OT: Computer & TV

[handicap18]

My next project (I've been saying this for a while now), is to mount a 32" LCD HDTV in a picture frame over the fireplace along with an embedded computer and use it as a digital picture frame. I'd also like to mix in some short HD video segments along with the pictures to do "Harry Potter style" pictures.

This is a very cool idea. Expensive, but very very cool. I might try to work on an idea like this myself on a smaller scale.

I've always been on the edge of being a "computer/high-tech/electronics geek". I've always had ideas (some may call them more delusions) of grandure of what kind of a setup I would have someday. I've finally come pretty close with my home theater. When the in-laws decided to put an addition on the house to keep us here they basically gave me the finished basement. So now I have the 42" Sony HDTV with the 5.1 surround (actually my receiver can do 6.1 and I have the speakers for 6.1, but no many DVD's are currently encoded with 6.1) Next step is to get the computer and home entertainment more together.

I'm going to look into the HD/TV tuner card for the computer and see what I can come up with.

BTW, nice setup Mark. I like it.

 

[dcox931]

are those the 'home theater seats' from lazy boy?

 

[boBQuincy]

Our geeked out home setup is as follows:
Upstairs we have a theater room with a front projector and a 110" screen.

My next project (I've been saying this for a while now), is to mount a 32" LCD HDTV in a picture frame over the fireplace along with an embedded computer and use it as a digital picture frame. I'd also like to mix in some short HD video segments along with the pictures to do "Harry Potter style" pictures.

Looks a lot like home! Our video room is a little short and we didn't have enough room for the projector to fill the screen. Hmm, my office is behind the rear wall of the video room. No problem, cut a hole in the wall, mount the projector in my office, and let's play "movie theater"!
Of course, the picture that covers the hole is of WDW (Spaceship Earth).

My office PC is connected to the projector for viewing photos.

We are also looking at LCDs for a digital picture frame. 40" and 42" are rapidly coming down in price. Then our "picture frame" will be able to play slide shows too!

And yes, I wear the "geek" tag proudly!

 

[MarkBarbieri]

are those the 'home theater seats' from lazy boy?

They are a discontinued model from Berkline. They have motorized reclining mechanisms. When I first heard about them, I dismissed the motorized reclining as a silly gimmick. After trying them, I changed my mind. The nice thing is that they are infinitely adjustable rather than normal three positions of a manual recliner. As I tend to watch long movies, I find it handy to adjust positions.

 

[seashoreCM]

Generally I think that connecting up the computer to a TV that is still used for watching TV shows is more trouble than it is worth.

1. If someone else wants to watch TV and you want to use the computer then (you fill in the blank) ______.

2. If the TV was not designed to be a computer monitor it may give a less sharp picture during computer use compared with the regular computer monitor even though the screen is bigger.

3. If the TV was not designed to be a computer monitor it might not accept the video output from the computer.

4. No matter how big the screen is, it is usually not convenient to have the screen way up on the mantle or across the room when you are trying to do intricate word processing or emailing; the text is too far away to see.

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

There may be some situations (usually forced) where you have to use the same screen for both computer and TV, for example you are a student in a dormitory room where you don't have space for separate screens.

My basement: Home theater under construction, 720p HDTV projector and 100 inch screen. Also an ordinary computer with its own ordinary 17 inch CRT monitor.

Living room: 50 inch widescreen non-HDTV rear projection TV.

Office: Ordinary computer with ordinary but more modern LCD monitor. Can watch the living room TV through open doorways.

Bedroom: An ordinary computer with ordinary CRT monitor. An old 19 inch TV which I almost never watch because I don't like to wear glasses in bed and cannot see the picture otherwise. A future 50 inch plasma above the dresser would not help.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

1. If someone else wants to watch TV and you want to use the computer then (you fill in the blank) ______.

Dedicate a computer to the TV. Have a separate computer for other computer uses. Works great for us. The TV computers can be really cheap old boxes.

2. If the TV was not designed to be a computer monitor it may give a less sharp picture during computer use compared with the regular computer monitor even though the screen is bigger.

Many new TVs take DVI inputs. Many computers with DVI ports can be configured to output HD resolutions like 1280x720.

4. No matter how big the screen is, it is usually not convenient to have the screen way up on the mantle or across the room when you are trying to do intricate word processing or emailing; the text is too far away to see.

