ucostyio

Media centre fun

Owing to the large collection of movies and other assorted video files completely legitimate Linux ISOs that fill my hard drives, my next obvious move was to utilise our LCD TV for media purposes.

System Specifications
Athlon 64 3500+
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro
FusionHDTV DVB-T Plus
3×200gig HDD
1×300gig HDD
Antec something-or-other case
Windows XP Pro + MediaPortal
Windows Media centre remote control

Setup was easy. I already had a working computer, which was completed with the addition of the TV tuner card. Setting up the screen, however, was the hard part.

Stupd Philips

This part is entirely Philips’ fault. Their HDTV compatible LCD tv’s refuse to scale up 720p images to the full size of the panel, resulting in a thick black border around the image. Fortunately 1080i images are not similarly affected so using the ATI drivers, I managed to find a working combination. It seems setting traditional 1080i would not work but setting the resolution of 1776×1000 interlaced worked fine. A little nudging of the image (it was off-centre) and I had a picture perfect full screen high definition display.

High Definition fun

Media portal is really easy to set up. I configured the remote, tv tuner and movie folders using the setup utility provided. Everything from there on worked as expected. A little tweaking with the DVB-T decoding software made it reliable like it should be.

For the future

I am planning on getting a shuttle case or similar as well as a DVD drive to replace our current standalone DVD player. I also plan on routing our Foxtel data through the computer. That way our media centre will be completely consolidated.

Written Sep 16, 2006

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