Re: [Hampshire] Hellow

> Sadly I am, once more, laptop-less. My old Dell is an old story, but my
> 'new' Compaq has recently been taken out of action by virtue of the
> hinge siezing up and breaking the bezel. I've not found the time to see
> if I can repair it yet.

I fixed a Toshiba Qosmio with a broken hinge last year (sppokily enough,
it's back in for a different repair as wep speak). I forget what the bill
came to exactly, but it was roughly £100, and it's a job I rally don't
want to do again :-(

I don't know your Compaq is put together - it might be less hussle than
the Tosh.

> A bad
> comparison perhaps, but the 'family' PC running Windows XP Pro with
> around 768M memory is largely incapably of playing even the tiny YouTube
> videos without major frame drops.

A dreadful comparison. Windows *sucks* at things like that. If you're not
going to run a Linux box as your decoder, you've only got yourself to
blame.

> Streaming to the TV would require some sort
> of box at the TV end to receive, or runnig cables through walls to get
> to it (and rushing back into another room to pause or etc.).

WiFi is your friend :-)

Get yourself something small & quiet (e.g. an *old* laptop) & equip it
with WiFi. Mount your data (held on a big, noisy server somewhere other
than the front room) with sshfs, and start playing it (mplayer or
equivalent).

> DRM also prevents me from watching legal DVDs on one of our other TVs.
> Since it doesn't have a SCART socket I have to use the arial. The DVD
> player doesn't have an arial out, so I decided to run it through an old
> VCR to convert the SCART to UHF/arial. Unfortunately this would allow
> you to record the DVD, so this has been blocked (well pre-DRM, so would
> that make it ARM?!).

MacroVision is easy to defeat. Have a search on the web; the first circuit
I ever saw to do this was long before I had web access, and it came to me
within 48 hours of the first time I'd seen MacroVision (on Tomorrow's
World, IIRC).

> Oddly, as an 'average' {?!) 'person in the street' DRM is pushing me
> towards piracy. I am having to work around the technology simply to be
> able to purchase and watch DVDs that I want to/have purhased quite
> legally!!

Yep. One of the big drivers IMHO is this "you wouln't steal a car"
nonsense that you're forced to watch at the beginning. They tell you that
"piracy is a Crime" - and that is actually true; the use of violence to
commandeer a ship on the high seas is indeed a crime under International
Law. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright infringement,
which is *not* a crime (not yet, at any rate).

Vic.