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jer446

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 28, 2004
826
0
I am starting to think about what electronics I am going to need for next year when i leave home and go into a dorm room. I plan on buying the new macbook whenever they come out. Since i am so used to using a desktop, I will have my bluetooth mouse and keyboard hooked up to it, and I would also like to purchase a monitor.

For my dorm room, I will also need a tv. So i figured why not use my monitor for both? Now i could do it one of two ways, buy a tv with a vga input and use that, but i will be sacrificing quality, or I could buy a monitor, which would be cheaper than a tv.

If i buy lets say a 22 inch monitory, a lot of them come with component inuputs. My dorm only has standard cable, and uses coax. Do they sell some sort of converter that would allow me to watch tv on the monitor? I would prefer not to use a computer tuner, and I cannot use slingbox because the university limits my downloads. Any suggestions?
 
Check out eyetv

You can watch tv on your mac, so it might be cheaper than buying a new tv.
Its an amazing app, highly recommended

b.
 
I would also recommend the EyeTV solution, it's a great DVR. The only problem in your case would be that you need the laptop there to watch it AND definitely to record anything.

Other solutions would be an LCD TV with a decent enough resolution to be your second monitor (Picture-In-Picture would be a huge plus, so you can still use the monitor for work while watching TV).

The third thing would be something like this. That way, you can switch between them and not need your Mac in place and hooked up.

When I was in college, I used my Performa 6400 with a built-in tuner to do the same thing, it worked great at the time. I should fire that thing up and see if it still works...
 
is there any type of adapter i could use that would not require a computer?
 
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