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Bender posted:I guess this is an HTPC question, but I'm not sure if what I'm looking for actually exists: Try one of the products available through slim devices. My neighbor seems pretty happy with his squeezebox and the interface seems real nice with an easily readable lcd display.
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May 29, 2007 06:32
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pretend to care posted:Ok, WTF is the deal here. Did you make sure to power up the display before the computer? I've no direct experience, but I've read that advice at least 100 times in the past few weeks while reading about HTPC->HD connections.
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Jun 8, 2007 23:22
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Alrighty, so I bit the bullet yesterday and built up an HTPC box for my new 47" Toshiba LCD. I set a budget of 700 bucks and ended up with a pretty nice system. Case: Antec Fusion  Mobo: Asus M2N uATX with geforce 6150e onboard CPU: AMD4200+ low power Memory: 2GB ddr2 800mhz HD: 400gb seagate 7200rpm sata2 3gb Everything went together easily and worked correctly out of the box. Total price was 701.37USD at a local frys. Although I did break down and pickup a new gyration wireless keyboard and mouse/pointer for 100 bucks after the fact. I opted against the Logitech dinova edge once I learned that it uses bluetooth instead of emulating a usb keyboard via proprietary usb dongle (Didn't want to hassle with getting bluetooth keyboard working under linux). I spent the better part of yesterday evening trying to get a solid 1080p signal from the dvi port on the 6150e by way of a cheap 10' ft dvi->hdmi cable and finally came to the conclusion that the cable is a PoS. So I'll be picking up a higher quality (and shorter) cable tonight. If anybody want the details on getting the nvidia driver to output 1080i/p I'll be doing a short writeup in another thread shortly. Initial impressions of the system are very good. The antec case is super quiet; so much so that I thought that something was wrong the first time I worked the power button and I didn't hear anything happen. The ASUS MB uses some sort of fan clocking tech where it scales the cpu fan speed with the processor load and the antec case fans are huge and move a ton of air with almost no noise. I slapped a cheapy dvd drive into the system and it is a sore point for now as the vibration isolation for the 5.25" drive mounts doesn't seem to be as effective as the silicon dampeners which suspend the 3.5" internal mounts. I'll be doing some testing with 1080i/1080p/720p video in different codecs/containers on both linux and vista over the next few days, so if anybody has any specific combo they're curious about, I'm all ears. Also, do any of you guys know if the pci-e video cards with hdmi out that are on the market now support any of the CeLink communications portion of the hdmi/hdcp spec? My Tosh flatpanel has what appears to be a thin client interface for controlling CeLink compliant devices and it'd be pretty sweet to offload the overlays for OSD to the TV instead of having to render them from the PC.
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Jun 19, 2007 20:20
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InTrouble posted:I'm building a HTPC using vista home premium and an antec fusion case, I do not have a MCE remote; any tips on how to configure my Harmony to control this thing? The fusion doesn't have an IR receiver built in. So basically your solution is going to have to include purchasing one and then either using whatever software it is bundled with or finding 3rd party software which supports it.
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Jun 24, 2007 18:33
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trinary posted:I am pretty sure that you will find this not to be the case, especially with 1080P h264. There is absolutely no way a Mini will be able to keep up. Just dropping in to quote for truth. 1080p is a FAT data stream to process. A mini will certainly not be able to keep up with decoding without some sort of hardware h264 decoding which AFAICT does not yet exist for that platform.
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Jul 3, 2007 19:41
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SpelledBackwards posted:The manual says the TV cannot accept PC output over its HDMI connection, so it looks like getting a DVI video card and an DVI->HDMI adapter is out of the question (or is there a workaround)? I wouldn't take the manufacturer at their word. I've heard of several manuals having similar warning about not working with dvi/hdmi from a computer. But, AFAICT, the dvi and hdmi signals are pin compatible and your TV has no way to know what is actually sending it a signal. So, it'd probably worth your time to try out one of the cheap dvi>hdmi adaptor cables from monoprice. Aside from that many of the current generation nvidia cards support component HD output. Specifically the 8500/8600 series cards and the 6150e integrated chipset. I'd opt for the 8500 just for the purevideo hd hardware x.264/vc-1/mpeg2 decoding. However I /think/ purevideo hd drivers might be vista specific. The 6150e has hardware mpeg2 decoding with the nvidia purevideo (not hd) mpeg decoder driver. which should get you up and running under XP.
