Tech Can Make it Too Easy!

While I am one of the millions who own an iPhone, I am not an apple fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I lean more towards the apple hater side of the equation than the apple fan boy, though I wouldn't call myself either.  But now having every single machine I have running Linux apple iTunes is basically out of the question now, not that I bought much from them anyway.

I will say though, I am a huge fan of google, and are far more fond of their google play offering, as its linked to your google account, and basically accessible from any computer with an internet connection.  But the problem was Flash is not supported on the Raspberry Pi, so I couldn't turn that into a google play enabled device to make my TV "smart" and my tower which I use my TV as a monitor did not output sound along the HDMI Cable,  I always figured it was a problem with compatibility with my video card.

When suddenly I spotted the UG802 android enabled device designed to turn any TV into a smart TV.  I almost gave in, but as the special I found ran for 13 ( now 11 more days as of the writing and posting of this), I decided to spend some time trying to trouble shoot my current issues.  Sadly the Raspberry pi, while incredibly fun to play with, I still think its too new of a technology for its use and there is very little support out there for it to function anywhere close to normal as a standard computer device, or even operate at the same level as a tablet.

But I realized sound should be transmittable over HDMI even through a video card so I went to trouble shoot that.  I went through a few steps making sure the card was recognized as an actual device on my computer, which it was.  I then went into the sound settings on my computer and unmuted every single channel.  But sound still would not play, but I about ready to give up clicked on the speaker symbol for the ubuntu operating system and under volume controls it said "Sound Settings... "  about ready to give up, I clicked on it.  Then low and behold right there, it gave the option to switch output device to my HDMI out through my video card, and almost as if it belonged in the bible "and there was sound, and it was good."

Sadly this was likely all I had to do for the whole 2 months I had been trying to think of ways to allow me to watch Google Play movies on my TV.  But I will admit I was outsmarted by something so incredibly simple.