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Road Kill on the Convergence Highway: Three months with Windows Media Center
Page: 3/4
(2082 total words in this text)
(84649 Reads) 
The Wide Screen HDTV Convergence Moment of Zen
Now it was time to move the black box with the terabyte inside ustairs to wire it to the big TV, a big 64” HDTV Pioneer CRT rear projector, the Pro-730HDI. The local hi-fi huts wanted a few hundred bucks for a 15 foot DVI-HDMI cable, but at Markertek I found it for under $50, delivered. This was not the last Markertek purchase I would make.
The softly humming Media Center PC found a good spot in the equipment closet, wired in with digital video, digital audio, two cable connections, FM antenna, and some purple dongle for a/v inputs, and anything else I could plug into it.
The ATI interface knew the Pioneer model number, but didn’t know what to do with it. The picture was a modest 4:3 box in the middle of the big screen, and not particularly good.
I was able to goose it up to a better size, but nothing like the big clear HDMI picture that comes out of a DVD player. After much correspondence, I learned that even though the ATI software recognizes the Pioneer HDTV, actually making it work is not a current or planned feature.
“The Killer App of the HTPC World”
Back on the web, they say something called “Powerstrip” is needed. It’s a huge chunk of freeware for tweaking drivers. You can’t buy it, but it is free, downloadable and documented across a couple of websites (one such resource is PowerStrip tutorial)
Here we learn this high concept stuff:
“Powerstrip is indeed "the killer app" of the HTPC world. It is possibly the most important program today in the "convergence" market between computers (PC only unfortunately!) and the high definition television (HDTV) or Projector marketplace. With it you can craft a custom resolution and sync timings to enable the best possible display of your computer Desktop, DVD's and other video sources from an HTPC to an HDTV or Projector.”
And we also learn the down and dirty truth of doing this:
“Check to make sure everything looks ok. For instance, if using the Key Digital KD-VTCA2 Transcoder, make sure the sync Polarity is set the same in Powerstrip as it is set on the Dip Switch on the Transcoder.”
Most of this is equally simple. They also tell you that you need to attach a regular monitor, and make sure you know how to start up in “safe mode” to recover from the many times your HDTV will refuse to cooperate. Thus you end up with this convenient remote control setup.
The wire snaking out of the closet into the front of the monitor is the S-video cable that went in after learning the hard DVI-HDMI lesson. It is actually the second S-video cable in this spot.
S-video is the suicide bomber of consumer electronics connectors, if not inserted & removed dead-on axis, they leave parts behind, as one did while being wrestled behind the PC.
What Media Center does really well is show many ways there are to mess with an HDTV monitor that it doesn’t like, and allow you to practice starting in “safe mode”.
What is does really poorly is most of everything else. I retired from battle with a strategic retreat: moving the whole shebang to the bedroom, cohabitating with me, spouse, two medium dogs, and a vanilla 27” CRT.
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