MyPCTV - coming to a house near you.....

Long-time readers of this blog will know we built a PC/laptop to TV system last year after seeing all the overblown IPTV solutions, which we christened "MyPCTV". There was quite a lot of harrumphing, for example:

- People will never put PC's in their lounge/living room/parlour etc etc
- You can't connect a laptop to a TV (well, we have...its not hard guys...)

Anyway, today I read with delight that VC and blogger Fred Wilsn has set up his own MyPCTV system - pix over here. Anyway, I think Fred is but few a swallows short of the Tipping Point...as he says:

When the web and all the people we know can start being an audio experience in our living rooms, it's a big deal. I realize that not many people have setups like this, but it shouldn't be too long before it's much more common. A mac mini costs $600. And it puts the web into your living room. Give it a try. I bet you'll like it as much as we do.

Actually, Fred's system is still a bit complex....if you want to build a really simple one read our posts on MyPCTV. Ours has been running happily for a year now on a home wifi and cable LAN. (And when the iPhone price is reduced I'll get one of those and hook it in as well)

And, if you want to get surround sound for about a dollar (thats 50p for us Brits), read this post on building a Hafler Circuit.

(Update...looks like Stowe Boyd's got one too....one swallow closer...)

(Update 2 - and Robert Scoble...hmmm...an epidemic of swallows! They're all using Mac Minis as far as I can see, which is more of a made-for-point solution, whereas we just adapted an old PC as a server, and also did the same with a (fairly) cheap laptop. )

By the way, it is also theoretically possible to do this with the Linux running PS3, but as yet we haven't tried it out.

(Afterthought...at the time my co-founder Dave Short wrote a little script that allows you to search YouTube for something and line up all the videos it finds, playing them one after the other so you can carry on couch potato-ing for hours. This is a must have....)