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Jul 10, 2007 20:54
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Kepp posted:I already flattened it. I guess I was trying to get a feel for whether or not a definitive setup exists yet for the nVidia PureVideo video cards. Stupid nVidia and their naming conventions are really at fault here. "PureVideo" is the name of their commercial (read: costs money) mpeg decoder software codec; "PureVideo HD" is the name of their hardware decoding engine. To add to the confusion, on some older nvidia hardware using the purevideo software codec would also enable some limited mpeg2 hardware acceleration features (xvmc) AND new purevideo hd capable cards are not all created equally, the 8600 and 8500 series cards support more codecs in their hardware decoding engine than the more expensive and "higher end" 8800 series cards. Furthermore, the nVidia drivers that allow purevideo hd hardware acceleration only work on vista AND need to be coupled with a capable software directshow filter AND VMR9 OR Enhanced rendering engine. The most popular purevideo hd capable directshow filters AFAICT are the ones made by cyberlink which come bundled with the *NEWEST* powerdvd 7.3 Ultra build. Long story short. Install vista, install newest nVidia drivers, install powerdvd 7.3 ultra, install halii splitter. Set cyberlink mpeg, cyberlink x264, and cyberlink vc-1 directshow filters as the default filters for their respective codecs in whichever software you are going to use. Set that software to use VMR9 or "3D accelerated" as the display renderer. Set "enable hardware acceleration" in the properties for all the cyberlink filters. Play your media. YMMV You may need to install additional directshow filters to support whatever audi stream is muxed with your video. DO NOT INSTALL ANY "CODEC PACKS"! If you suspect something isn't working correctly install Microsoft's graphedit software and drag the media in question into the graphedit window. You will see a block diagram of the default filter stack that is used to demux, decode, post proccess, and render the file. You can then change, add, or delete individual elements. And test playback directly through directshow without having to muck with any globbed on UI. Now graphedit is great for troubleshooting, however it has one serious drawback, it won't save your graph into anything usable for playback in a "real" directshow media player. For that you are going to have to delve into the registry and changed the "merit" of the different filters to alter the priority in which windows (and other applications) will utilize them. This used to be something which required editing hex values and knowing a bit more windows-fu than most average people have. However, now you can use programs like radlight filter manager and filmerit to easily change filter merit values as well as fully unregister/register filters entirely. edit: added info on graph edit edit2: added info on editing filter merits. dfn_doe fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Jul 18, 2007 |
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Jul 18, 2007 23:07
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Crackbone posted:That is perhaps the absolute best description/guide I've ever seen so far. I know most of this already, but thanks for putting up in one place. I had to read about 200 different AVS threads to get to where I am now. Well, you can either download the entire directx sdk from MS, or you can try your luck searching for repackaged copies on google. Just make sure you use some common sense and virus check whatever repacked copy you get if you decide on that route.
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Jul 19, 2007 19:01
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rolaids posted:i'm getting stuttering and skipping with the majority of 1080p videos Any of the 8500/8600 nvidia cards will playback 1080p content smoothly if the source is one of the supported accelerated codecs. I haven't tried it with anything slower than my dual core amd (2.2Ghz), but it doesn't even run the proc at full clock speed when playing back 1080p.
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Jul 25, 2007 00:06
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furushotakeru posted:Does dual/quad/single core matter that much for 1080p playback? My understanding of this issue is very limited because I have never owned a multi core processor machine, but wouldn't the computer only be able to dedicate one logical processor to video playback even if it had two or four? It depends on the software used for decoding. I'm not a computer scientist nor a developer, but some tasks are more easily multi threaded than others; I figure if encoding can take advantage of multiple cores than decoding should be able to as well. The big guaranteed benefit is that when you are using one core to do the decoding you can use the other core for other tasks. Hence a multicore system MAY have better interactive usability while being used for a single large processing task. Really the whole better/worse argument is moot when you offload the decoding onto your GPU. Then you can use your CPU/s for whatever you want without getting stutters until you hit another bottle neck (disk io is a big one on HD video).
