Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater X1 projector setup ... for those interested

After my server got hit by the Blaster bug it took me all this time to get it setup. Anyways mind the poor picture taking in the semi-dark. Thats the best pictures i could take. The picture live is definitely much better but take a look and tell what you think....

http://www.spacelofts.com/x1/

If there are issues connecting message me here.
The pictures were taken with ambient lighting 6:00pm ish...one pic has sunlight coming through a bit. In a dark situation the picture is 10x better. If you click on a pic and get a full screen just click the back button.

Saturn

Wow. I am stunned. That looks very good. What was that big silver box with the tape slot and blue lights?

Looks cool saturn, my sanyo z1 gets here thursday supposedly....yay!

And just to let everyone know, never order from projectorshopper.com MISERABLE service.

Thats a HTPC - Home theater PC I built up. Its a PC in a smaller format about show box size. I has a DVD/CD burner which played the movies you see using a ATI Radeon 9700 video card. It has a TV tuner which plays regular cable TV. Its has a SPDif connector which outputs digital to my Rotel receiver and decodes the DTS or Dolby Digital audio from the DVD. It also has an infrared which I can control with my Rotel learning remote. And you
can surf on a nice 78" 16:9 picture. Theres a hole only because I forgot to put a floppy drive. I will mostlikely install a media bay drive wherein I can just put my compact flash, media cards etc.
I found that this gave me a better projector picture vs. my progressive DVD player.

Let me know how your Z1 fares. If you can get some screen shots that would be great too.

It should give you a better picture, Saturn. That's the whole point. Your nice little inexpensive computer is performing, quite well mind you, the function of a $2000-6000 scaler.

Are you using DVI or VGA to connect it or a component video transcoder (or god forbid even ATi's little dongle)?

I learned from you .. Maaassteerrrrrr....
As your suggestion many months ago I went to search for a case that is quiet and also has the ummppph in small package. It has 1 AGP and 1 PCI and it supports the Hyperthreading chips up to 500 mhz bus. It would be nice for a 800 bus but that would be too expensive. I bought a 9700 Radeon a week after you bought yours. Figured if it worked for you it would work for me...Maaassstter......precieous.....

Tried both DVI with dongle and VGA and was no diff on the X1. The DVI to VGA dongle only passed the analog signal to the projector. Noticed some noise on the picture with the dongle so went just straight VGA to projector. Even with the component video on my progressive DVD player to the Farouja scaler the straight VGA from HTPC to X1 is the best PQ. I am using Powerstrip to sync a 16:9 800x430 WinXP desktop so that I do not have to switch between 4:3 16:9. So the 4:3 image is smaller but I don't have to adjust my settings anymore and I can definitely start looking for a 16:9 screen rather than this el cheapo screen. Just have to wait till Feb 04 when the new place is done.

Sounds good. The reason I asked is that apparently the ATi dongle triggers circuitry that restricts the output of DVDs to 480p in accordance with Macrovision encryption. As such, it totally eliminates the scaling properties of an HTPC. I've no idea why they did that.

I had never heard of a HTPC before I started on this board. Can someone explain what the purpose is and what the advantages of it are? It sounds like the computer DVD is used instead of a DVD player, and I guess i just hooks up to any TV. If you need to get technical on the computer side of things to explain it, go right ahead.

Thats what some people have mentioned. But I tried it and it does output standard 800x600. I only see 480p on the bootup XP logo. Then it goes 800x600 in winxp desktop. It was working fine until last week thats when I saw some noise so I started using the primary display vga rather than the DVI with ATI dongle to VGA. Mind you I got an OEM Shappire card. The dongle that came with it is not stamped ATI. Mine could be another companies passthrough which only sends analog signals. The picture definitely is not scaled prohibitive because I can run the htpc at any resolution and run DVD full screened or windowed. Some DVI has both analog and digital ...like this ATI. But some like Apple only have digital through DVI. That is why only Macs can use those nice Widescreen LCD by Apple. Id love one of those for the PC.