Home Entertainment Center

Many movie disk purchases include an alpha-numerical key for digital downloads of that movie. Go to a site that accepts such keys, enter the key and you will be able to watch that movie, using online streaming, and without your disk. The best known, Ultraviolet, closed recently but a new one, MoviesAnywhere has opened. Vudu also accepts digital keys. I have discovered a way to make my purchased collection available to the TV. A while back, I purchased a 4K UHD blu-ray copy of the movie Independence Day (1996). I think that is one of the movies, that I like, that will improve on a 4K screen. Some movies are better suited for 4K UHD than others. I had also, previously, purchased the full Game of Thrones series on blu-ray discs. Neither of my blu-ray players supports 4K UHD disks. This was frustrating to say the least. Now, several months later, after some web reading, I managed to find a round-about way. Currently, several of the online movie/TV-series clouds have allowed us...

This is the system I have currently: LG 55" SmartTV 4k HDMI (wall mounted) Legacy VHS recorder/player and laptop dongle with app. ALtec LAnsing Valencia speakers bi-amped and run with: Pioneer VSX-42 500 watt AVR The Valencia crossover filters have been remade into four filters, placed in a custom box. One each, for the horns and woofers. A B&O RX-12 turntable with ESP RIAA filter, custom boxed, with B&O #4 equivalent cartridge-needle. The Valencia speaker horn compression drivers have been replaced with inexpensive Chinese knock-offs. A set of MidWest Speaker after market replacements are in stock. A repair kit for the original set is also stocked. Polk Audio sub-woofer Sennheiser headphones Dr Dre Beats earbuds Pioneer Blu-ray recorder/player for laptop Samsung stand-alone Blu-ray player Six hard drives; 5x1TB and 1x4TB for a total of 9 TB of data storage Channel Master antenna signal amplifier. Antenna signal splitter Asus x510UA laptop w'i5 8th G...

The LG SmartTV has an operating system installed, just like a personal computer. The one on my laptop is Windows 10 Pro. I also have one of the many 'flavors' of Linux installed inside the Windows operating system. The one on my Apple cell phone is iOS. The one on my Raspberry Pi is 'Raspbian Buster', before that, 'Raspbian Stretch' was resident. The one on the TV is WebOS. That operating system is used by LG for many devices. I also have an LG washing machine with wifi capability using that operating system. The system was made open source some time ago. That means, interested people can contribute to the evolution of the software, or make a spin-off of the own. I'm considering the options available using a custom build of the software. I hope to make saving video data for future viewing opssible. Some LG models have/had a recorder on board. My model does not. The Sony Betamax law lets people make copies of electonic media for which they have leg...

Recently, I installed a USB hub. This lets me run all my external USB hard drives through the hub, THEN into my oled TV. Prior to this, there were some problems with the drives. The source of the problems were the power required by the drives and the status of the drives after powering down. Sometimes, on powering up, the TV would give messages regarding plugging and unplugging external devices. Eventually, this became a major nuisance. The hub requires a separate power supply, so I purchased one that requires a separate power source, thus solving the power issue. This also frees up some of the oled TV's USB ports for other uses/devices since the hub uses only one. I moved the 4TB WD Passport hard drive to my router. That drive contains no 4K videos, so no degradation of the video will occur, as is the case with 4K UHD movies. That drive is presented s a separate input on the inputs list, using LG's SmartShare software.Despite the 4k drag issue, I placed the drive contain...

I'm devoting this post to the RTLSDR. This device is a dongle for laptops and tablets/phones that have USB ports and software written for the particular device. The SDR is a radio frequency receiver. Sounds simple. The radio spectrum is divided into segments dedicated to particular functions and by assorted agencies. The idea behind a SDR is a programmable radio that can be configured and reconfigured for different  spectra and formats. Two different agencies, e.g.,governments, may transmit data in different formats. If the format information is available, the SDR can often incorporate the standards into the unit programming and receive/record transmissions from those sources. The most common uses are to receive commercial FM radio bands, NOAA weather bands, Air traffic control bands and weather satellite imagery. Recently, digital radio, HDRadio, receiving software became available. The digital radio broadcasts are, for some reason, encrypted. A researcher decrypted t...

I found an app to replace the Google Chrome remote desktop app. The name of the app is Team Viewer and works well. The app gives me a remote trackpad on my laptop that can run the laptop remotely. I use VLC player for Windows, and the iOS VLC Remote app to play videos on my laptop using my HDTV as the display screen. I hook up my laptop  to the TV using an HDMI cable. I can select and play the videos from my easy chair using my iPhone. UPDATE: My current setup includes the Googl Chrome remote desktop app to control my PC. My PC is connected to my 55" oled via an HDMI cable. With this setup, I can watch movies stored on my laptop (using the VLC player/streamer) but not yet moved to a remote hard drive.

The idea of attaching hard drives to my router was a good one. There is a drawback: the setup is too slow for some 4K UHD content. Some 4K videos will start to pixelate and freeze. The same videos will play normally when connected to the HDTV USB ports. Lower resolution content will still play normally, but the 4K videos had to be removed. USB hubs would be of use in this situation. A hub funnels several USB devices into one USB port. As a matter of fact, I tried that earlier but found the HDTV would only recognize one or two of three drives on the hub. I have since learned that powered hubs have been working for some. The hub I tried was a passive unit. Any power needed had to come from the HDTV's USB port. My next step is to purchase a powered USB hub and make the same trial. Hopefully, the powered hub will work. The addition of one or more powered USB hubs may allow me to expand the number of drives I can use. I am currently limited to three on the HDTV and two non-UHD ...