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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