When buying a new HDTV, the first thing you should settle on is where in your room the set should go. Webapp TV Size Matters can help: upload a photo of the room where the TV will go, set a standard scale, and the service lets you try different-sized TVs for size to see how they fit. More »
When buying a new HDTV, the first thing you should settle on is where in your room the set should go. Webapp TV Size Matters can help: upload a photo of the room where the TV will go, set a standard scale, and the service lets you try different-sized TVs for size to see how they fit. More »
Blu-Ray discs may be more protected and harder to play in certain programs, like XBMC, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play your HD video on your media center. Here’s how to rip and compress Blu-Ray discs for high quality, space-saving results. More »
Blu-ray Disc – Movies – Arts – Home Video – Blu-ray and HD
We love DIY projects here at Lifehacker. Whether we’re building computers, backyard projects, or turning office supplies into artillery, we’re always tinkering. Today we’re taking a peek at the most popular DIY projects of 2009.
Inspired by a tutorial we posted last year, we decided to make our own DIY sun jars. The trendy summer time lighting accessory retails for $30+ but we were able to make ours for around $10 each. The sun jars proved to be our most popular non-computer DIY of the entire year and readers shared their own creations with us.
Building your own computer is a great way to get exactly what you want, the way you want it, without being constrained by the limits and high-prices of mass produced computers. We showed you how to build a computer from start to finish and have fun doing it.
What’s standing between you and some office mayhem? Certainly not a lack of Sharpie markers and keyboard dusting spray. Combine the two with this fun DIY project and you’ve got one of the most awesome pieces of office-machinery we’ve ever featured.
You need to be properly erasing your physical media: all the time, every time. Our guide will show you how to get the job done and done right whether you use software to scrub your disks or you send them to the great data mine in the sky with a 21-gun salute.
Why settle for a digital picture frame when, in the same wall space, you could mount an entirely functional computer/slideshow player/TV tuner? One Lifehacker reader turned an old laptop into a super-charged digital frame.
We’ve always been keen on DIY laptop stands, but reader Aaron Kravitz—inspired by an attractive $50 stand—went above and beyond, creating one of the most attractive DIY laptop stands we've featured to date.
If the Hive Five on best home server software got you excited about setting up a home server but you’re not keen on another unsightly PC in your home, check out this DIY IKEA NAS.
We’ve shown you how to make an air conditioner (even for as low as $30), but what if you wanted something you can put in your car and take with you? While it’s no substitute for a fully-charged and factory-fresh AC system, it’ll keep you cool.
Who hasn’t dreamed of having a mystery-story-style secret passageway? While a trick bookshelf is pretty awesome in itself, this secret passage hides a home office with clever style. One industrious Lifehacker reader and his girlfriend had grown tired of seeing their office from their living space, so they hid it behind a wall of books.
You’ve ripped a movie on your laptop, and now want it on that fancy new home theater PC next to your TV. If you’ve got the time, wiring your house with Cat-5e cable could make transfer times a distant memory.
We’re all about creative cable management here at Lifehacker, so we were instantly drawn to reader Seandavid010‘s rain-gutter cable management setup. He was awesome enough to send detailed photos and step by step instructions to help other readers recreate his setup.
The lights went out on analog television this year and we were there with a guide to help you build a great DIY antenna for boosting your reception and getting that crisp digital picture you crave.
Lifehacker reader Matt Lumpkin saw our monitor stand from door stoppers post and thought we might like his laptop rack hack as another space-saving desktop solution for laptop-lovers. He was right.
Suppose you were inspired by the cheap DIY home pizza oven—but weren't so sure your home insurance would cover oven modifications. It's time to build a safer, more eye-pleasing oven, and we've got a thorough guide.
Two years ago we highlighted how to crack a Master combination padlock for those of you who may have lost the combination to your bulletproof lock; now designer Mark Campos has turned the tried-and-true instructions into an easier-to-follow visual guide.
We’ve covered the invisible floating bookshelf once or twice before, but if you liked the idea but weren’t keen on ruining a book in the process, weblog May December Home’s got you covered.
Instead of storing your books upright on top of the shelf, the inverted bookshelf holds all of your books in place using elastic webbing so you can hang them below the shelf—all the while allowing you to still take them out and put them back on as needed.
