Monday, November 23, 2009

Adventures in Electronics

Our TV arrived safe and sound at about 5:30 yesterday afternoon (they deliver on Sundays!). The two delivery guys took our old heavy beast of a TV to their truck and did a simple set up of the new one, which consisted of taking the new TV out of the box, putting it together (we are not mounting it on the wall), putting the batteries in the remote control, hooking it up to our satellite box, and firing it up to assure that it was operational. We had to loan them one of our phillips head screwdrivers since they did not bring their own tools. I figure that is about a 6.3 on the WTF scale.

We decided to wait until daylight to set everything else up. Although M tried to hook up the DVD player, it worked, but was not displaying the color red for some strange reason.

Woke up this morning, M had misplaced his keys, I found them underneath some papers. Score one for the wife.

After I dropped K off at school, I set about to get the TV and everything hooked up. Looked on the back of the TV and discovered that there is only one set of inputs. One set of inputs and three things that need to be hooked up. Not only that, but there is no S-Video input. Which I found kind of surprising.

Because we have satellite TV and our box does not have an HDMI output, we had no need to purchase an expensive HDMI cable. The satellite box initially was hooked up via coaxial cable. Which left only two things to hook up with one set of inputs. So I made a run to my favorite store that has a bullseye logo to buy an AV switch box. Thankfully they had one that had 3 sets of inputs. YAY!

Back at home, I decided that we might get a better picture using component cable from the satellite box to the TV than using the coax. So I hooked the sat. box up to one of the inputs. The second input was given to the DVD player. I also wanted to run both the sat box and the DVD player through the stereo, so I had to use two splitters on the DVD players outputs, so I could hook the audio to both the stereo and the TV (dang DVD player had only one set of outputs). The third set of inputs went to the Wii. I opted not to run the Wii audio through the stereo because I do not have two more splitters. Got everything connected to the TV, and fired it up.

Satellite worked wonderfully. Switched to the DVD. Houston, there is a problem. I had a side by side double screen on the DVD menu screen, and it was very dark. Ugh, had to go fishing through all the setup menus to get it all straightened out. Finally got it all figured out and plugged a movie in. Voila! Red (and all the other colors), YAY. Turned on the Wii, and somehow the screen was kind of dark for that too. Ran to get a Wiimote, and when the Wiimote hooked up to the Wii, suddenly it was a bright screen, so thankfully no surfing Wii setup menus!

I feel like I have conquered something, but now my lower back is all tight and the muscle spasms are back. Oh well, at least I have everything hooked up. Anyone up for Wii Tennis?

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