So yesterday my housemate Ian and myself wanted to watch the Obama inaguration event from the Washington Licoln Memorial. Unfortunatly none of the TV channels we had available turned out to broadcast it. Luckily HBO was streaming it live on the net, but that gave me the issue that we didn’t really want to watch it on a laptop screen with laptop sound. So I decided to try something I feared to try up to this point, which was connect my laptop to the TV using the DVI output.
As it turns out this just worked, I connected the DVI cable to the HDMI input on the TV, fired up the Nvidia Display Settings application, pressed ‘Detect Displays’ and choose to set it up as a Twin view screen. It just worked. I then dragged totem over to the TV display and put it in fullscreen mode and was set to go.
Well almost, as it turned out when the event started, HBO had put in place a IP blocking for people outside the US. Well 5 minutes later I had found a US proxy server and was able to click into the stream. Once I had it going in the browser I just use Totem’s ability to take the stream over into a separate Totem instance then play that fullscreen on my TV. For the sound I just hooked a cable into my headphone output and connected it to my hifi system. Sure not Blu-Ray quality image and sound, but definetely acceptable sound and video quality :)
I had a similir experience, I was setting of trying to connect my laptop to my TV via HDMI because I was afraid it would fail horribly. Luckily it didn’t. in fact it worked perfect.
Now I can enjoy playing Super Mario 64 with mupen64plus on my 40″ TV ^^
HDMI is backwards compatible with DVI. Your PC is generating a signal without HDCP (copy protection). DVI to HDMI cables are passive, they work in both directions. Try to take the output from a cable box and hook it up to a DVI monitor. It won’t work. You’ll get a nice screen saying copy protection handshake failed. It’s the HDCP copy protection that ruins things like MythTV.
Note that if the DVI monitor works it has a HDCP compliant chipset in it. Hobbyists and small companies are shut out of the licensing for the HDCP scheme. HDCP is why you are pretty much forced to rent your DVR from the cable company. AFAIK Tivo is the only independent HDCP capable DVR and they cost $600.
I watched Family Guy instead. Considerably more entertaining, and certainly more profound.
Just a shame you were using some rubbish proprietary driver.
Since someone said VLC could play the official stream ( http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1098059&cid=26529149 ), I tried it and it worked in Totem :)