Inspired by our guide to giving an old laptop new life with cheap or free projects, Lifehacker reader Brian turned his aging Dell laptop into an incredible under-the-cabinet kitchen PC.
If you’d like to have delicious home-grown tomatoes but lack a garden to grow them in, you’ll definitely want to check out this ingenious and inexpensive self-watering system.
A few years ago, blogger Jimmie Rodgers’s camera was stolen while volunteering in an impoverished Brazilian community, so he did what any sane person would do: He bought a new camera and made it ugly. With his uglified camera, Rodgers was able to snap pictures freely during the rest of his trip without worrying too much that his ostensibly crappy camera would end up stolen.
Nothing adds space to a desk or home theater setup like a simple monitor or TV stand, and weblog IKEA Hacker details how to build your own stand on-the-cheap with a few inexpensive items from IKEA.
You don’t need to run out and buy a new TV because of the DTV switchover. If you did anyways, Make Magazine has put together quite a guide to giving old TVs new life.
If you need some cheap and novel ambient lighting for your next party, you’re only a box of ping-pong balls and a string of lights away from solving your lighting worries.
DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum, inspired by the cheaper set-top boxes, made his own higher-powered “BoxeeBox” for the free, open-source media center. He posted all the parts, the how-to details, and lots of pictures.
You already shelled out your hard earned cash for a swanky laptop, why drop more cash on an overpriced laptop stand? Cardboard alone can do the trick, as detailed in this step-by-step tutorial.
Earlier this year we put together a wildly popular guide to building a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, start to finish, and then followed it up with an even easier guide to install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC, no hacking required. Computers + DIY is all sorts of geeky fun waiting to happen.
Which Is Your Favorite Lifehacker DIY Project of 2009?(polls)
Have a favorite DIY from 2009 that wasn’t highlighted here? Sound off in the comments with a link to your favorite project. Want to see more popular DIY guides courtesy of the ghost of Lifehacker past? Check out our huge DIY guide roundup from 2008.
Adam thinks XBMC is the best media center around, but I roll with Boxee for its awesome streaming web content. Here’s how I turned a relatively cheap yet powerful home theater PC into a DIY Boxee Box for my HDTV.
Why go with Boxee? A few reasons, really: it’s free to download, it’s got a ton of great applications and add-ins, and it was, like XMBC, built with a big-screen interface in mind. When I was done installing it on top of a basic Ubuntu desktop, I had a system that could easily handle 720p and even (with some very easy overclocking) 1080p video files, run Hulu streams in full screen with very little glitching, and let me show off Flickr streams, Facebook photos, Pandora or Last.fm music, to name just a few of many content streams.
Plus, with Ubuntu installed and set up, you can easily run any other Linux app on your TV—like Hulu Desktop, a huge-screen Firefox, or whatever you can imagine.
You could, of course, wait for the first official Boxee Box to be unveiled in December, then shipped sometime later. This way, however, you get a seriously powerful HTPC that can run most any media center, and tears up HD video streams while doing so.
Many thanks to the fine posters at the Boxee and Ubuntu forums, where I found needed help and inspiration. This ASRock how-to, and wake-on-LAN tutorial, in particular, were lifesavers.
Setting up Ubuntu is something I’ve done many times, and it’s just as easy on this system. Here’s the quick walk-through:
Ubuntu, like XBMC, can run entirely off a thumb drive, or be installed to a hard drive. We’re going for the latter option here.
1. Create your Ubuntu installation media:
The fastest and quickest installation is to put the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop ISO you downloaded on a thumb drive using the free Unetbootin tool on a Windows or Linux system.
You can also have Unetbootin automatically download Ubuntu 9.04 for you, or burn the ISO to a CD or DVD, but thumb drive installations are much faster and don’t require wasting a disc.
2. Set up your ASRock
Take the unit out of its box, and find a location for it where it can breathe and exhaust a little—not flush against a corner, in other words. Plug in an ethernet cable straight from your router (or Wi-Fi bridge), and connect it to your TV via an HDMI cable. You’ll also need to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse to get through the initial setup. Make sure all the connects are snug and not stretched, then plug in your USB thumb drive, or power it on and insert your CD/DVD.
