HTPC Dreams

While looking for something to do, and worrying about all the holiday shows and movies that were piling up on our DVR, I decided to bring my desktop computer down to the living room and see what I could do about connecting it to our home theater. I swapped out the older video card (Geforce 6600LE) for a newer model, a Geforce 7600GS, in the hopes of playing a few games at the TV's full resolution via DVI. The motherboard has optical digital audio output and firewire built in, so I can send Dolby Digital Live to the audio receiver and capture the transport stream from the DVR for temporary storage.

With a little tweaking I was up and running, playing Half Life 2 @ 1920x1080, and getting really scared at how immersive the game could be. Wow! I really loved playing it at my desk, but it was nothing like this. I'm literally too scared to play for more than a half hour at a time.

I was able to find instructions and software to capture programs from the DVR and save, view, or burn them to DVD from the HTPC. This is pretty cool in a time when there are so many good shows in HD and our DVR has a relatively small hard disk. While playing shows on the DVR to record them on the PC, I was able to watch the un-aired episodes of Vanished in near-HD quality by pointing my browser to the show's M*Space page. By dropping the display resolution to 1280x720, and expanding the streaming video in the browser, it almost filled the screen.

One of my reasons for wanting a home theater PC is to more easily control our television. One of its weaknesses is that it has no discreet remote-control command to switch it the second HDMI/DVI input. All other inputs can either be selected by their own code, or by toggling through each one in succession. The other weakness is that it ignores anything you tell it to do while it is switching between inputs, which takes a few seconds (we'll call it 4) to do.

The "exciting" new bit about having the PC nearby is that have been able to experiment with the serial port on the TV's back panel. I managed to find a program that would allow me to send commands to the TV, by manually constructing the words required for the TV to pay attention. I was able to send commands to switch between a number of inputs. Just about every function available from the remote control can be duplicated through the RS-232 interface. My Pioneer receiver has serial control, too. I have found a few references to controlling Pioneer components, and that will be the next challenge.

I am starting to see the Infra-Red Light at the End of the Tunnel. My goal is to have a small "not-quite-a-PC" appliance sitting in the entertainment center that can be connected to most of the devices there, that would receive a specific set of commands from my remote for which it responds by changing the TV and receiver's inputs, and be the main interface to the entertainment center's UPS. Until I have that device, I can use the HTPC for the same job, and develop the device using the HTPC. An interesting possibility would be to put the "intelligent" bits into the wireless router (a Linksys WRT54G currently running DD-WRT software) and connect an Ethernet accessed serial controller of some sort to it.


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Heroes Alert!!!
On Monday night, January 22nd, during a commercial break on Deal or No Deal, there will be a sneak preview of a new and previously unknown Hero. I can't wait!
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