With the ability to watch movies and TV series on Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, those of us without an Internet-ready TV have been settling for watching at a computer desk or on a smaller laptop screen. One way around this is to get the video from your computer to the TV as seamlessly as possible. Last year, I reviewed Warpia’s USB PC to TV video adapter, which provided decent wireless video up to 720p. After that review, many people asked about 1080p video and other features. Today, I reviewed Warpia’s latest product in this line, the ConnectHD.

1080p HD USB PC to TV Video Streaming

Like other streaming products, the ConnectHD includes a USB adapter for sending video and a receiving unit on the television end to convert the signal and display it on your TV. This is accomplished by Windows treating the Warpia adapter as a duplicated monitor and feeding it all the video you see on your screen. That video image is then streamed wirelessly to the receiver and shows up on your TV. I tested this with video in 1080p and it streamed very well. At the request of my wife, several additional tests were conducted with full episodes of Sons of Anarchy from Amazon.com. The 1080p video testing from YouTube looked great and the additional tests passed Michelle’s scrutiny.

HD Video Conferencing

The premier feature of ConnectHD is the ability to, well, connect in HD to others. The TV adapter includes a 720p HD video camera and the ability to stream video both ways. On your computer, the camera shows up as any other camera you might connect directly. This makes the ConnectHD uniquely suited to act as video conferencing hardware for applications like Skype and MSN Messenger. I tried it with Skype today and was pleased with the results. The video quality showed some signs of compression, but that may have been more Skype than the camera as the image was crystal clear in Skype’s video settings panel.

Warpia ConnectHD Video Demonstration

During my testing, I created video of some of the process, showing how well the ConnectHD works and demonstrating the features as seen below:

Conclusions

Listed on the Warpia site with a sales price of $199.99, ConnectHD is a good bundle considering the $100+ prices of most HD PC to TV video solutions and the cost of a good HD camera. ConnectHD bundles both to ensure they will work well together. If video conferencing is something you won’t likely do from the couch, $199 can seem steep, so Warpia and other companies offer cameraless solutions for a lot less cost. This solution performed very well in all of my testing and works great for the task at hand.

Earlier this week, thousands of sites, including JoeTech.com, blocked or hid their content as a symbolic gesture to protest the impending SOPA/PIPA legislation that threatened the integrity of free-flowing information on the Internet. While some sites displayed a pop-up message allowing users to move on to content by clicking a button and Google simply changed their logo to appear censored, sites like Wikipedia and Joe Tech completely blocked all content from users to truly emphasize the impact such legislation could cause. An example is seen below. This post will show you how we did it in just a few very easy steps.

Black Out Your Site Like Wikipedia

This site and Wikipedia both used a pretty harmless method to block our content for the protest. The method we used involved simply covering up the normal content with a layer of HTML that hides it and shows something else in its place. To accomplish this in an elegant way, you will need an image and/or content to display, the HTML shown below, and a small change to your site’s CSS. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Create your image and content. In my case, I made a couple very simple changes to a large version of my logo image to make it more protest-y.

2. Add the overlay code. In your site’s template (or your theme’s footer.php in WordPress), copy the code below and paste it right above the /body tag. Modify it as indicated to include your own image or message.


<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;
width:100%;height:100%;
background:url(/images/darken.png);text-align:center;">
<!-- Add your image and message below this line -->
<img src="/images/sopa.png" />
<!-- Add your image and message above this line -->
</div>


Here’s the background and content images I used.

3. Stop the scroll. Update your site’s CSS file to stop the original content from being larger than the new overlay content. This may not always be necessary, but will be pretty obvious when it is. Just add the following code anywhere to the bottom of the CSS:


body{overflow:hidden;}


That’s it! Follow the three steps above and you’ll have your protest/maintenance/special message up in no time on every page on the site.

If you haven’t heard about S.O.P.A. yet and why it needs to be stopped, spend five minutes and read on.

What Is S.O.P.A.?

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.

In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?

And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.

If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Wikipedia And JoeTech.com Are Going Dark In Protest

At 12:00 AM on January 18th, 2012, the English version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours, and so will JoeTech.com and we’re certainly not alone. Reddit got the SOPA Strike rolling, and Mozilla has been vocal about this for a while. My dedicated server provider, Codero, voiced their own opinion about SOPA/PIPA, urging customers to get educated.

During that 24 hour period I’ll have a blackout page up, but as of 12:00 AM on January 19th, 2012, JoeTech.com will be back to normal.

How You Can Protest

If you have a web site, go on strike with me.

Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.

Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.

Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.

Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.

I know you guys love contests, so here’s an awesome one from my friend over at DragonBlogger.com, another tech site you should bookmark. He had a contest last month that went incredibly well, with thousands of entries, so he’s doing it again.

Here’s the deal. One winner chosen at the end of the month will be shipped a brand new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet for free and this will include a copy of uRex DVD Ripper Platinum which allows them to rip their favorite DVD’s and convert them to MP4 format they can transfer to the Kindle Fire. If that wasn’t awesome enough, he partnered with New Trent and will also be giving away a New Trent IMP78B Imperial Leather Case and a New Trent Fimir Anti-Glare Screen Protector to the winner of the Kindle Fire as well.

To enter, just do any of the stuff listed below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Kindle Fire Giveaway contest hosted by Dragon Blogger technology blog is made possible in part by these awesome sponsors and you should pay them a visit and thank them!

Sponsors:

Aside from the Kindle Fire, if you could win anything on DragonBlogger.com or JoeTech.com, what would it be?