Last Friday, I went down to the local MicroCenter looking for parts to build a new PC to hook up to my TV and Stereo. I ended up deciding it would be not much different in price and a lot easier to buy a PC. I got a Sony RX650 Windows XP Home, PentiumŪ 4 1.60 GHz, 80 GB drive, 512 MB, CD-RW & DVD ROM, for about $1000.
I also got an All in Wonder Radeon, 128MB AGP video / tv tuner card, and a Logitech Cordless Freedom Optical keyboard/mouse.
At home, once I got it running, connected to my network, and switched the video card, I connected it to a Sony 32" Digital TV and to an amplifier.
The TV card is connected to the TV with an S-video cable for video and a ministereo to RCA jacks cable for audio.
The connection to the amplifier is by feeding TV sound back to the amp with RCA cables.
To get Windows Desktop images on the TV, I lowered the resolution to 800 x 600.
HOW WELL DOES IT WORK?
My TV is now the monitor for the PC. Running Windows, the image of the desktop is just useable. It isn't crisp. The text characters have non-uniform line widths, but it is readable.
Running Media Jukebox 8.0.199 with it works really well, with one exception (DVD).
TV works well with image quality comparable to using the TV tuner. (I don't yet have an HDTV tuner.)
Music plays nicely, as you would expect.
What I didn't expect is that displaying digital images from a Sony camera works using their PictureGear program works extremely well. The images are mostly 2048x1536 and they look great.
Combining a slide show of images with music was a big surprise. Really pleasant. Like a soundtrack on a movie.
DVD was good news and bad news. It worked great, with a high quality picture. But it only worked once for each movie I tried. The second time, it wouldn't play. It's probably a bug in the beta version of Media Jukebox. We'll get it fixed.
The wireless keyboard and mouse worked well, too. It took a little time but most of the media keys on the keyboard (volume, play, stop, next track, last track, etc.) work now. I had to add a line to a file called players.ini in the Logitech directory. Thanks, Gatobrit, for reporting it in your earlier thread. Here's the line again:
MediaJukebox=cmd,media jukebox.exe,MJFrame,MEDIA JUKEBOX,xxx,32778,32779,32780,32781,32782,0,1,Media Jukebox
It's worth mentioning that the overall effect is that the experience is not much different than using standard stereo components except that you have the addition of the Windows desktop so you can do ALT Tab to get a different task or run TV in a window while you surf or read email. Except for the readability of the text, it's just like using a PC usually is.
The best thing is that my wife loves it. I find her at the TV now, looking sheepish.
For those who want to dig deep into this subject, I recommend the HTPC forum at AVSForum. Here's the link:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26Anybody else doing this with their TV? Details are welcome.