Teun.ToString()

A few weeks ago, I decided to finally get myself a laptop as a experimental development environment. The virtual machine solution got too slow and I didn't want to risk the desktop machine to crash on me (my girlfriend is writing her PhD thesis on it as well). So I decided to go for a relatively small form factor: 13.3" wide screen. This allows me to work on it on the train. The machine I purchased also sported an S-Video port. This got me thinking: "that should allow me to watch streaming stuff from internet on my TV". There are a few types of content that I now tend to watch on my desktop PC, but that I'd rather see from the couch: MSDN TV, .NET show and the likes (when my girl is out :)), "Uitzending gemist", a site by the dutch public TV that shows a lot of the formerly broadcasted programs (except for purchased drama, for obvious juridical reasons) on demand and for example right now, the Winter Olympics are broadcasted online through 6 different channels, so you can pick your sport (as long as it's curling). So, with my brand new laptop under my arm, I bought an adapter cable to go from S-Video to SCART, the only thing my TV understands. Alas: the laptop seemed to work just fine, but it showed only black-and-white on screen. This seems to be a common problem: most normal TV sets do not understand the S-Video signal. If I had researched this properly, I would have known. Turns out that the SCART specs include the S-Video signal, but most older TV sets do not implement this (I am not much of an early adopter, I still don't own a DVD player!). So I ordered a new adapter from this shop that was supposed to do this trick. I got it in the mail yesterday and it works like a charm. I have just been watching the MSDN TV episode on Atlas. Pretty interesting. Thumbs up to svideo.com!