3. Install Ubuntu
Make sure your TV is switched to the HDMI source your ASRock box is plugged into. After you power on the ASRock, hit F11 immediately on your keyboard to open the boot options, then select your USB drive.
You'll be launched into Ubuntu's setup screen. Choose your language, then select the "Install Ubuntu" option. You'll launch into a bare-bones Ubuntu desktop and then into the installer application. Most U.S. users can hit Next through the first three language/location/keyboard screens. When it comes time to partition your system's hard drive, though, I'd recommend splitting it into three parts: One for the Ubuntu system, one for a swap partition, and another NTFS-formatted drive for your media. Why NTFS? It makes sharing media from your HTPC box to Windows computers easier, and it can hold gigantic files—like the kind of high-resolution videos you'll be viewing. If media sharing isn't a concern for you, go ahead and tell Ubuntu to use your whole hard disk.
Otherwise, choose the “Specify Partitions Manually,” click on the big, unallocated space in the next screen, and hit “Add” at the bottom. Set up Ubuntu’s own partition like so:
Hit “OK,” then create another partition, about 2 GB, or 2,000 MiB in size, and choose “Linux swap” under the “Use As” heading. Finally, add one more partition by hitting “Add,” choose NTFS as its format, and have it use all the rest of your space.
Click through the rest of the setup process, wait for it to finish installing, then reboot your computer and remove your thumb drive or CD when asked to do so.
When your system boots up next time, you'll get a menu asking which system you want to boot into, with a 10-second timer before it heads to default (which we'll fix soon). Log in with the username and password you gave during setup—something else we'll get to optimizing.
One quick little command we have to run before getting started: Hit Alt+F2, check the “Run in Terminal” box, then enter this line and hit Run:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys CEC06767
That authenticates a repository with some necessary graphics drivers to install software on this system.
Now, down to the real business. Head to the System menu in the upper-left corner, mouse over the Administration sub-menu, then choose Software Sources. On the first tab, check off the “Proprietary drivers for devices” and “Software restricted …” options. Head to the Updates tab, and check the unchecked items. Finally, head to the “Third-Party Software” tab.
We’re going to add in three lines to this list by hitting the “Add” button at bottom-left and pasting in this text. The first is Boxee’s Ubuntu repository for Ubuntu 9.04, and the other two are a Ubuntu repository for the NVIDIA ION chipset inside our HTPC, known as “VDPAU” hardware. Here’s all the lines in one spot:
deb apt.boxee.tv jaunty main
deb ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
Hit Close, and agree to Reload your software list when prompted. Now head up to System->Administration and select Update Manager. You'll get a list of everything that needs updating, and it might be rather long.
Install the updates, then make a cup of coffee or tea while you’re waiting. When you get back, you should be updated and ready to actually install some new stuff.
Let's do this. Head to System->Administration, then select Synaptic Package Manager. Click the "Search" button at the top right, and in the dialog that pops up, change the "Look in:" to "Maintainer," and search for "Snider."
In the results that come back, check off these packages to install. There might be newer versions of them to try out, but I know these work with this system, on this version of Ubuntu, running this version of Boxee:
Back at the Synaptic main screen, hit “Search” again, change the “Look in:” to Name, and search for mplayer. Check off the version with “+svn2009″ trailing in the “Latest Version” column for installation. Search again for boxee, then check to install it. If you’re looking to use an infrared remote, also search out and install the lirc package and whatever dependencies it asks for. Ubuntu’s own wiki offers a guide to getting set up with LIRC.
Finally, hit “Apply” in the top toolbar to install all these things on your system.
Once Synaptic is done installing those goodies (or while it's running, if it's taking a while), head to the System->Administration menu again, and open Login Window. Head over to the Security tab, and enable timed and automatic login for your username:
Assuming you don’t expect a burglar to break into your house, fire up your HTPC and start watching your Blu-Ray rip of “Up,” you should be fine with these options. They free you from needing a keyboard or mouse to get into Ubuntu, and automatically log you in when resuming from a suspend.
Next up, let’s speed up that boot-up process with a quick GRUB menu edit. Hit Alt+F2, and enter this command:
gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
In the editor that pops up, head down just a bit to the “## timeout sec” section, and change the value there to 0. Just one section down, remove the “#” from in front of “hiddenmenu,” if it’s there.