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Jul 25, 2007 01:05
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AraqirG posted:*in response to disk IO being a bottle neck* I would normally agree, when you are referring to single stream playback. However on my HTPC I might be recording 2 analog cable feeds, 2 digital cable feeds, and 2 atsc feeds while at the same time playing back a live buffered feed or pre recorded content from anyone of those sources. This can definitely lead to disk IO being the next bottle neck after processing. Heck my original comment I was actually intending it to be a reference to how disk IO would become a bottle neck while using your excess processor for other tasks; specifically I often have one or more torrents active along side my standard HTPC apps (Beyond TV, itunes, powerdvd, etc). It only takes a few of those apps working in concert to get the disks really thrashing. I've actually put my main OS and pagefile on a separate 80gb 7200rpm drive with a 16MB cache to avoid these exact situations.
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Jul 25, 2007 09:20
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L:ordSilent posted:I am considering making one of these and was just wondering if I have digital cable (cox if it helps) will it be able to see all the channels? Depends on how you are gonna set things up. You can use an ir blaster of some sort to control the cable box and then capture it's output with your pc to get all your channels (even premiums) but you will probably only be able to get svideo output from the cable box for capturing which means no HD content. Although some set top boxes may have firewire output which can be used for capturing HD content although I have no personal experience with these devices I hear it can be made to work pretty well. Personally I'd probably use something like a new hauppage hvr1600 capture card which will allow you to easily capture the unencrypted QAM digital cable as well as having an integrated ir blaster and svideo capture for getting the encrypted stuff off your STB.
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Aug 1, 2007 18:41
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Lobbyist posted:Get an 8600GT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127293R Uhm, did you read the review you linked? the 8500 was not tested and wasn't "not recommended" although they speculate about it not being a high performer. The 8500gt that I have in my htpc seems to be fine for all the hidef stuff I've thrown at it and it plays back hd-dvd @ 1080p with no problems at all. Same for hi bit rate hi-def matroska and mpeg.
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Aug 6, 2007 17:40
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Lobbyist posted:From the page I linked: I'm gonna stick to my guns on this one say that the article you've cited is incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst. nVidia's own product comparison shows that both the 8500gt and the 8600gt support an identical set of hardware video decoding features. AND I'll reiterate that I have an 8500 card and it works great on 1080p and looks awesome.
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Aug 6, 2007 22:59
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Oodles posted:I am looking to get an external HD for my movies, am I best going for a drive with firewire or would USB 2.0 still perform up to standard? Both standards are going to be more than sufficient for streaming even the highest bit rate HD content. USB is available on more host devices, firewire uses less CPU for i/o tasks. So balance availability against performance and buy whichever seem more suitable for your uses.
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Aug 15, 2007 02:23
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VulgarandStupid posted:Anyway, pretty much my only requirements are that it's available in black or black/gray/silver, full ATX, can take 3 HDDs, has front USB connections and is hopefully quiet. Any suggestions? You've just described 85% of the computer chassis on the market...
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Aug 21, 2007 18:10
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ahawks posted:Here are some pro's and cons of using media center over BeyondTV: Big cons you forgot: - Only supports 2 tuners - No QAM digital cable support
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Aug 28, 2007 01:17
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Fnord posted:Both of your cons are wrong. I am doing both of these right now. Well, please enlighten me as to how that works. I have 2 ATSC tuners, 2 analog tuners and 2 digital cable tuners. I have previously been able to get one of my hvr1600 cards to use two sources on one card and used a single source from the second card in VMC, but that still fell short of what I need/wanted. The QAM "support" is still non-existent as far as I can tell, all the implementation for QAM tuners uses some sort of emulation layer where the QAM tuner is presented to MCE as an ATSC tuner and you must manually map the channels AND then hope their exists an equivalent channel in either your analog cable or digital OTA guide info. If there is a way to make 1 HD homerun and a pair of HVR1600 cards work with vista media center and present as 6 tuning devices with accurate guide info I'd certainly like to hear about it.
