If you have treated yourself to a High Definition (HD) TV the chances are you aren't using it to its full capability. According to a recent report in The Register, only 1.7% of Western European households have the equipment necessary to receive HD broadcasts, and these consist of only a handful of channels. This situation is set to improve, in the UK we are lucky enough to have Sky HD and Freesat which both carry HD content, but the report goes on to claim that the widespread availability of free-to-air HD channels will not occur until 2015. However, there is no need to despair, luckily there is another interesting source of High Definition content; this time in the form of video podcasts: Miro. The advantage of video podcasts, or vodcasts is that you can subscribe to the content you want, no more being spoon fed by scheduler in a remote TV station! You don't have to watch these vodcasts on your computer either, pretty much every HD television can be hooked into your computer so you can enjoy HD content on your new TV.
Miro is available for all major platforms, I used it with Ubuntu, where a package is already available from the repositories. You can install it by simply entering:
sudo apt-get install miro
Before running it though you will need set up your HD television to work with your computer. Most TVs will have either a VGA or DVI connection. You'll need to get hold of the appropriate cabling to attach it to the external monitor port on your computer. Once everything is wired together you'll need to configure the display on the HD-TV (which will be treated like a monitor). Make sure the HD-TV is set to its PC input. If you haven't installed a proprietary graphics driver you should be able to activate the TV as a cloned monitor by going to "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Screen Resolution". If you are using a proprietary graphics card driver, things can be slighly more complicated. I've got an NVIDIA card so I had to install the nvidia-settings package, this will attempt to auto-detect the TV and let you configure it. A small problem I ran into though was that initially it refused to let me select a resolution higher than 640x480. This was apparently due to some displays not giving the correct information to XServer, a fix for this can be found on the Ubuntu Forums. This also worked for an external projector that was refusing to go above 640x480 too.
After you have set this up, launch Miro. The first thing you will see is its useful channel guide. You can simply browse or search for content that interests you. At the time of writing 4727 vodcasts were available through the channel guide, so there should be something there for everyone. Some of these channels provide high resolution podcasts, a favourite of mine is Hidden Universe HD: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope which offers stunning photography set to music. Once you select a channel Miro will handle your subscription, with an option to automatically download new updates to your computer.
Miro is not the only way to enjoy vodcasts, an alternative is Mythstream, which plugs into MythTV. Using this combination you an build yourself a home media centre, capable of handling your music, video, TV and now vodcasts. The interface on MythTV is much more like a consumer device and is designed to be used with a remote control for that true armchair media experience.
Vodcasts are a great way to get HD content. Using Miro or MythStream also puts you in control, you can subscribe to content that you want to watch, not what somebody in a remote TV station thought you might like or would be good for you.
Re: Get High Definition TV today with Miro
Just so Windows Users don't feel left out here's a link to download Miro for Windows. http://www.getmiro.com/download/