[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”300” caption=”TVBOX”]
[/caption]
Since I am in Seattle and still looking for a place of my own, I haven’t shipped out all my computer stuff yet. Two things I did have shipped out were my Xbox and my LCD monitor. Since the Xbox was hooked up to the TV sometimes there were things that I wanted to watch or play that other people didn’t. So my idea was to hook the Xbox up to the LCD monitor. Sounds simple right? Well, kinda. I figure there were a couple ways to go about this.
Buy a cable hack it up and put a VGA connector on it and hope that the LCD had Sync-on-Green.
Try to make a converter .
Buy a converter box.
I first started to look on how to make a cable but I didn’t want to get all done and find out it was a waste of time. So I decided to try and find a converter box. I went to pretty much all the electronic stores I could think of and not one had what I wanted. RCA (Yellow aka composite) to VGA. So my second option was to buy a crappy computer and put a tvtuner card in it an run it through there, which is what everyone was telling me to do in the stores. Bah! I didn’t want to do that but I wasn’t going to shell out 150$ for some ridiculous converter box online. So I decided to go the computer route. I was searching through craigslist.org and low and behold a converter box for 30$. Right up my alley. So I picked that up and it turned out to be this one. Let me tell you it works awesome. It has composite RCA in, VGA in, S-Video in, and TVtuner in with VGA out. It also has a remote and channel up and down, and volume which work great. The only gripe I have right now is that the signal is a little fuzzy. The videos and movies play alright but the XBMC dash is pretty fuzzy. I was reading that If you use the S-Video In it’s better, but it’s good for the time being. If anyone has a chance to pick one of these up for cheap I would highly recommend it. I was thoroughly impressed. I’ll post a picture when I get a chance. Now that I have all my stuff working, I started playing around with XBMC some more. I have an XBMC dash from at least a year and a half ago my guess is probably longer. So I was looking around and seeing if anyone has done updates because I have seen that It came out on linux and windows a while back, which is cool. So when I was poking around I came across T3CH’s site. I looks like this is the latest update for Xbox’s XBMC. I’m going to give it a try tonight hopefully there are some cool updates from what I have.