Two quick fixes, to make HDMI audio work perfectly for both Ubuntu and Boxee. First up, follow this Boxee forum poster’s instructions to set up a .asoundrc file that tells Ubuntu how to route its sound. Next, open up a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), type in alsamixer and hit enter.
Hit your right arrow key over to where you see the columns for “IEC958,” and be sure none of them read “MM,” or muted. If they do, hit “M” to unmute them. Hit the escape key when you’re done.
Your second-to-last tweak makes Boxee run right at start-up. Head to System->Preferences, choose "Startup Applications," and hit "Add." Give it a name like, oh, Boxee, and make the command /opt/boxee/run-boxee-desktop. Hit OK on that screen, then close out your Startup Applications.
Now, for the final piece: Remote desktop access from any other computer on your network. Head to the System->Preferences menu, select Remote Desktop, and configure your system to accept remote desktop connections, with a password for safety.
If you’re the geeky type who knows how to remotely administer a system by SSH command line, be sure to install the openssh-server package in your Boxee box.
Finally, if you're using a Microsoft Media Center remote with your Boxee box, and you've plugged in your USB IR Receiver, you should be good to go in Boxee—it automatically works with the Media Center setup. If you're using something different, like a Hauppage remote, this guide might point you in the right direction. Myself, I mainly use the free Boxee Remote applications found in both the Android Market and Apple App Store to control Boxee and type in text with little fuss.
Reboot your system, and you should shoot through Ubuntu’s boot-up process, arriving straight at Boxee’s log in screen.
The only major tweak you’ll need to make is to Boxee’s audio setup. Head to the Settings menu in the lower-left corner, then to Hardware, and then to the audio tab. Set your settings to look like those on the left, or, in text form:
Digital
Off
Off
default
default
From there on out, Boxee should be your multimedia workhorse. You can suspend it and wake it up with the power button (or a wake-on-LAN tool, as detailed at the Ubuntu Forums). You can use it to download torrents, directly drop files into it over SFTP, give it more video feeds, and other tweaks we’ve covered in our Apple TV/Boxee guide, and in Adam’s XBMC guide (the latter mostly for the SFTP guide). If you want to actually use your Ubuntu desktop on your TV, just exit out of Boxee from the log-in screen or the main menu
So you’re in the market for a new HDTV, but don’t know what size screen to buy. You could go with the “bigger is better” adage, or you can precisely calculate a more suitable size by applying the following formula.
Gadgetwise blogger J.D. Biersdorfer and NYT personal tech editor Sam Grobart demonstrate how to determine the right television size using one simple formula.
According to the duo, the process involves taking the viewing distance from the screen (in inches) and dividing that by the number two. Why two? According to Jude, salespeople will tell you to divide the distance by 1.5 because they want you to buy a bigger set, whereas non-salespersons typically suggest 2.5 as a benchmark. The “pragmatic thing” to do, she says, is to split the difference between these numbers and divide by two instead, which should provide you with a proper screen size.
Check out the above video clip to see the simple calculation in action. If you don’t want to hassle yourself with all that inconvenient math (or you just want a more forgiving scale of sizes within maximum and minimum viewing distances (not everyone is sitting exactly the same distance from the TV, after all), this previously covered TV-to-space chart can do the trick, too.
Whether you purchased your HDTV yesterday or last year, there’s a big chance you just plugged it in and fired it up. Tweak your HDTV for better viewing quality. Photo by blakespot.
While HDTV has a pretty awesome picture, and you've likely been enjoying your screen just fine how it is, your television didn't come out of the box pre-programmed for your living room. Your HDTV came out of the box preset for a showroom floor, with the settings cranked up to compete with a wall of other HDTVs to induce that certain feeling of, "Oh my God, I can't believe how HD-riffic this is!" Your living room is not the same as a showroom floor for a myriad of reasons—bright polo shirts and tube fluorescents among them—so the best viewing experience requires a few display setting switches.
