What use is WiFi on a Costco Viso TV?

In sci.electronics.repair, on Sat, 5 Sep 2015 04:43:38 +0000 (UTC),

I don't have a new tv.

Thanks but won't work for me. You've come in in the middle of the story, Not worth repeating it.

THat probably is a very good and simple idea. Connecting laptop or tablet to use as primary display and big creen TV set as a duplicate display.

Micky, B4 asking whole bunch of questions, you ought to search for your answers on the 'net. Specially Youtube gives lots of visual demos. Be specific when you have questions. Like telling us what you have and what you are trying to do and what problem you are running into or something you don't understand. As far as TV set goes, we're in HDTV era and HDMI cable takes care of a/v hook ups. When you mention WiFi, then do you at least have a router for your home network in your home?

Nothing to do with wires, just turning on the tv to watch, it takes to to boot, and you must wait in order to change the channel. Mikek before

I don't have direct tv. My router does not have a coax input.

I thought that was a coax cable coming out of all those direct tv antennas I see on houses.

If the output of Direct TV is coax, how does that coax get "into" your network?

It can't go through the router. How does it get into your router without a coax connector on the router?

I guess a USB wired mouse and keyboard would be useful.

Do most of these WiFi TVs have the ability to accept a typical USB mouse and keyboard?

I went over to a friend's house who had a new samsung wifi tv and the browsing was so slow that I'd say it's unusable for two reasons:

1. Typing the URL with the remote was punitive, and,
2. Once you had the URL, the time to load was interminable.

This might just be a bad Samsung TV, but, wow. It's great for checkboxes but it doesn't work in real time.

That's bad too. I hate my smart phone because it takes so long to turn on, and 5 steps to turn off. The "bar" phone I used to use turned on or off in a second or two.

My Philips DVDR, which does it's main job very well but has a bunch of design flaws, takes noticeably longer to change channels than does the Zenith set-top box.

The output from the Direct TV is a coax cable, right? How does that coax cable connect to your router?

alt.home.repair:

It doesn't. The TV network connection is via the common wireless or ethernet cable.

A DirecTV box has multiple "outputs". HDMI, component, etc.

The DirecTV boxes I've had all had an ethernet connection that I plugged my home network into. I think some of the newer boxes also have wireless capability, or maybe they provide a separate device to connect wirelessly. The coax that you see is from the Dish (actually from the LNB) to the DirecTV box. The DirecTV box takes care of the connection to the internet. It works kind of like the other devices that connect to the internet via your home network. I also have a Blu-Ray player and it connects to the home network via ethernet also.

So, help me here.

Let's say the DirectTV dish is on the roof, and it has a coax cable that goes down the side of the house, through a wall, to a wall plate.

From that wall plate, how does "it" (i.e., the tv signal) get on my "network"?

You said the tv signal gets into the network via either the wireless connection or through the wired ethernet (cat5) cable.

But, how does that coax cable tv signal get to either one of those (i.e., how does the coax connect to the wifi or the ethernet cable)?

Oh. That explains it!

So, the coax cable that comes out of the dish on the roof then goes into a "box" which has, as outputs, either coax or RJ45 or a wifi antenna?

Is that correct?

Well, the main outputs of a direcTV box are designed to send a signal to a TV, so they are the HDMI and the video and audio to the TV or a monitor. The Ethernet is just an addition.... there so you can get internet access for streaming "stuff" from their web. There's also (on my box) an eSATA port so I can connect an external drive, and a USB port that I've never seen any reason to use. If there is a coax output I've never used it, but I did notice am S-Video port which I've also never used. I've never seen a WiFi connection, but then I don't use WiFi I use wired connections to connect to the direcTV boxes.

If I remember correctly, direcTV has an application called DirecTV to PC that you can install on a computer that's on your network, and if the DirecTV box is also on the network, you can watch recorded content (from your DirecTV recorder) on a computer connected to the network. So far as I know, that's the only way to get TV content to your computer.

Years ago, before HD, the DirecTV boxes could be hacked (they run under DirecTV's version of Linux) and content could be moved around from boxes to computers..... but that's no longer the case.

The signal in the coax is an encrypted digital signal and requires a DirecTV box to decrypt it. The box can then output it as a digital signal to a TV (HDMI for example) . To get the signal to a computer requires some means of defeating the copy protection built into the DirecTV system. I think the DirecTV to PC ap does some of that.