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Aug 28, 2007 06:50
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Just dropping in to ask fnord again about QAM and more than 2 tuners in MCE or Vista MC... I'm honestly interesting in hearing about the solution, not trolling...
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Aug 30, 2007 21:03
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Undecided posted:I'm interested in recording HD OTA (720p or 1080i) and analog cable with my current computer, but I can't really decide on a capture card. That hauppage card will work just dandy for OTA+analog cable. The newer retail versions have some support for digital clear-qam cable too. Get the MCE version if you can find it as it comes with a more standard remote/receiver setup than the other versions.
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Sep 1, 2007 18:52
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moron posted:I've recently set up my HTPC, and I'm glad to say it runs brilliantly (mainly thanks to advice from this thread!). I have it running at 1080p through my 42" Sharp TV, and I couldn't be happier. Change your font res. to 120 or 140 dpi. Things become much easier to read, however a lot of apps don't do font hinting correctly and will draw text outside windows.
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Sep 19, 2007 22:39
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moron posted:I've noticed a it of a problem with the 5.1 on my HTPC. For some reason, certain apps and file types refuse to send a signal to my subwoofer. Sounds like your receiver should be manually set to a different mode while playing non 5.1 sources since it doesn't appear to do it on it's own. There may be a software solution for upmixing 2 channel>5.1 (or similar) but I bet you'd get better sound from simply switching your receiver to a mode appropriate to the number of channels of the source is going to sound better and require far less work.
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Sep 24, 2007 20:24
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moron posted:Hmmm....nothing on my reciever that I can see :-/ I think this calls for more drastic measures.... What sort of receiver are you using? Every receiver I've ever used had some ability to switch to different modes for non-multichannel input sources. I.E. it'd have Auto/Analog/Sport/Movie/Rock/Classic/Jazz where Auto would do a crap job of switching between analog dolby surround, analog stereo, and digital; Analog will force using analog inputs when when a digital source is present, and the other named modes will upmix a stereo or mono source to 2.1, 4.1, or 5.1 channels depending on the base configuration of the receiver. As I said in my previous response I'm sure there is a way to do this in software as well, but it is almost certainly going to be easier to do with your receiver. Also it seems like your sound card is operating just like it should be, not sure why you are contemplating ditching it for something else... If anything is to be replaced it sounds like your receiver is the weak link here if it doesn't support any upmixing modes.
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Sep 25, 2007 18:12
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BFD Zio posted:drat thats what I figured...Would DVI or HDMI fair any better? DVI spec has a minimum length for signal stability at 5 meters; or in other words anything that meets DVI spec should work up to 5 meters and may work for a distance over that but there is no spec for max length. HDMI spec has similar wording but with a min length of 10 meters, but in practice I've found cables as short as 5 meters to not work at full 1080p resolution reliably.
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Sep 25, 2007 21:18
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Gromit posted:I used the Antec Fusion Black HTPC case (includes PSU) and the Fatal1ty I90HD motherboard that has built-in video with HDMI out. I can't hear the thing at all. I have the nearly identical, except for the color, Antec Fusion v1 and it pretty much rocks. The front display is all but worthless with the bundled software, but it works a treat with lcdsmartie and few plugins. The knob on the front of the case OTOH is truly useless, I hear that v2 of the Fusion has a regular uncrippled iMon lcd/ir receiver/knob which should work with a few other software packages.
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Oct 10, 2007 16:26
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alien8 posted:Is anyone using one of the newish AMD 690G chipset motherboards with onboard HDMI together with Vista? I'm having some serious HDMI audio issues and before I make a post in the Haus of Tech Support detailing what's all wrong, I'd like to hear if anyone is running it with no problems at all. What sort of "serious audio issues"?