For those with a factory default tube, the New York times put together a crash course in tweaking your television. Most of their advice, as you would imagine, involves cranking things down from their eye-searing in-store levels. Start by controlling the external lighting as much as possible, then start tinkering with your settings starting with the brightness:
A picture’s black level is controlled by the TV’s brightness adjustment; it needs to be set dark enough so that the screen displays rich, deep blacks. Set too low, many images will lose their detail. Set the black level too high, the picture will look muddy.
Black level is important because the truer the blacks, the greater the perceived sharpness of the TV image. A muddy picture will look less sharp than one that has true blacks.
To get the proper black level, you can use a PLUGE pattern, which typically consists of six vertical bars of varying black levels. Turn the picture level down until one of the bars disappears against the background. PLUGE patterns, and other patterns discussed here, are available on a variety of TV tuning discs.
Once you’ve got a handle on your brightness, don’t neglect the contrast and colors. But wait! Don’t run out and spend money on a calibration disc. Not only are there tons of free test patterns a Google Image search away, but there are hundreds of DVD movies that include test patterns tucked in the bonus features.
Check out the full article below for tips for your other HDTV settings.
Windows/Mac/Linux/Xbox: What could make the already awesome Xbox Media Center even better? An infusion of eye candy, of course. Read on to see some awesome XBMC skins and learn how to install them.
What is this media center magic we speak of? Originally an open-source package designed to run on modified Microsoft Xboxes and turn them into full-fledged media centers, XBMC gained such a popular following that it has been ported to Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you’re new to XBMC, you’re in luck. Lifehacker has much love for XBMC, and we’ve written guides to help you install it on a classic Xbox, install it on your Mac, run it from a thumb drive, and covered the first completely cross-platform release XBMC Atlantis.
Once you’ve grabbed a copy of XBMC and installed it, the customization can begin. The default skin on just about every distribution of XBMC is Project Mayhem III and its HD variant, the original skin is show at right. It’s a beautiful skin and if no one could customize it away, very few people would complain. You’re not here to keep things stock though, so admire Project Mayhem for being so awesome it was made the default skin and prepare to customize!
Installing skins is about as straightforward as customizing software can be. Depending on which operating system you’re using XBMC on, you’ll need to extract the contents of the archive you’ve downloaded into one of the following directories:
- Windows:
C:Program FilesXBMCskin- Mac:
~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/skin- Linux:
~/.xbmc/skin/
You’ll most likely never come across a skin that doesn’t have the directory structure already carefully mapped out, all of the skins below can simply be extracted into the skin folder and all the necessary components will be neatly placed in skinSomeFancySkin automatically.
Once you’ve extracted the skins, switching from the default is as easy as navigating in the XBMC menu to System -> Appearance, and selecting your new skin.
Different installation packages and releases for different operating systems have different skins included. Some of the following skins may be bundled with the installation you downloaded, MediaStream comes with XBMC Atlantis for example. Check your /skins/ directory before downloading, you may luck out and already have the skin. Note: Each of the following skins was downloaded and tested on both a classic Xbox and HTPC running Windows XP with a 1080p display, with stunning results. The screenshots below—except some for the Focus skin—are from the respective websites of each design team, their media collections were far more varied and interesting than this humble tester's.
Aeon was built from the ground up to look stunning in HD. Although you can display Aeon on a SD display, the skin was designed to be native to 1080p. XBMC will scale everything down accordingly, but be forewarned that if you're using the original Xbox as your XBMC platform, using the rich 1080P background images you see in the screenshots above will cause stuttering—the same is true of any of the skins here that use HD background images. The eye candy factor on Aeon isn't from the over abundance of items and menus on the screen but on how seamlessly and almost transparently they interact with each other. The skin functions more as a frame to show off your media collection than anything else. The default background for each main menus is an abstract Mac-esque swish of color. The awesome images seen in the screenshots above were pulled from the hundreds of HD background images available on the Aeon website.
MediaStream has menus with a weightier appearance than Aeon, but the skin still maintains a minimalist approach. Menu text is solid and bold, the menus slide out in a blade-style system that is snappy, and navigation is easy. Since version 0.90 there has been support for SD 4:3 viewing ratio, so if you haven’t made the leap to a HD TV yet you can use MediaStream without any scaling. Like Aeon you can set customs backgrounds and use fan art. If you’re having trouble keeping up on which of your shows you’ve watched, take advantage of the unwatched media menu to get a fresh list of all the things you haven’t watched yet.
