I've spent the past month preparing for and implementing a migration from comcast cable tv to relying on both off-air hdtv and Internet video.  The easy part was dumping Comcast, though they magically managed to NOT turn off billing because they had to send out a service tech (for no good reason – there is nothing the tech has to do at the house) and that guy never showed up so they never closed out the call and kept billing.  Magical.  A second call to a slightly scared but helpful front line support kid fixed the billing.  I explained how things really work, that the tech was a scam and that I know why these systems work.  I also made it clear that I would drop the Internet immediately if the bill were not corrected immediately.  It's fixed.  One must often frighten the front lines to get things accomplished.  Front line support usually WANTS to help.  They can't help they work for crappy companies, however.

Anyway, Comcast is out and HDTV off-air is in.  I got a nice antenna and two digital converters (with two TVs that were digital ready) and now my wife and I just watch a few things like the big bang theory – in glorious HD.

Now comes the hard part.  The big TV – sony bravia – is hooked to a computer (what I call the media computer) with an nVidia 9800GT video adapter.  The computer is a Fedora 12 dual-core 64bit with 1G memory.  Fast enough to display HD.  So the issue will be bandwidth – getting the data to the computer.  The computer has a wired ethernet but there is no wire to where the cable modem is in my office.  So wireless has to get the data from the cable modem to the media computer.

The media computer is currently connected to a cheap wireless bridge.  How cheap?  It doesn't have any make or model identifiers either externally or in the web based software.  I have no idea who made it.  But it works.  And seems to work well.  But apparently not fast enough to stream media from the cable modem. 

Tests with computers wired directly to a wrt54g router running DD-WRT show HD video from hulu and various networks play just fine.  But piped wirelessly to the media computer and there is excessive jumpiness on the big TV.  So I assumed that no-name bridge was the problem.  I suspected I needed an N router, instead of the G router.  N is faster – up to 300Mbs in optimal conditions.  G maxes out at 54Mbs, and I wasn't even getting that.

My first attempt at fixing this was to order a Wireless N router and PCI adapter from Linksys (via NewEgg).  A week of testing later I returned them.  I simply couldn't connect to the router from existing wireless devices and the adapter wouldn't connect to the existing WRT54G router.  Since they were bought as a special I had to return both. 

So I ordered a TP-Link router and USB adapter.  A couple days of testing and I find that doesn't work either.  The driver (ar9170usb) for the adapter is one problem – it isn't stable and the adapter keeps dropping out.  The router doesn't work with the wireless bridge I'm currently using either, though othe 54Mbs devices do work fine with it.  But the router is DD-WRT capable so I'm keeping both and will wait until the USB adapter works better.  I put those aside and reexamined the original problem – throughput from the WRT54G to the no-name bridge.

A little research on DD-WRT and I find I can do adjust some QoS settings that gives data priority to the bridge and the media computer.  I also set the router to push 54Mbs instead of Auto.  After doing these, the data slides through to the media computer fast enough that Hulu and various HD videos play without skipping!   A few tests wtih ttcp from another computer across the router to the media computer show about 1.8Mbs througput.  That should be fast enough for Hulu.

But there are some catches. First, I can't run full screen.  I don't know why but suspect its due to lack of hardware acceleration in the flash player.  This leads to other problems because the TV is large.  I had to set a black background, load a gtk+ theme that uses no window borders (Elegant Brit No Borders) and has a black title bar with very small and hardly visible window manager icons.  I auto-hide the top an bottom panels too.  And finally, I had to install gconf-editor to disable display of icons on the desktop (look for the Nautilus app and disable icons that are initially enabled).  Icons for Hulu and firefox (to get to non-Hulu video) sit in the top panel.

The other problem is that I need to set the CPU to run at full speed all the time, or at least while watching videos.  By default it idles around 1.0GHz.  I push it to 2.6GHz using the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor panel applet.  I worry this will kill the CPU if I forget to turn it down after we finish watching videos.  I also disabled nearly every service I could except those that are absolutely required.  So I have nearly complete use of the cores.

Now the TV, displaying the media computer desktop, looks like a media device.  My wife is happily watching episodes of Glee from Hulu with no skipping and almost no desktop nuisances visible.

Unfortunately for me, The Daily Show doesn't play well when expanded.  The video isn't high quality so we're stuck watching it inside the web page.  I have to check to see if Hulu or some other service has it in HD.  I hope so.

After all this, I can rest happily that I've successfully dumped Comcast but still have access to the shows of interest.  Until they buy NBC and disable access to everyone else via Comcast Internet.  Anyone wanna bet when they get around to that?
 

update: 2010-05-29

Good news.  south park plays great on the big TV over the Internet.  Nearly full screen too!  Butters wanting to be a vampire never looked so good.