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Oct 10, 2007 16:29
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alien8 posted:It's weird - it sounds kind of like a 'digitized crackling' for want of a better term. The weird part is that it's not always happening. The Vista start up sound is perfect, and system sounds are fine, but as soon as I start up the media centre everything goes awry. It doesn't matter if I'm listening to music, watching Live TV or anything from My Videos, it's all got this really weird vocoder-like quality to it. Perhaps a bit rate mismatch. Does either your driver or your TV/receiver have any way to adjust/lock the PCM bit rate? I'm guessing that perhaps you are outputting at 44.1Khz and the receiving end is expecting 48Khz or vice versa. If that doesn't solve your problem I personally would just revert to either coax or optical spdif or plain jane stereo RCA hookups until the driver/support base for hdmi audio gets a little more mature. The bitstream support for hdmi digital audio doesn't offer anything above/beyond spdif anyways unless you are outputting HDCP content with DD+, TrueHD, or DTS-HD audio to a reciever which can accept/decode that content. I can tell you from my own experience using vista for my HTPC that Vista will output 1080p full res hdcp video stream over hdmi/dvi along with DD or stereo pcm audio over spdif without a problem. Aside from requiring an extra cable to hook things up this provides the exact same quality of output as you'd get with a full audio+video hdmi solution; with the same caveat I've stated above with regards to the 3 NEW digital multichannel audio codecs/protocols/containers. Since your post seems to indicate that you are running from your htpc directly to your TV I'm gonna venture to guess you don't have a receiver that does any of those 3 new audio formats... edit: wikipedia posted:HD DVD and Blu-ray permit "interactive audio", where the disc-content tells the player to mix multiple audio sources together, before final output. Consequently, most players will handle audio-decoding internally, and simply output LPCM audio all the time. Multichannel LPCM can be transported over an HDMI 1.1 (or higher) connection. As long as the audio/video receiver (or preprocessor) supports multi-channel LPCM audio over HDMI, and supports HDCP, the audio reproduction is equal in resolution to HDMI 1.3. However, many of the cheapest AV receivers do not support audio over HDMI and are often labeled as "HDMI passthrough" devices. dfn_doe fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Oct 10, 2007 |
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Oct 10, 2007 19:59
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alien8 posted:Unfortunately, if that doesn't work I'll be forced to install a video card with DVI output. Even if I disable the HDMI audio, and only have the regular analog speaker connection enabled and defaulted, I don't get any audio at all. I'm not sure if it's the TV not allowing analog audio with an HDCP enabled connection, or if it's the video drivers. I know that the PC is outputting the audio, as it works if I plug the RCA cables into a different output, just not on the HDMI input. I'm confused by what you are saying here. The second sentence seems to be saying that you can't get any audio out on your PC but the fourth sentence says that the pc is able to output audio via RCA. Which is it?
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Oct 11, 2007 06:39
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LordOfThePants posted:This looks like what I need (especially nice because I can use a SFF case then). Is there any configuring you need to do to use the tuners in different modes? I'd like to be able to record two shows in HD at once (like when CSI and Scrubs are on at the same time) - but I also want to be able to record stuff off my analog cable too. Digital only, the HDhomerun doesn't have any analog tuning capabilities. There are however plenty of dual analog tuner cards which can be add to your system to add that capability. Here is the part where I talk a little about something most people don't consider: When setting up a multi-tuner HTPC system be aware that every time you split your cable signal you will get a signal strength drop. A 100% clean cable drop from the pole /should/ be between 11 and 14 decibels and will see a drop of 3.5 decibel aprox. every time it is split. At 3.5 decibel total signal most tuning hardware will be very marginal on receiving anything. If you setup 2 digital tuners and 2 analog tuners you will be right at the envelope if your cable drop is 11db to start with. Also not all splitters are created equally, nearly every major brand name splitter I've used had more than the rated signal drop... Just some food for thought.
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Nov 14, 2007 00:13
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LordOfThePants posted:For the price of an HD Homerun and a third analog tuner, I could get two WinTV HVR 1600's and have four tuners (two digital, two analog). Of course that almost certainly means no SFF case, but I can't really find one I like anyway. I have a pair of those hvr1600s in my computer, atsc tuning on them was never very good and QAM tuning isn't officially supported by them (and only kinda supported on some revisions) which makes them not that desirable IMHO. The analog tuner on them is pretty alright though... Also they have zero driver support on linux.
