YouTube on TV; bit of tweaking will work wonders
People come up with crazy stuff to link various gizmos together. YouTube seems to be the ‘it’ site these days so it is but natural that some genius put this on TV sooner than later. Justin Heideman seems to be a real geek (read genius) and he’s come up with a masterstroke – he’s put YouTube videos on a TV, which stream real time. And this he did for the installation of Worlds Away. A bit of tweaking with several elements involved – viz a Mac, a CRT, a Remote Buddy and of course the browser itself – enabled him to hack together a mechanism that enables people to view videos off YouTube on a TV and control them using a custom interface.
Of course they (guys who came up with this wonderful hack) did try the easy way out first. They just took the flash videos from website and wrote them up on a DVD. They were to realize later that such a thing just wasn’t done, being explicitly forbidden under YouTube’s terms of service. So they resorted to using YouTube’s trademark player and put it onto a TV.
Using jQuery and Safari, the guys built an interface, replete with all the necessary instruction keys, that would enable videos to be played on screen. It is quite obvious that playing things on a TV isn’t really fun without a remote. For that the guys configured a Remote Buddy to work with a third-party USB infrared device. As already mentioned elsewhere the videos stream real time in this project, and the guys are really lucky to have good wireless coverage. Thereon in, all the elements i.e. the computer, TV and so on were brought together and put in the gallery.
You must read the entire thing here. And do watch the video of YouTube videos on a TV below (That’s a weird thing to say). Anyho, the project’s really interesting for all the geeks out there. So go ahead put your very own YouTube playlist on a TV.