Don't think of a computer hooked to a TV as being like a computer you use for those tasks. Think of it as an entertainment center. We never type on our HTPCs. We use them for watching movies and slideshows and playing games. They also do a few other minimally useful things like display the weather.

My basement: Home theater under construction, 720p HDTV projector and 100 inch screen.

That's the perfect candidate for an HTPC. It'll give you a much better picture than just about any DVD player. If you get an HD camcorder, you can use it to watch your HD footage. You can use it to display 1280x720 resolution photos.

 

[Groucho]

Much of this sounds familiar. I often hook a laptop into a TV to watch videos, but not so much any more as I found a $50 Toshiba DVD player that plays Divx, which covers most (not all) of my non-DVD content.

The basement is a mostly-complete home theater with a custom-ratio ~102" screen (8' wide, something like 45" tall - regular 16:9 stuff has unused area on the sides, and when watching Cinemascope AKA 2.35:1 movies, I zoom it to fill the whole screen), two rows of seats (rear row are old red playhouse theater seats complete with sponsor names on the back, the front is currently a couch but will be the home theater recliners when I get a spare bunch of money - those suckers aren't cheap!), a stage, speaker towers, currently 5.1 but wired for 7.2 sounds, etc, etc... plus a mini-arcade with some arcade games and an air hockey table, and in-wall DVD storage for about 1,300 DVDs (hey, why mess around?) All run off a 1280x720 projector, a Sharp Z2 to be specific. The room has been 100% build by my father and I, so it's kind of a labor of love.

The whole thing is run off a home-built (like all the zillion PCs in the house) HTPC, running standard XP, most media playback done by Zoom Player, some with PowerDVD (just because it's a pain getting all the configs right.) There's a lot of HD content out there if you know where to look... It also have video inputs though I very rarely use them - but DScaler does a good job of making lousy old standard-def video look pretty good. The HTPC also doubles as the main MP3 storage (all are also on CD, of course.) It has an Irman so it can be controlled with any standard remote but I haven't really gotten around to configuring that yet. Some day... Oh, and naturally, it does X10 stuff as well.

We also have a couple nice DDR pads so that StepMania can be played on the big screen, rather than upstairs where the jumping makes the floor bounce a little more than I'd like!

Running an HD projector off a standard DVD player is a mistake IMHO, you'll definitely lose quality over a PC. It seems kind of a waste. It's also mandatory to get some HD content on such a setup - DVDs look a little soft and sometimes blocky on such a big screen, but HD looks stellar. You will definitely curse your old DVDs that aren't anamorphic...

As for the "geek" term - I despise it. I bristle if anyone ever tries to use it on me and I don't like to hear it being used. Geeks bite the heads off chickens, they don't build home theaters.

 

[Groucho]

Many new TVs take DVI inputs. Many computers with DVI ports can be configured to output HD resolutions like 1280x720.

Although, many TVs don't play well with PC input... today's models are probably a little better, but I remember a couple years ago when I was following AVSforum and so on pretty closely, most TVs were extremely difficult to use at their native resolution with a PC. It took some weird timings and such (I can't even remember the name of the program that people had to use to fine-tune such things...)

Naturally, projectors don't have any such difficulties and all work well with PCs.

Oh, and I forgot to mention in the last message - color me a DirecTV Tivo fan too. Mine's all hacked up, running the old-old software (2.something I think?), 120 gig drive, FTP server... I regularly FTP programs to my PC, edit out the commercials, and burn DVDs with the exact same quality that the program was originally broadcast in. (I'm up to, I think, about 7 DVDs full of Disney park shows... I've got nearly all of them from the past several years!)

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Naturally, projectors don't have any such difficulties and all work well with PCs.

My projector didn't work well with my PC. It couldn't negotiate the correct resolutions. I finally added a little box between the computer and the receiver that lies to the computer and tells it that it is a monitor that can do 1280x720.

most media playback done by Zoom Player, some with PowerDVD (just because it's a pain getting all the configs right.)

I use ZoomPlayer on the family room TV and the kid's computer, but the theater room uses TheaterTek.

in-wall DVD storage for about 1,300 DVDs

I just shove my DVDs into boxes and run them all of off servers. It saves having to track down disks at various locations around the house.

As for the "geek" term - I despise it. I bristle if anyone ever tries to use it on me and I don't like to hear it being used. Geeks bite the heads off chickens, they don't build home theaters.

I'm a geek. I don't bite the heads off of chickens, but I'm a geek.

