Techronical

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My Media Center - A Work in Progress

OK I promised a few pictures of my Media Center in our “great room”- my youngest daughter calls it the “Audition”, that is slowly going into the new addition on our house. As requested from several emails I will also post up how to’s on installing ceiling speakers, mounting TVs to the wall, etc, I just have to cull the pictures and may even do a Photostory movie of it giving a walkthrough.

OK so here is what I have so far, I am using an HP LCD TV I purchased less than a year ago to move up from 720P to 1080p in our family room and an 11 foot diagonal projection screen I picked up off of eBay for some very short cash. The LCD is for basic TV watching, gaming, UI for music, photos, etc. The projector serves as the large home theater media option for the room.

Here is a Picture on Picture shot showing off a shared 1080i input on the 42” LCD TV and Exotic Purple(Ben Moore 2071-10) painted wall.

Screen Savers

It isn’t the Stewart screen I wanted, but help keep well under budget with a purchase price of $88 and $134 shipping, Yes, shipping cost more than the screen. I initially wanted to do get a rear projection screen but the final layout of the room didn’t work. I went with a 4:3 screen since it can handle both 16:9 and 4:3 formats. Most projectors like the X1 can run in both modes and squish and stretch the image as necessary to fill the format window chosen, me I like to go native. J

Here the projector was placed on the floor to measure throw and placement as you can tell from the angle of the shadows.

Here the Kids are sizing up the screen and furniture layout. This picture gives a good view of the strapping and how I chose where to place the over head speakers, pot lights, and projector mount placement.

My kids liked the screen so much they moved some furniture in there to “test out” the placement. The above pictures show how it is important to test the fit of the screen, placement and throw from my aging Infocus X1 projector that I will hopefully upgrade with an HDMI 1080p projector(Runco, Sony SXRD, and that doesn’t suffer from the screen door effect. It’s a good projector I have had for around 4 years and is still on its first bulb and purchased off of TigerDirect for $540 as a refurb and flashed it with various tweaked firmwares from different models to get the optimal viewing. It does 1080i so gaming, HDTV, and movies look great. The TI DLP auto calibrates itself by syncing to the color wheel and the PixelWorks and Faroudja chip do a good job too. If you are looking for a great FAQ on this aging projector head here. The can be had for very low prices on places like eBay.

Plan it out like Bob the Builder

Make sure you have good plans on paper before construction occurs, but even after the walls are up you may change its placement. Make sure you check things twice like electrical placement, cable, network, and speaker wire layouts. If you have all your equipment going into a closet or room also plan for proper cooling and noise baffling. Above in the picture is a copy of the plans on my Fujitsu Tablet PC, that I wrote over change orders to our builder for the great room, where I ended up changing the placement of the screen and added a window seat on the large window at the front of the room. Windows are generally the bane of most home theaters, but we wanted multi-functionality from the room besides watching movies. Spousal acceptance factor is important too, so that is why I opted to use some Polk in ceiling speakers rather than use large speakers and place them on a sand-filled sound stage. I was even going to with an in wall subwoofer, but the calculations for the room size told me to go with a free standing model, so I went with a 15” Velodyne (DLS-5000R) that sits in the corner outside of the A/V closet and to the left side of the screen and television. I picked it up as a refurbished unit from ListenUp! (note you can get it much cheaper from them on eBay or via a link from AVSforum. It is a very nice unit and even comes with its own remote control and has a night mode so you still watch movies and play video games into the wee hours of the night with some boom to liven your entertainment, but not enough to keep others up at night.

The Vista Media Center PC

Here is the belly of the beast in the rack with the removable hard drive pulled showing off its pretty lights

I hand built my own Media Center PC from an old server case I picked up on eBay and paired it with a quiet chipset and mother board. I post up the process of building the HTPC in a later post. I actually didn’t construct it, but my 7-year old daughter did with my guidance. She loved it and wants to build her own PC.

The Media Center PC while the renovation went on resided in our home office for a few months. The server case is in a rack shared with some electric guitar gear and a rack mounted slide out keyboard and monitor combo I picked up off of eBay for $220 not bad for a 19” display, granted it isn’t wide-screen nor does it have a built-in KVM switch or USB connectors, but I really don’t need that.

The keyboard is a full sized keyboard complete with a touch pad. I also have a Media Center keyboard, which I am not too happy with that is stored with a Media Center 2005 XP system I had built in a Shuttle case that has a touch screen display in our dining room. It doubles as a Music player (from digital music and a Sirius Widget) and a digital picture frame.

The display doesn’t look too bad either and is more than large enough to see. It became a dedicated Purble place and Spider Solitaire system for my kids.

Here is the first use of the Media Center as an extender via the Xbox 360, It was the first thing we tried after hooking everything up. The projector needed to be adjusted just a bit to fill the screen after the adjustment we enjoyed having a full media center in the TV room, which was actually quieter than the Xbox 360.

Movie playback is really nice after calibration. We have a 24” Dell with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on an apothecary table behind the couch (so the kids and myself can hook up our laptops and work and watch television. It’s all about multi-tasking!) that I turned on for this shot to show the rest of the room layout and show that when a ceiling mounted projector is in place even a table lamp won’t get in the way if its far enough back. Don’t worry when the monitor is off the black levels of the letter box are pure black. This photo was taken during an overcast day with light blocking curtains pulled on all windows. Nice thing about having the monitor in the room we can also use Remote Desktop to connect to the Media Center and the kids can use Vista on their old XP laptops.

Selecting music on a 9 foot wide screen is just really nice!!! My kids have had several Karaoke parties using it

Ripping CDs and storing our DVDs and PC games is done by this stack of 5 Sony Vaio CD/DVD changers from the deal mentioned here. So that’s a 1001 DVD player for the room, which unfortunately is almost full.

The heart of the system- the Audio/Video Receiver

I had purchased two different receivers to power my media experience and act as a video switcher and audio zone switcher for my house and went with the Yamaha RXV2700 and returned the Denon AV4306, which had some very similar features (the newest version the Denon AV4308CI is Vista Certified, has HDMI 1.3a, can also stream pictures, supports album art, nice OSD UI and supports WiFi). Today another model I would have considered would be the ONKYO TX-SR805 or Yamaha RX-Z11 (which allows browsing over a PDA or PC) if they were out. The Yamaha also can be controlled by my Media Center PC via a serial port connection and some software. Some of the great features of the Yamaha is that it too supports media sharing, internet streaming of radio and podcasts, XM radio and iPod connectivity via accessories, a USB port that can play from various media players, USB thumb drives, and even external hard drives. The reason I chose the Yamaha over the Denon as that it was a better fit for the sound of the room for both movies and music which we listen to a lot of in our household and for under $900 I couldn’t go wrong.