My TV Computer... thoughts... a long rambling post *sorry


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Posted by Jim K. on 2, 2000 at 12:49 AM:

In Reply to: [OT] Recommendation on S-Video card for DVD playback posted by JP4 on 30, 2000 at 7:29 PM:

Here is my current tv setup. I agree with the othre posters... if you are going to do this from scratch it would will be cheaper to buy a dedicated dvd player... but if you have parts it can be a cheap alternative. Here is what I did. First off my living room setup. I have a 32" Sony trinitron with a sony home theatre setup. First off I built an old pc (parts and trades) of a p5 200mmx, 64mb ram, 3 gig hard drives, a viper 550 tv out video card, sound blaster 128 sound card. I got this system up and working for mame. It was cool to play robotron on 32" and surrond sound. Then I filled up a 3 gig hd with mp3 files and ran the sound card into my speakers. a little winamp and geis pluggin and walla... really cool jukebox with like 20 hours of music. then I bought a hub and networked the pc's used winproxy and then had internet to the tv. this was all well and good but I was still using corded keyboard and mouse. cordless mouse from work and cordless keyboard for christmas... now I had the surfing machine. One really cool feature was bringing the tv listings up on the net.. then picking what I wanted to watch.. also a family icq chat with my brother out of state at the holidays (these are the kind of things that make it cool that most people don't think of). Also picture in picture with surfing and tv.. or winamp and a football game... anyway.. last part was the dvd player. I bought the creative encore set with a 6x dvd drive and a hardware dvd card. the playback on the dvd card to tv is spectacular. I have a high quality vcr (bit of a movie buff) and the picture blew it away. The cordless keyboard and mouse worked wonders and were "good enuff" for a remote... maybe not as user friendly as a remote but completely functional. I love my system so far.. I have a few caveat's though... first off the tnt tv out sucks... I had to do some rigging to get it to work right. also you need alot of inputs on your gear. I used two on my reciever, 2 on my tv and 1 on my vcr. If you want to know the specific wiring email me. also another problem is that for best dvd playback you need to use the tv out on the card. so the dvd plays on one input on your tv and the computer screen is on another. a bit of a pain but if your tv has picture in picture it is a problem that can be worked around. When you are first configuring your system you probably will need a monitor. that means you have the wife yelling at you "when are you going to get that ugly monitor our of the living room".. but once i fired up frogger on the tv she shut up :) So as you can see it is alot of work but can be very rewarding. If you want to talk more email me. I have some definate how to's that might be of some interest.

Jim
jkennedy@thebeaconjournal.com


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