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Nov 14, 2007 05:42
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LordOfThePants posted:Really though, other than the hardware flexibility (which I'm sure will be somewhat limited), I don't see many advantages to running this over something else. You're not going to have automatic commercial skipping and the files will be locked down just like in current Tivos. Not to nit-pick, but... hardware flexibility is a great feature for the Tivo software. I loved my directivo sat60 and my series2 software, but I outgrew the hardware with advents of hidef video and the desire for more tuners than the tivo supports. You other two specific complaints are pure speculation at this point and should probably be reserved until we see what the actual software looks like. Although suspect you will be proven correct on both counts. The meatier part of this story though is that it implies that they've forked their development to support both linux and windows environments unless they've wrapped some sort of virtualization layer. P.S. I feel a need to endorse beyondtv every once in a while since it doesn't seem to get name dropped in this htpc discussion very often. I'm still happy with this software and it packs a good ammount of value for the price. Definitely worth a look for those dropping in here for first time htpc setup suggestions. The early problems I had getting it to work with my hd homerun have been totally resolved in the last few updates.
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Nov 29, 2007 01:15
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Bender posted:It was my processor. The 3700+ is just under the limit that PowerDVD can work with, apparently. I bet the the video card made a bigger difference than the processor. Since the 8xxx series cards support video codec hardware offload/accel and your old 7600 only supports mpeg2 processing. My system chugs at about 80+% utilization with hd-dvd playback and hardware accel disabled, with it enabled it pulls 4-6% utilization...
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Dec 25, 2007 19:25
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vanilla slimfast posted:The only channels that are going to be available as unencrypted QAM are the ones that you could also get freely over the air. This includes the big three networks of ABC, NBC, CBS, as well as others like FOX. Channels that you have to pay for on cable like A&E and TNT that have HD versions will likely *not* be available unencrypted. This isn't true in my experience. Here in the SF East Bay Comcast/AT&T sends quite a bit of unencrypted QAM stuff down the pipes. Personally I get almost everything that is normally included in the "extended basic package" unencrypted, which includes something like 60 channels. Which is quite a bit more than just the major networks.
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Dec 26, 2007 21:04
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tinselt0wn posted:Anyone have experience with external DACs? I'm looking at these http://www.scott-nixon.com/dac.htm but I don't know much about this stuff. Right now I'm using a Sound Blaster X-Fi and my speakers are the Axiom M50 towers, and the Axiom EP175 subwoofer. You don't list what receiver/amplifier/s you are using to drive those speakers. That said, an external DAC is really only advantageous (AFAICT) if you are taking a pretty high bitrate PCM stream and want to feed that to a highend amplification stage to drive high end speakers. The differences in sound quality between the DAC in any modern receiver and what you would find in a stand alone unit are not going to be night and day; rather it will be the type of increase in fidelity that can only be really exploited when the rest of your components can accurately reproduce the sound well enough to make the difference audible. As an aside, the particular site you've linked is quite light on technical details as to what is in their magic boxes, but a look around seems to indicate that they use a standard Phillips TDA 1543 8 pin DAC chip which is a commodity processor which costs about 5 bucks in single unit quantities from parts houses. The rest of the box is filled with a simple tube based preamp. Personally *I* don't much like over-processing my audio. I figure the production company paid BIG money for an engineer to make the CD sound the way it is supposed to sound in the first place. And *I* think it is antithetical to the intentions of accurate reproduction. That said, with the assumption that the "T" in HTPC implies more viewing than listening I'd say that there is basically no place in a Home Theater setup for a device like this (preamp) unless you already happen to have a setup with individual amps and no existing processing hardware and want to move from analog transport to digital transport from the PC.
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Dec 27, 2007 04:55
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Saukkis posted:The problem with using graphics card is that I think only very few video players support them, like PowerDVD. Easier to use the CPU. This is only kinda true. While you do need software which supports the hardware acceleration it is provided by powerdvd in the form of a directshow filter which can be used by any directX programs. The end result of this is that you can use an unregistered version of powerdvd (trial version even) to get the directshow filters and then Bobs your Uncle and it just works... While you CAN just rely of software decoding you will see very high CPU utilization which will impact other tasks running on the same computer.
