[mythtv-users] Frontend for home theater

[Michael Tiller]

At work we just got a $700 computer projector that looks fantastic. I hooked
my laptop up to it while watching a widescreen DVD and it even seems to
support the widescreen format quite nicely.

So, I'm thinking about getting one of these for my basement. My plan would
be to mount it on the ceiling and project it against a wall. I'd also like
to hook a very simple MythTV frontend up to it. My plan would be to have
only a DVD reader, small hardrive (if necessary), network and video card in
it (i.e. no tuner cards and no direct live TV feed to the projector...only
live TV from a backend over the network).

Here are a few questions:

1) Any comments on why this might be a bad idea? :-) It sure looks
attractive to me.

2) Any special issues with video cards? When I hooked my laptop up the
projector we have at work, it seemed like my laptop was putting out a
special resolution on the output port and that the projector was matching
it. The widescreen version looked great. Will all video cards+X.conf be able
to provide the optimal widescreen resolution or is this a special feature to
look for?

3) The projector we have at work is a 1600 lumens Panasonic. It also seems
fairly cheap. I get the impression it can support some pretty high
resolutions (HDTV?)

4) I've got a fairly nice 5.1 receiver plus speakers. Anything special I
need to hook that up to a computer? If I play a DVD, will it send a
pro-logic encoded signal over normal "line out" or do I need to have a sound
card that can split it up locally and then send out all the signals
separately? I may just skip the 5.1 for now use simulated surround sound.

5) I'd like this to be as cheap as possible (WAF). If I'm just using the
frontend to playback DVDs and programs recorded on a backend, I assume I can
get by with some pretty low end specs. Since I only need to do playback, I
suppose a PIII could probably fit the bill although I suspect that might
actually be hard to find. I have this thought in my head that someday I'll
have HD quality recordings on my backend. What does it take to get HDTV
playback (only) for a frontend. The MythTV site mentions some kind of NVIDIA
acceleration? I probably can't afford to protect for this capability but it
doesn' t hurt to at least understand the tradeoff.

6) I considered a diskless configuration (probably save me money), but it
seems SO COMPLICATED to setup. Could I boot KnoppMyth and then take the DVD
out? Would that work?!? Then I could save on the disk and just boot the
thing with a DVD and leave it running all the time. Comments?

Any other suggestions would be very much appreciated. Unfortunately, I don't
have much time or money so any suggestions along the lines of quick and
cheap would be very useful.

--
Mike
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