Last Winter I bought a Sony EX64 Bravia. We’re watching a movie right now, so it’s not a good time for experimentation.
The SO and I went to see the new Star Trek movie last night. Fandango gave me a free download of the first reboot movie, for buying the tickets through them. I’ve downloaded the movie into iTunes. Can I connect the TV, which is Internet-ready and connected to my Airport wireless router, to my computer so that we can watch the downloaded film on the TV? Or are we stuck watching it on my 17" computer screen?
Additional info: Wireless LAN PC is ‘always on’ when I look at Setup. The manual has a section to play movie/music/photo via USB connection. When I look at that part on the TV, and I’m assuming that ‘PC always on’ means that the TV is connected to the wireless router, show up.
You can certainly do it. I don’t know what kind of setup you eventually want if you are going to do this often but you should just be able to do it with a VGA or HDMI cable straight from the computer to the TV.
Do you have an HDMI cable? That should be all it takes. You can use those types of TV’s as a huge monitor just by connecting the two and selecting HDMI as the source on the TV. VGA connections are just as easy too if you have that available.
Another alternative, which I do, is to copy the film onto a 32 gig memory card, and plug that into my TV using a USB adaptor. No trailing cables and dead easy.
You don’t run into DRM problems with that? I was under the impression that all movies from iTunes were DRM locked. It would be lousy DRM if you could play it anywhere just by putting the file on a memory card. That would effectively be removing the DRM.
Then again, the same sort of thing used to work back when iTunes audio had DRM. You just had to burn the song to an audio CD.
Check the manual to determine if your TV is DLNA/UPnP compliant (most high-end Sony kit is). If it is, then you just need a suitable DLNA server on your computer, and the TV will stream the film from your PC.
I use a DLNA server called Serviio (it is a java app so runs on a variety of systems), but I am not sure how it co-operates with iTunes datastores. Windows Media Player is also a DLNA server.
On Googling - iSedora is a win/mac DLNA server that appears to work with Bravia TVs and supports iTunes.
Put it on a thumb drive (memory stick) and plug it in. So long as your TV recognises the Apple format which it should, you will be fine. I play lots of stuff through my Panasonic plasma from a memory stick and its often in different formats.
If you have a PS3 or an XBox 360, they each have the ability to stream movies that are on your computer, as long as the computer and game system are on a network together.
My monitor is officially a TV, generally I use the HDMI cable as that way I control both the sound and image with a single remote. A google tells me that yes, you’d need an adapter (the info I find refers to a minidisplayport-to-hdmi adapter).
The USB thumb drive should also work, you probably already have one (checked info on the Bravias, according to Sony they can play directly from a memstick or external HD).
It might depend on the exact vintage of your MacBook, but you’ll probably need one of these. Once plugged in, you’ll need to fiddle with the “Displays” and “Sound” control panels in System Preferences, but it’s simple and straight-forward.
The .ITE file is apparently a renamed folder. Remove the .ITE extension and it will become an ordinary folder you can open to see the files inside. You may need to do this to allow your TV to see the MP4 file on a flash drive.
Do these movies really have true HiDef resolution? I would expect something formatted for a computer monitor to lose resolution on the big screen. But I’m just guessing-- I’ve never done this.
Also, do MacBook Pros generally have an HDMI port?
What version of Macbook Pro do you have? There’s probably an adapter for it. I use this one for my Macbook Air and it outputs HDMI fine.
Saved, yes. Played from by a TV? I doubt it. It’s going to be DRM’d to iTunes, so only iTunes on a Mac or another Apple product (like the Apple TV) that speaks Apple DRM will be able to play it.