll end, the TV will go blank, and they’ll carry on playing with their toys until they remember they can start their own movies. I’m much happier with it than I am with the never-ending A/V of broadcast TV or long-play DVDs.
We tried Tetris (well, Gnometris), and Nibbles but Emily really didn’t seem to get it. It looked just fine on the TV though, so perhaps I might even have managed to delay the purchase of a game console for a few years too! I’m so cheap…