Monday, March 21, 2005

On watching college basketball

So, back in the old days, when I wanted to watch Illinois during the
NCAA Men's basketball tournament, I pretty much had to live with whichever games my regional CBS affliate wanted to show me. Or go to a sports bar with satellite TV. For the first game on Thursday night, we
tried the latter -- we did go to the Old Pro in Palo Alto, but it was
too loud and too crowded for our tastes. Then again, it was also
St. Patrick's day.

Saturday, we sat down to watch the games at our house. I decided it
was time for something different.

On those rare occassions when our game was on KPIX, it was a simple
matter of watching the TiVo connected to good, old-fashioned Comcast
analog cable.

When they switched to some other (lesser) game, I used Firefox and the
Windows Media Player 9 browser plug-in to watch streaming video of the
Illinois game via Comcast High-speed Internet through my Linksys router to the Airport card of my Powerbook. From there it was a simple matter to
connect the stereo audio and S-Video output from the Powerbook to the
Onkyo A/V Receiver.

A few commands listed on the LCD of my Harmony universal remote allowed me to switch between the two inputs.

Oh, and after the game we switched the RealOne player and listened to the post-game interviews with the players and the coach.

What could be simpler?

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