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Dec 30, 2007 00:12
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Gromit posted:I suppose some of you may be recording TV at the same time or something, but my HTPC isn't doing anything else when I'm playing a movie, ever. Recording a few streams of video and downloading torrents via utorrent and the RSS feed plugin.
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Dec 30, 2007 20:33
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SnatchRabbit posted:I think I can get about 8 inches of vertical clearance and a foot or two deep in my entertainment center, roughly the dimensions of an old Xbox, which the HTPC would be replacing. I think the Antec Fusion is looking pretty good. Word of warning! The Antec Fusion is wider than most stereo components AND requires air space on both sides as well as the top. If your space is only big enough for an Xbox is definitely won't hold a fusion.
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Jan 5, 2008 12:12
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EC posted:As long as you can find software that will listen to the receiver and translate commands into keypresses, you're in business. I think HIP does this, and I know Girder does. Also, some of the front-ends out there (like Meedio and Media Portal) have built in features that will allow you to listen for commands. I started playing with a program called Event Ghost just yesterday, it is a very powerful FREE program which has functionality similar to girder but was much easier to configure. With it I am able to use my snapstream firefly remote (X10 RF instead of infrared) to actually control my PC, which is then able to SEND ir signals through the USB-UIRT to control my other components. This is one of the big advantages of the USB-UIRT over other recievers; it is a transceiver! And a pretty good one too, it has an internal receiver and transmitter as well as a stereo headphone jack on the back where you can use each channel (left,right) to connect another IR led output which can be controlled as separate zones. I've only begun to get the setup perfected but with just a bit of fiddling I was able to get controls working for PowerDVD Ultra*, Beyond TV, and ZoomPlayer as well as get the RF remote to trigger an IR event which controls my stereo receiver. This software/hardware combination is awesome and the flexibility of the usb-uirt really is worth the extra cost. * I finally got sick of using my 360 as a hd-dvd/dvd player and bought the latest version of PowerDVD Ultra yesterday afternoon. It totally sucked having to pay full retail for a type of product which I would normally just get as a bundled with some hardware. The playback video quality is SOOOOO much better than with the 360 though, which really made it an easy decision to pay for it. It doesn't exactly make the decision any harder once you see that cost of the hd/bluray dual format drives that include an OEM copy of PDVD Ultra 
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Jan 5, 2008 21:46
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Gromit posted:I have that case and it is great except for the front display, which is utter poo poo. Yeah, the display is kind of pain to get it to do anything worthwhile, at least on my revision the software availability is quite low and not very good. I'm using LCD smartie with the imon driver. I hear that the newest revision of the fusion has a better LCD and an IR reciever which can do more stuff and uses more standard drivers. That said, once I got mine working I'd say that aside from not having much REAL utility it does look pretty swank and is plenty bright and readable; although I've heard others complain about their particular display having too low of a contrast or not liking the color. I keep meaning to look into replacing mine with something a bit more substantial, perhaps a 4x20 vfd display.
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Jan 6, 2008 02:37
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Gromit posted:Yours must look very different to mine. I have light blue text on a darker blue background, and anything outside of about 1 to 1.5 metres away you can't read it for poo poo. I would leave it with no drivers installed whatsoever, and just showing the time, except that the default font it uses is one of those embarressing "what the 1970s thought scifi text would look like" fonts. So mine is bright blue text on a nearly black background, it has that distinctive VFD display brightness and angle of readability that allows me to easily read it from anywhere in the room. LCD smartie is kind of hacky, but it seems to be the only 3rd party solution available for this display AND it requires you to copy a dll file from the imon software which is supplied with the chassis. You can basically configure it to do all sorts of crazy shizzle, although I've noticed that LCD smartie has a habit of hogging resources if you try and get it to do too many things at once. I'll take a picture when I get some free time and also post up a copy of my config for anyone who is interested.
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Jan 6, 2008 05:33
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