I have a Samsung 42″ plasma TV, great picture, connected via HDMI to my TimeWarnerCable HD-DVR box.

Also connected is my Xbox 360, via component, and I typically use that (when not playing games) to watch videos, stored on my Drobo, with the attached DroboShare running fuppes to front the files via UPnP.

And today, when I had sat down to watch a film, I turn on the Xbox, and it freezes. And then displays the ominous Red Ring of Death. Damn.

Now I’ve submitted a repair for this, so even though it is out of warranty, M$ offers up to three years on this particular issue, and provide shipping and packaing for it all, so hopefully in a few days I’ll get their boox and send my dear console back to the for repair.

This failure spurred me into wondering how I could watch my films, so I hooked up my laptop’s video out and headphones up to the TV, and saw that work well. And then my roommate mentioned that I might want to hook up the mini-stereo system to the TV as well.

So I did. And the sound is pretty good compared to the internal speakers on the TV. They are ok, but the stereo speakers provide a much warmer sound, a fuller environment.

So now that there’s a new set of speakers involved, and my eternal desire to not have fivethousand remote controls around the house, I got a Logitech Harmony remote control a while back, so I updated it to use the correct sequence, and control the stereo volume.

So it’s all nicely playing together, all except the Xbox, which is dead. That lead me to look into other multimedia solutions, like XMBC and Plex, both pretty good looking. So I might figure out some way to create that link sometime soon, so it’s a very pretty multimedia interface.