I am looking for advice on home theater setup. I know, I am opening a can of worms but I know this forum has some good ideas on a wide range of topics so I thought I would give it a shot!
Display - I currently don’t have a home theater setup – or anything I would call that any way. I currently have a 32” tube analog tv with cable - basic, basic, basic (10.00/month basic) channels. As much as I would love to get more channels and move to the digital channel area, my financial side aka:wife, doesn’t see the need. I now have a projector that my work was tossing out. I have played with it a bit and it seems ok, a little out of focus but not bad. It could be that I am displaying analog tv and regular dvd images to a large space so it looks a little fuzzy. I have temporary access to a nice screen so it is giving it a true test I believe.
Question #1 – I could splurge and get a nice 54” plasma and hang it above my fireplace. Pretty spendy jump when I already have the projector. Is there any reason people prefer one over the other? I know projectors can get color wash out, and are noisy. I am leaning on saving this money and spending on other equipment if I can. Any advice on this would be appreciated. I will add that we play dvd’s from a Panasonic DVD player with a hard drive as a recorder, as well as PS2 video game console, but also play movies from the HTPC when I can. (See next paragraph)
HTPC - I have a P4 2.4 with 1gb ram. This has worked well for playback of audio and movies that I have ripped to a shared drive on my network. I bought a Pinnacle USB PCTV HD Pro tv tuner a while back, in hopes it could run on a laptop or whatever. It was dog slow on a laptop, so I moved it to my computer. It was not much better there! So I installed an nVidia AGP card in it with 256 memory. That seemed to make it better but at times it still gets broken up picture. I currently set this up to use ota only just so I could see what the hd looked like from my pc to the tv or projector. So I am thinking of getting a different video card with more memory in hopes that will take care of it. I also have access to a P4 2.8 with 1gb memory, but only on board video card. That only has PCI and no AGP or PCIe.
Question #2. Is this spec for a pc going to work for HTPC? Do I look at getting a better AGP (or PCI if I move to the 2.8 computer) card and then all the worlds problems are solved? Or do I look at getting a PCI tuner and then the current video card will suffice? I assume you need some sort of decent graphics card to watch tv with a PC. (although it doesn’t really show it as a requirement). In a nutshell, how can I get a computer working correctly with a tv tuner with my spec – invest in video card, tv tuner card, or both?
I realize this is really open ended so I understand a response may be difficult. Even something as basic as what you run that works, and why, would help. I realize I may not be able to afford what others recommend but it may point m in the right direction. I just need to know my money is going to the right items!
