Online Video Sharing

As mentioned in an earlier post, Pizza and a Video Sharing Site, I recently purchased a system to begin watching video sharing sites on my TV.  It just got to be too much to have my family huddled around my computer to watch our home videos online or latest funny videos from YouTube.

After two days of dealing with the S-Video & Audio cable setup & swapping, I realized that a hard-wired solution was just not for me — too much work and too much of a mess.  After some (quick) research online, I ordered the GrandTec Ultimate Wireless PC to TV setup, primarily because it was the only one that had an S-Video input.

The setup was easy.  You have two key pieces for the wireless video & audio - a transmitter that you hook up to your computer, and a receiver that you hook up to your television. 

The transmitter can either hook up to your SVGA (monitor) port or your S-Video port, and has all the audio cables required to hook into the audio output of your sound card.

Unfortunately, the receiver is only able to hook-up to your TV via standard composite video cable, even though the packaging advertises "Composite, S-Video and RGB Video output via traditional cables."  This is a big negative in the long-run, as downloaded movies that you might want to watch will suffer in quality not being in at least S-Video resolution.

All-in-all, the GrandTec Ultimate Wireless PC to TV System is average — I would hesitate to wholly endorse it’s "Ultimate" designation.  The video quality leaves a little bit to be desired, and the audio tends to get static whenever my Gas FirePlace fan turns on (go figure).  But it sure makes watching video from online video sharing sites a lot more enjoyable for a group of people.

Whatever happened to pizza and a movie?  More and more, I find myself and my family watching more and more online video.  Our typical Friday night pizza and a movie has now been replaced by pizza and a number of video sharing sites.

I have three kids (9, 8 and 1), so the first stop is usually 30 minutes of checking out video sharing site YouTube for the latest crazy dog or cat stunts from Americas Funniest Home Videos.  Even though my daughter has probably seen many of the same sequences 10 times or more, she still busts out laughing every time.  Why YouTube instead of Revver, MetaCafe, etc?  Two main reasons come to mind - breadth of selection and a fair chance that most of the content will be appropriate for my kids (MetaCafe still allows adult content).

After the laughs come the memories.  I have used home video sharing site StashSpace to record, tag and organize over 50 hours of my digital home videos on my laptop, and have another 50 or so hours of analog video stored on their remote servers (Disclosure, I am a co-founder of parent company HomeMovie.Com). 

My son & daughter love looking back at individual video clips of when they were babies, and marvel at how much they both looked like my youngest son as a baby.  They also get a kick out of watching mom & dad from earlier times as kids ourselves (from old film we had transferred) or seeing our life without the kids.   

And although I have DVD copies of all my edited home-video movies, we find it much easier to search for individual clips (we’ve tagged most of them) and watch on my laptop instead of swapping out DVDs. We also recently bought a wireless PC to TV system (from GrandTec) so that we can watch the videos on TV instead of the laptop.

I don’t see this trend slowing down any time soon — we’ll continue to watch more and more online video.  We’ve already started testing out the movie download sites (personally enjoy Amazon Unbox the best), and usually download & watch one movie a week.  Now I just need to figure out how to get some more local storage for all this video….