High Tech Household

My wife and I recently moved into our first house, so now that we’ve got the immediate issues good-enough-for-now (walls painted, wallpaper removed, water heater replaced, yadda yadda), we’ve each settled into more fun projects. My first project along those lines was setting up a home-theater PC. I’ve got a few observations from the experience.

• We recently got a new TV, and it has the standard HD audio/video plug, HDMI. Because of this, I made sure to get a PC with built-in HDMI.
• My particular PC/TV combination seemed to have trouble with a lot of desktop resolutions, until I put it at 1080p (1920×1080), which is the native resolution of the TV. Before I set that, it would seem to run okay for a little while, but the moment I asked it to do anything intensive (start a video, play a game), the picture and sound would often cut in and out. Once it was 1080p, I didn’t see that issue anymore.
• At 1080p, it can be hard to make out the text and icons of the Windows interface, even on a pretty large TV. Vista (and the upcoming Windows 7) has a nice DPI adjustment feature. Just search for ‘DPI’ on the Start Menu. This scales up the whole interface, giving you a usable interface, even from 10 or 15 feet away.
• I initially set my TV display ratio to 16:9, so the display would take up the entire wide screen. Oddly, though, this cut off the edges of the picture a little. After some Googling, I tried a suggestion to set it to Auto instead. Bam! The whole picture, edges and all, showed up.
• I suggest getting a wireless keyboard with an integrated pointer (mouse). Many have trackpads or other laptop-like pointers built into the housing of the keyboard. That way, you don’t need to string a wire or wires across the living room to wherever the PC is.
• The particular PC has both on-board audio, and the audio that’s part of HDMI. Sometimes, on boot up, it would want to use the on-board audio instead of the HDMI, so there would be no sound from the TV. I ended up disabling the on-board audio from the BIOS.

A home theater PC is great way to watch the increasing amount of video on the web. Not only are there movie trailers and Youtube, but Hulu is great for watching TV episodes and movies. If you’re a subscriber, Netflix is also great on a TV. All of these assume you have relatively fast internet connection (probably at least 500 KB/s consistenly).

A home theater PC is great way to bring the web into your living room, so everyone in the house can enjoy it.