Video and plasma

Okay, so here's the deal. We started watching Battlestar Galactica and have purchased the first two seasons on DVD. This all started because we started watching the end of Season 3. If you are familiar with getting addicted to television shows then probably understand how you just keep watching program after program and before you know it hours upon hours have just vanished into thin air! Okay so here is the point... We finished the DVDs and we missed setting up our DVR to record the marathon season 3 that they played a week or so ago. So, now what do you do??? Well, as it turns out, you can buy the episodes through iTunes and play them back on your Mac (actually a PC will work too - at least I have heard it will work). Anyway we bought the MINI-DVI to VGA cable for the Mac Book so we could connect it to an external monitor (read 50" plasma TV). Amazingly enough it works pretty darn good and we just connect the Mac Book to the TV and the stereo and play it through Front Row. It actually works pretty good...

Okay - so the main point is this. We had the Mac Book in the living room and we ended up connecting with Nana and Max for a video conference. I stuck my iSight firewire camera on top of the tv and we had a nice video chat. It was really pretty cool because the audio was coming out of our A/V receiver and we had a huge full screen window to talk to them. I am not sure if we will do it again or more often but it was really pretty cool!

OBTW - the plasma works REALLY well as a monitor. The native resolution is about the screen dimensions of the Mac Book and it's pretty clear and sharp. We also ran some slides shows and web surfing through it and I was pretty impressed. Not exactly something we would do on a regular basis but it was pretty darn nice.