From Merriam-Webster:
1 : a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake
2 : a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked
3 : an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity

I'm clearly in category 3 and I'm sure that there are those that put me in category 2. Maybe I'll go for the trifecta after retirement.

color me a DirecTV Tivo fan too

I swapped out most of my HD DirecTivo for the new DirecTV DVRs. I've got mixed feelings about them. They are faster and they give me the locals in HD, but the interface isn't nearly as good.

 

[Cheeky in TN]

Looks like some nice systems. Mark or Groucho, do you guys use the connected pcs to do DVR type functions (Like a MEdia Center?) or just for DVD players and games? If you use it for DVR, what software do you use?

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Looks like some nice systems. Mark or Groucho, do you guys use the connected pcs to do DVR type functions (Like a MEdia Center?) or just for DVD players and games? If you use it for DVR, what software do you use?

I do not. I cannot receive HDTV over the air and it is not sent unencrypted on the cable in our area, so I have no cost-effective means of capturing an HD signal on my computer. Having a non-HD DVR would be pretty pointless to me, so I was left with no other options.

My other reason is that my friends with HTPCs used for video capture don't paint a picture of stability and simplicity (although MCE 2005 certainly helped a lot). Because that's something that my wife uses a lot, it needs to be pretty bullet-proof.

I'm eagerly awaiting something like cable-card in a PC capability, but until I can directly record the incoming bitstream from cable or satellite on my PC, I'm probably going to stick with stand-alone DVRs.

 

[Groucho]

My projector didn't work well with my PC. It couldn't negotiate the correct resolutions. I finally added a little box between the computer and the receiver that lies to the computer and tells it that it is a monitor that can do 1280x720.

That's more a function of the driver. Well, partially the projector - it should present itself as a plug-n-play monitor - but you can defeat that. When I first got my projector, widescreen displays were still pretty rare and you needed to add a registry entry to make 1280x720 available with the then-current ATI driver. Since then, the ATI and nVidia drivers all include 1280x720 and such issues are a thing of the past.

If it is still doesn't display the resolution properly, you can use device manager to change the monitor to a generic one that will let you choose every resolution that your video card can support.

I use ZoomPlayer on the family room TV and the kid's computer, but the theater room uses TheaterTek.

I've tried it but never really cared for it, but I know a lot of people love it. With all the HD stuff I watch, it's pretty important to have fine control over all the filters, splitters, etc; I don't think TT gives quite as much as ZP, but is more user-friendly (though ZP has made huge strides in that area.) I know a lot of people like Media Player Classic, too.

I just shove my DVDs into boxes and run them all of off servers. It saves having to track down disks at various locations around the house.

That's why I put in all the wall storage space. I just can't see putting all my DVDs on a server especially since most are watch once and put back. I've got a pretty big collection, too (in the early days, I had more than most rental stores!) so it would take a huge amount of storage and a huge amount of time, too.

I'm clearly in category 3 and I'm sure that there are those that put me in category 2. Maybe I'll go for the trifecta after retirement.

I just don't care for the term, I find it incredibly insulting. I know many embrace it and I'd clearly in the minority here, but I'm sticking to my guns! Not that it'll do any good, but oh well.

I swapped out most of my HD DirecTivo for the new DirecTV DVRs. I've got mixed feelings about them. They are faster and they give me the locals in HD, but the interface isn't nearly as good.

My only HD display is the projector so I haven't gotten into any of that yet... and we just go down there to watch movies. It's too dark for watching TV or anything like that. One of these days I'll pick up HD for upstairs and then I'll probably have to come up with some sort of HD DVR.

Cheeky, that sort of answers your question, too - I don't use my setup for TV or DVR functionality. I actually had a DirecTV receiver down there for a year or two but almost never used it, so I shut it off to save the $5 a month.

 

[Groucho]

I'm eagerly awaiting something like cable-card in a PC capability, but until I can directly record the incoming bitstream from cable or satellite on my PC, I'm probably going to stick with stand-alone DVRs.

I'd love that, too - some sort of standardized system for grabbing the original broadcast data. I believe such things have existed before for certain satellite systems but they were rare as hen's teeth. With the push for more encryption, DRM, etc, I doubt we'll ever see that.

Still, most HD content can be grabbed in full quality via Firewire connections, but the appropriate hardware is outlandishly expensive (like nearly a grand, I think)... ouch!