EUTOMASITAD: Watching TV

This is the first of a series of posts about the Excessive Use of Technology to Make Simple Tasks Difficult (or “EUTOMASITAD”, for short).

Like most people, I watch television programs and movies on my TV, not on my computer screen. As with many things in life, however, I’ve learned to make this otherwise simple activity quite complicated through EUTOMASITAD (Excessive Use of Technology to Make Simple Tasks Difficult).

The first step to watching TV “the EUTOMASITAD way” is to change where you get your programming. Antenna? Too easy. Cable? Too easy. Satellite? Still too easy. No, the best way to get EUTOMASITAD programming to watch on your TV screen is from the internet. I’m not talking illegal rips of movies here, of course (that would be wrong) — I’m talking original, non-copyrighted material that gets published to the internet.

For example, one of my favorite geek shows is from the website DL.TV. The show is a 30-minute video that gets published twice a week and covers all types of tech news. Now, I could just watch the latest episode of DL.TV on my computer screen, especially since the video quality isn’t that great (oddly, it’s almost like they expect that you’re going to watch the video on your computer). But that’s just not the EUTOMASITAD way.

Some modern DVD players are capable of playing videos which are downloaded from the internet. A simplified EUTOMASITAD method would be to simply burn the downloaded episode to a CD or DVD and play that disc using one of these EUTOMASITAD-friendly DVD players. But this method fails to involve one of the most important facets of the EUTOMASITAD home: the home network. A true EUTOMASITAD user will use the home network whenever possible, especially when it’s not necessary to accomplish a given task.

This, then, is the way I watch an episode of DL.TV:

1. set up a podcast program (juice) to automatically download the videos from the DL.TV website
2. set up some sort of service on my computer to handle delivering the content (in my case I usually use the UPnP server “Nero Media Home”)
3. stream content to a media device connected to my home network and TV (in my case I have a Roku HD1000)
4. enjoy the first 5 seconds or so of the video before it craps out
5. begin EUTOMASITAD troubleshooting
6. run to the basement to see if the network switch is working
7. run upstairs to the computer to see if the UPnP service is running properly (and reboot it anyway, just to make sure)
8. run back downstairs and reboot the Roku HD1000
9. return to the couch to watch the next 5 seconds of content before it craps out again
10. goto step 5
11. give up

(Those of you who are programmers will notice that you never actually reach step #11. A true EUTOMASITAD disciple will never give up — they may get frustrated, they may get annoyed, but they will never give up. That is not the way of the EUTOMASITAD.)

I’ve left a few steps out (like transcoding the video to MPEG-2 on the fly and getting the UPnP protocols to handshake properly) because I don’t want to give the impression that the process is overly complicated.

Like most problems solved using EUTOMASITAD the solution works great when it’s working and causes trouble the other 90% of the time. It’s a lot like playing golf in that respect — it’s that 10% of the time when things go right (or that perfect golf shot) that just keeps you coming back for more.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go reboot my television.

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