Focus is by far the most minimal skin in our roundup. It isn’t overly flashy but the transitions between menus are smooth and pleasant. The menus themselves are well laid out with frequently accessed items like unwatched television shows placed near the top. None of the skins we tested felt unwieldy or intrusive by any measure, but Focus was especially quick to melt into the background and make you forget there was even anything there between you and your pile of media.
MC360 is the most complete clone of the XboX 360 dashboard available for XBMC. The animations are spot on and you can even use your real Xbox Live Gamercard info for your profile. The game save manager is very polished, something that isn't a high priority for some of the other skins in the roundup. MC360 has native support for all SD and HD resolutions up to 1080i—the highest resolution the classic Xbox can display with the component video pack. The skin has three themes: the default 360 skin, the high transparency Glass skin, and Carbon a smokier version of the default. If you're using an Xbox with a supported modchip, MC360 can change the color of the LED on the chip.
If the purists among you are shocked and scandalized by all of these non-traditional skins, especially that nonsense about putting the Xbox 360 skin on a classic Xbox, don't worry. The same team behind the beautifully executed 360 skin has a classic Xbox skin that is just as accurate and stunning in its own right. The interface of the original Xbox wasn't a marvel of flashy transparency but it was a very well implemented—and green!—design. The Classix Xbox skin pays hommage to that design and remains very faithful to the original interface. Love the design but not sold on the bright green? There are themes included to turn the skin fiery red and deep blue.
The screenshots here can’t even begin to do justice to the stunning work these design teams have done. Most of the skins are fairly small, 50-100MB in size, it’s more than worth it to download them all and see which one looks the best on your setup. Between the hard work of the XBMC design team and the teams behind these skins, the experience is so seamless and enjoyable you’ll be amazed you didn’t pay hundreds of dollars for the pleasure.
Love a skin that isn’t featured here? Have a cool hack for XBMC you’re dying to share? Sound off in the comments below and help your fellow readers get more out of their media centers.
Jason Fitzpatrick is the Weekend Editor at Lifehacker and a devotee of the pure awesome that is XBMC. He can frequently be found in his workshop modifying Xboxes to give to friends and spread the gospel of open source.
Windows only: Sure, almost all the offerings on NBC Direct can be watched at streaming site Hulu. But if you’re an HD fiend and want offline access, NBC Direct’s player might be worth checking out.
NBC Direct is definitely powered by DRM and ad-powered software, so if you’re not cool with that, well, you probably know a few other places to look (like, er, Hulu). But if you dig the idea of subscribing to, and downloading higher-quality videos of your favorite NBC shows, it’s not a bad way of getting them guilt-free.
About NBC’s definition of HD:
Standard Quality videos are available for download at 360p resolution while registered myNBC users will have the option to download High Quality video at 720p resolution.
Thanks to wqwert for the clarification!
Installing NBC Direct means downloading a little applet, which then puts an add-on into your Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browser, and runs a system tray applet to download and watch shows offline. When you’re connected, it seems, you’re also a peer source for other NBC Direct users:
Once the installation starts rolling, you’ll be asked to close down your browser. NBC Direct downloads and plays its shows through your browser, and it plugs in a rights-restricted media handler to do so (pictured at right).
When you launch NBC Direct from a shortcut or by heading to nbc.com/video, you'll get a pretty easy-to-follow menu of offerings. The full episodes and clips offered tend to follow the Hulu model—usually a few episodes back from the most recently aired episode of current marquee series, and fuller archives of kitsch/nostalgia shows, like Miami Vice. From any video, you can click to download, subscribe to the series (which starts downloads automatically, assuming you haven't killed the NBC auto-starting tray applet), and switch to bigger views:
Even when you’re “offline” to watch a show, though, you’re getting some ads. The one complaint I’d make about NBC’s video site, versus Hulu, is that they take “fullscreen” to mean something less than literal. Here’s an episode of The Office, in HD, set to “Fullscreen.” There’s actually a bunch more space at the bottom and right-hand side, but I clipped it for Lifehacker page constraints:
If you’re planning to be away from a net connection for a while and want to catch up, NBC Direct’s not a bad option, and it does offer good quality shows for free. It’s free to use, sign-up required.
