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

This thread has been an absolute revelation to me. Another example of the citizens of this board enlightening me in unforeseen ways. Thanks to Saturn and Semi (and the rest) for the good info.

I'm interesting in browsing, PC gaming and MP3 streaming via this method. Currently have an older 55" Mitsu RPTV.

How much would one expect to spend on a decent HTPC? I could move my current DVD player to the bedroom and replace it. Oh, the convergence!

How well to the "wireless" PC input devices work? That is, if your HTPC is in the front of the room, do you use a standard (Logitech?) wireless keyboard/mouse for control?

I appreciate your time and sharing.

Yeah my HTPC does run 800x453 using Powerstrip. The projector still projects at 800x600 but my windows desktop is 800x453 ... something like than.
The bottom and top is blacked out. When it present 4:3 material it projects properly with black line on the left and right. This is good if you have a 16:9 screen.

I used BLeodler powerstrip settings from avsforum.

The X1 is set to 4:3, but I am using powerstrip on my HTPC to create a custom resolution of 800x453. I was never able to get 800x450 working, but the extra 3 lines aren't noticeable. The X1 sees it as 800x600 so the scaler isn't activated. The following are my powerstrip settings:

800x453=800,40,80,104,453,49,3,99,37125,7

To use these just copy them and go to the custom resolution screen in powerstrip then hit the paste button.

This setup allows me to have the HTPC desktop displayed on my 16:9 screen. There are a couple problems with this resolution however. First, on some things in Windows the OK and Cancel buttons are off the screen since there are only 453 vertical pixels. I have overcome this by using tab to blindly hit OK or using the powerstrip tray icon to quickly change to 800x600 and back to 800x453. Second, sometimes when I turn the projector on the image is shifted to one side, I fixed this by programming the effect key to do auto image and included it in the power on macro.


http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=3cbaa10ef50c5a64b197b3b130b8e7ed&threadid=283564&highlight=powerstrip

I definitely did not use your tripod. Some of those pictures were pretty blurry. Show how steady my hand it.
The pictures that did come out well was when I propped my fiancee tall jewelry box beside the X1 and had it take pictures using the timer.

Those speakers are Hales Trancendance ... didnt you see the blurry decals.

Wireless works fine. Get a el cheapo wireless keyboard from your local no name computer store. BTC and ACER has one for like $25. If you have a learning remote (which I do) just find the keyboard keys to operate the software DVD. All the control on most of your software has a alternative keyboard stroke. You then put your keyboard ir to your learning remote ir and hit the appropriate keystrokes to approriate keys on your remote. Voila..your remote does all your keyboard commands for that DVD software program.

If not this remote is pretty cheap from computer shops.
http://www.atitech.com/products/remotewonder2/index.html


This is what I use to watch standard cable TV on a projector. If you want HD or Sattelite Semi_on has more info than I do.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/video_box_nextvisionn5.htm

This is my recommended DVD software player - NVDVD. It is easy to setup. And you pretty much leave it alone after intial install. WinDVD another product is supposedly the best picture quality but lots of tweaks need to be adjusted to get the best PQ.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nvdvd.html


This is the sofware that scales your desktop for make it 16:9 properly. (If your projector isn't 16:9)

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm

Most people recommend getting an ATI Radeon card. Very good DVD decoder hardware.

CPU anything more than 800MhZ since you have a good video card that does DVD decoding or motion compensation. For PVR and TiVo - to record your shows on your computer for later viewing you need a really fast CPU in upwards of 2.2 GHz. Semi_On know more of this than I do.

Make sure that the motherboard does have SPDiF digital out so that you can connect a digital cable to your surround sound Reciver/processor to decode the DVD's audio. Lots of new/current motherboard todays have this as standard.
I built mine for about $550

CF968L case http://www.american-media.com/Products/PC_Servers/CF-968.html
Intel Celeron 2.2 Ghz
Radeon 9700 Dual with DVI
20 gig laptop hard drive
cordless keyboard/mouse combo
MSI TV tuner card
512 meg DDR
LG 16xDVD 48xCD burner combo

Win XP
DirectX 9
Powerstrip
NVDVD
Media Player 9

Just to cover what little Saturn left out...

In reply to:

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This is what I use to watch standard cable TV on a projector. If you want HD or Sattelite Semi_on has more info than I do.

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For standard digital satellite, any capture card will work to bring the digital signal in. Hauppage, ATi, Avermedia and quite a few others all make them. For HDTV, TV input cards are far more limitted. Once you have the signal into your TV, Dscaler does the best job with displaying it, but it still doesn't have much in the way of TiVo like functionality built in.

In reply to:

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For PVR and TiVo - to record your shows on your computer for later viewing you need a really fast CPU in upwards of 2.2 GHz. Semi_On know more of this than I do.

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You don't necessarily need a fast processor if your capture card has built in MPEG compression such as the Hauppauge PVR-250. Otherwise, you'll need more muscle.

What's more If you want to watch HDTV media files, you'll need a 3GHz CPU to do so without skipping.