My Kit - Part 1 : The TV room

Technology Oct 10, 2006

I use an old PC plugged into the new LCD TV and the amp (receiver)

The LCD TV has a fair few inputs, one of which is a standard PC socket. I had planned to just test this out before moving to the ‘real’ one; the pure digitial HDMI. However the picture quality was excellent so the digital socket is free for a BluRay player one day. The rest of the kit is:

I am licensed for Windows XP so left that on the PC.

The free and open source (foss) Media Portal is my media centre software. Besides being an excellent librarian for my video files, it keeps track of where I’m up to in each. Saves a lot of remembering or writing down that I was 28 mins and 15 seconds into file2test.avi. Invaluable. Supports remote shares directly via UNC, so no need to map drives.

The excellent, powerful foss ffdshow provides a number of useful codecs plus enables me to then ‘post process’ the video; that is sharpen-up divx, xvid, mkv (x264) files. The compression used in these files usually makes the picture ‘soft’ or a bit blurry. ffdshow is a great way to sharpen the image back up.

In fact I use the uber-cool avisynth to help out ffdshow too; another must-have application.

Rather than keep getting up to control the Media Portal, I’ve got a dedicated PC-remote for media centers; an iMon Station. Now that works a treat!

Most stuff is shown (streamed) from the PC in the study over wired Ethernet. This PC also has the HD/SD USB2 digitial tv box, so recordings are made on the Study PC and streamed to the 2nd PC in the lounge room. More on the Study PC in another post,

The lounge PC also supports digital sound out, so it can send the Dolby 5.1 or DTS etc signal to the amp for conversion to surround sound. Happy to report it too works.