When I came here to this room I found this old big tv laying around. Old but perfectly functional.
First I put a tv cable on it with hundreds of channels but after one month I realized that mostly of them are crap and I was watching everything on my laptop (mostly shows from Netflix and BitTorrent). Obviously I wanted to connect my laptop video output on it.  As an old television it doesn’t have any HDMI port. It have a RCA video and audio ports so after some research I bought a VGA-to-RCA converter. Besides watch movies on it there is a lot of cool things I could do with it to decorated the room or create a environment while we are jamming.
In this article I’ll show how to create a fireplace.
You will need
- an old tv
- computer-tv connection (vga-to-rca in my case)
- Linux (Ubuntu here)
- mplayer
- wine
- cheese
Getting a high definition fireplace video
You can search in Youtube for high definition fireplace videos.
There is a lot of ways to extract the videos from Youtube and it’s not the point explain it here but I can say one the best ways today is using JDownloader. Using it you can extract sound and video in any available resolution.
Choose a fireplace video and download the highest resolution available (usually 720p). Here I stored it at /home/silveira/Videos/fireplace_hd.flv.
Screen layout
I’m using the TV as a second display in the right. The width of my laptop monitor is 1920.
Creating a shortcut
First, right click in the upper panel of Gnome and select Add to Panel. Select the Custom Application Launcher option.
Let’s fill it like this:
On the command put:
/usr/bin/mplayer /home/silveira/Videos/fireplace_hd.flv -nosound -loop 0 -geometry +1900+0 -fs
Explaning:
- /usr/bin/mplayer the mplayer full path (probably you have the same path but you can try “whereis mplayer” in a terminal to find it).
- /home/silveira/Videos/fireplace_hd.flv as I said, where I put the video.
- -nosound no sound. 🙂 Usually I have some music playing so I don’t want any fire sound. But if you want the fire crackling sound omit this parameter.
- -loop 0 the video I took have 10 minutes. If I put -loop 6 it would loop for 1 hour. Zero means infinite times.
- -geometry +1900+0 you can specify the size of the screen and position but here I’m justing saying I want it on horizontal position 1900 (bigger than my first screen) so it goes to the tv.
- -fs fullscreen
Now drink the wine and cheese in front of your low carbon footprint fireplace. 😉
Bonus
Now you can use the same idea and make an virtual aquarium, ant farm, an interactive art piece or anything!
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