As far as your computer is concerned the TV is just another monitor. the tricky part depends on the TV and what kind of TV it is and its inputs. My old CRT was a PITA to get working, but my newer TV has VGA and HDMI so it plugs in and the computer looks at it trats it like another monitor. Now some graphcis cards are much happier about this process than others. Nvidia if you are using their Drivers makes it a cakewalk, ATI a little less so, opensource drivers are really hit or miss, and sometimes depend on the tools you use to manage them. Ubuntu/mint are not bad in this regard at all. I have had other distros slap me in the face with having to manually configure my configs to even have the other screen show up.

in all it should be pretty easy unless you have to deal with converting to TV that does not have ready computer friendly inputs.


On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:25 PM, Brian Cluff <brian@snaptek.com> wrote:
If you have an LCD TV, then all they are is giant monitors.  All you'll need to do is plug it to the VGA port on the back if it has one.  If it doesn't have one, hopefully you have a DVI or HDMI port on your computer.  If you have and HDMI port on your video card, just pickup a cheap HDMI cable and plug it in.  If you have a DVI port on your computer, you'll need a cheap DVI to HDMI converter.  They can be had for just a couple of dollars on amazon, including shipping.  Then you'll just need to get an HDMI cable and plug it in.

If you have an older CRT based TV, then you'll either need a video card with a TV out capability, or you will need a scan rate converter to convert the signal to something that the TV can recognize.

Brian Cluff


On 01/29/2013 09:38 PM, Michael Havens wrote:
xbmc looks good but what I was wondering was what I needed to do to get
it to work. From my research it seems that all you need to do is plug it
in and start it up but it seems that is the windows way of doing it.
Does it work that way  with Linux too? Another thing, could I do
something where I it is like I have two screens with on monitor so I can
surf the web and watch d/l movies ? Like one computer with two screens
  and each screen is doing something different. Gee, I have a dual
processor One processor for each screen!
:-)~MIKE~(-:


On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Vimal Shah <vimals@sokikom.com
<mailto:vimals@sokikom.com>> wrote:

    This might offer a few ideas:

    http://lifehacker.com/5900626/create-a-kickass-seamless-play+everything-media-center-the-complete-guide

    On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com
    <mailto:bmike1@gmail.com>> wrote:

        I'm going to hook my tv up to my computer.... what do I need to
        do? What do I need to d/l to facilitate this?
        :-)~MIKE~(-:

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