June 27th, 2023
Whilst taking a break and perusing YouTube, I chanced upon some episodes of Paramount’s Star Trek Strange New Worlds. I decided to waste an hour watching Season 1, Episode 1 — I was pretty tired after working outside in the heat for some hours.
Talk about a blast from the past. This show slavishly reproduces the original show, but with 21st century video technology. It’s Captain James T. Kirk — well, actually, Captain Christopher Pike — facing tough puzzles imposed by strange alien cultures who, through lack of insight, are bent on doing harm. But the standard combination of clever applications of science, clever speeches, and overall cleverness saves the day in the end. Along the way there’s the appropriate amount of rousing space combat (the shields always get down to 25%, but that’s when they somehow avoid further combat), a little punch-em-up here and there, some Vulcan nerve pinches, and the whole thing peppered humorous asides. All ends well with everybody happy and Captain Kirk — er, Pike — dispensing a closing witticism to wrap it all up. And although it’s true that, in space, nobody can hear you scream, you can always hear the whoosh of starships zooming past.
My wife Kathy has some tight specifications for video she’ll watch. No gore, no cruelty, violence held to a civilized level, and a happy ending. Disney video (with the exception of Bambi and Ol’ Yeller) is usually acceptable. So I figured that she might like this show. We usually watch an hour of video at dinnertime. It’s a family thing: Kathy, me, and the dogs all gathered together in the main room, eating dinner, chewing bones (the dogs, not us), and watching TV. All I had to do was get YouTube working on our TV set.
It’s an old Samsung big screen TV. This thing is old, so old that, when you turn it on, you can hear the powerful turbines coming up to speed with a high-pitched whine. So old that I’m sure that there are some radio tubes in there somewhere. Yes, it’s a fully digital LCD screen at least a meter in width, but I think that the digital part is done in Roman numerals. No, it doesn’t have any kind of YouTube application built in or downloadable. It does have Netflix and Amazon Prime, but no other streaming services.
“No problem!” I laughed to myself. “I’ll just use the built-in web browser!” I fired it up — and was confronted with a screen saying in big upper-case letters that the page I wanted to access was dangerous; accessing it could well result in the collapse of Western civilization. This was for the home page for the Samsung TV!
“OK, no problem! I’ll just download a modern web browser!” I chuckled to myself. I had seen a reference to Chrome earlier. I dug around, found something, and attempted to download Chrome. Problem: Chrome is too damned high-and-mighty to permit itself to be downloaded by some mangy old cur of a TV set. “I refuse to dirty myself residing on anything less than a 256-bit CPU with 65 Godzillabytes of memory!” it declared.
“OK…” I told myself, refraining from my ‘no problem!’ addendum. I retired from the scene of battle to work on something easier, like a 70-year old tractor.
Eventually I returned with a new idea. I dragged my Mac laptop down to the TV. Sure enough, my Mac has an HDMI output port, and my TV has an HDMI input port. I unplugged the HDMI cable from the DVD player (“DVD players” are ancient devices that can read video data from a plastic disk on which tiny holes have been drilled by a laser and… oh, never mind.) Anyway, I grabbed that HDMI cable and plugged it into my laptop. At dinnertime, I fired up the laptop and accessed the Internet over the wireless network and went to YouTube. Then I found the Star Trek episode and ran it. The video flowed freely from the Internet to my Wifi transmitter to my laptop to the TV. Ta-da! Human ingenuity prevails again! Rejoicing in my cleverness, I sat down to eat dinner. And it worked perfectly: the video came through to the TV flawlessly and the picture was beautiful.
But not the audio. HDMI means “High Definition Multimedia Interface”, but apparently audio is not one of the media in that multi — at least, not on my old Samsung TV. Maybe it was built before they invented audio. No amount of screwing around could convince the Samsung to play the audio that was clearly playing on the laptop. My dinner was getting cold. I’m sure that, had I only accessed the proper settings on the laptop to convince it to route audio through the HDMI cable, and then accessed the proper control panel on the Samsung to locate the appropriate control sector containing the list of menus containing the menu for routing audio around in the TV, and then finding the actual menu item for routing THIS audio from THIS HDMI port to THAT output, it would have been a snap. Everything is easy when you already know how to do it. If you don’t already know how to do it, you’re screwed — and it serves you right for presuming to attemp to influence such a high-tech miracle without thoroughly studying the 761-page manual.
“Ha!” I shouted triumphantly. “I shall bend you to my will!” I ran upstairs and found an old 3.5mm male-to-male audio cable — we all have one of those laying around somewhere, right? — then ran downstairs with it clutched in my sweaty fingers. I suppose this tale would be more gripping had I slipped on the stairs and fallen to my death, but, boring to say, I made it down safely, plugged one end of the cable into the headphone port of the laptop and the other into one of the input jacks for the external speaker system that I just happen to have added to the TV. Sound, glorious sound gushed out from the speakers! I turned around to bowingly accept the wild cheers of my adoring audience, but Kathy had already finished dinner and the dogs were more interested in their chew toys. So I slunk back to my dinner, which was completely cold, and we watched Star Trek. Huzzah.