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Hotel TV vs. PS3
posted on 16:35 02/11/2009 by planetidiot.com

I've been meaning to blog this for a while, so apologies to anyone who could have used this info in the meantime. Over New Year's I stayed in a nice Doubletree hotel in Houston. The Doubletree Hotel Houston Intercontinental Airport to be exact. I was quite excited to see a bunch of my friends, but more importantly, to party and play PS3 in the hotel room. Yes, I brought my PS3 to Houston. Let's move on.

The fact is I do this a lot. I've brought the Gamecube to hotels, the Wii, my laptop (to hook up and watch movies, play MAME on, etc) and it's usually a fairly painless process. Recently however I've noticed more and more hotels not letting me set the damn inputs on the TV without calling maintenance. See, the TV is fine, they just have some weird "hotel mode" on these things so that when the idiotic "pay-per-everything" box is set up on the TV, someone doesn't hit the channel down button on the set and get confused. They give you a goofy cable box remote and you need the real remote to do any of the normal TV functions, like change the real channel, change the real volume, or change the inputs to watch something something not crappy.

It's sort of understandable, but still annoying to have to call and get a remote sent up. Well this time the front desk flat out said, "You can't do that." In so many words, I said "the hell I can't" and they sent up the maintenance guy, in spite of the fact that according to the front desk "lots of people ask about that, and it can't be done."Now this is really really stupid. The room had a fantastic LG LCD HDTV (say that three times fast) with HDMI inputs right in the back. I figured this thing should work no problem, I mean why have digital inputs on a digital TV if the only thing you can watch is shitty pay-by-the-second hotel cable?

Nemesis

Of course, it's no-go. So I told them yeah, send the damn maintenance guy up, because I know how TVs work, and LG did not manufacture a "hotel model" that has no ability to accept input yet didn't bother to take out the inputs or the input button from the set, nor did they remove the fact that televisions require inputs to be input into them from the realm of logic and reason.

The back of the LG LCD HDTV showing the inputs and stupid cable thing

Said stupid analog cable thing and fine wonderful digital inputs

Yoink! Ha-Ha!

So the maintenance dude shows up promptly and says, "Yeah, they take all the remotes now when they install these." He says he'll look for one but is pretty sure there aren't any. At this point I'm pondering the logistics of picking up a universal remote for this stupid thing somewhere between picking up liquor and eating before everything closes for the Eve. He comes back and sure enough there are no remotes. So he pokes around the back of the TV some more and says, "Let me try something." I assist him in moving the dresser holding the TV away from the wall and he pulls the AC adapter of the hotel cable thing out from the wall.

Holy hell, wouldn't you know that was all it took. The TV, no longer receiving brain-washing commands from the mothership, was completely back to factory freshness. The input buttons on the side of the set were once again tasting the sweet, sweet nectar of freedom.

Maintenance dude, you are my hero. So again I apologize for the delay in getting the word out on how to defeat the alien hotel cablebox threat, I myself looked to the web for answers but found none. But with the help of a competent maintenance dude I was able to hook up the PS3 and the laptop for gaming, movies and other diversions for a happy New Year for all.

Woo hoo! Victory!

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