AoD Hardware Forum FAQ

[JeffDM]

HT Frequently Asked Questions Guide

There used to be a thread I started that had basic information on home theater hardware. It seems to have disappeard several months ago. I have just found my local copy of the text so I am reposting it.

I welcome input. If there is a subcategory I missed, let me know, or you may make your own sub-FAQ covering the subcategory by posting a reply.

I have put together a list of basic information a person might need for setting up a home theater or to improve their video and sound system.

Please scan this page for possible answers to your question.

Please note that this document is for accessibility to the widest possible audience, so I will try to keep things concise and point to sources for more detail and information.

Anime On DVD is not responsible for the opinions within. No one except you are responsible for how you use or misuse this information.

If you have questions about a very specific model or part number (eg., you found a Panavox DG-530 and want to know how good it is), please check other sources.


Basic Sites to look up specific hardware
AVS Forum
Audio Review
epinions

Be careful to not accept just any single review at face value. Reviewers may have biases and hidden agendas. Sometimes they even miss obvious solutions to their complaints or don't bother to properly set up the device in question.

A lot of times the maker of a piece of hardware posts user manuals on their web site. I highly suggest downloading one for each of the particular devices you are considering.

In general, it is best to avoid devices that try to integrate more than one major feature component, such as the Home Theater In a Box (HTiB). Other than possibly ease of use, they generally don't do any of the included tasks as well as a separate components will. Also, if one part fails then you may be out the entire system rather than just one part. A TV whose included DVD or tape player doesn't work might look silly.

Video Quality Sites
Video Artifact Page
A site dedicated against Edge Enhancement

Thanks to fractured78, Citizen Klaus, Skywise and others for their input.

[JeffDM]

TVs and Displays

Again, see AVS forum for details on specific models.

Display Technologies In general:

No video technology is inherently superior to any other in all categories. They all have their own merits and demerits.

CRT
An electron beam hits phosphors on a screen to create a lit image.
pro: mature, inexpensive, generally best blacks
con: heavy, large physical depth, and projection CRT is particularly succeptible to burn-in

Plasma
A gas is energized in little cells on the panel to create an image.
pro: flat and large, while still being thin.
con: expensive, succeptible to burn-in, some screens look coarse.

DLP:
It uses panel(s) of micromirrors that flash on and off to display an image.
pro: good digital display type, with good fill ratio
con: rainbows, bulb cost

LCOS:
Also known as D-ILA, which is JVC's brand. LCOS is short for liquid crystal on silicon. Light is reflected off of these panels to create an image.
pro: high resolution, very little pixelization due to it having the best fill ratio
con: can be noisier because it needs better cooling, somewhat grey blacks, there aren't any low resolution versions, so the starting cost is currently higher, bulb cost

LCD:
For projection, light is usually shined through tiny panels, often around 0.7" to 1.3" / 2cm to 4cm in panel size.
pro: common and often least expensive digital display type for the resolution
con: screen door, somewhat grey blacks, for projection, bulb cost


Projection

Front projection - a reasonably small box shines an image on a wall or screen. This kind needs good light control to work well, preferably nearly no light in many cases.


Projector Central - guides to front projection devices and supplies.


Rear projection - a large box with a built-in screen large, inexpensive screen that can be used in a lighted room.


Adjustment & Tuning
For best results with any kind of display, it should be tuned up. If you see a display review that doesn't mention tuning as part of the review procedure, ignore the video quality part of the review if not the entire review. The best tuning happens with a particular display in the environment it will be used. No disply can be optimally tuned from the factory. while digital displays often don't need geometry adjustments, they still need color adjustments. For other kinds of displays, you will often need to get into service mode or possibly manual adjustments to correct geometry problems.

Generally the best is getting an ISF certified tuner to adjust the set, but it can be expensive. You can get special tuning DVDs to show you how to dial in a TV:

Avia
Digital Video Essentials
Video Essentials
THX optimode is available on nearly any THX certified DVD made in the last few years, requires separate purchase of the blue gel from the THX site. I think similar could be bought at a professional camera or stage supply store, but I don't know the specifics of the material.

Terms:

Burn-In: A situation where an old image appears in the display. It is so named because on CRTs, the phosphors are "burned" from over exposure to one static image. Calibrating a display to limit the white brightness is a recommended way to reduce the risk of burn in. Often displays are set to be overly bright so they look good on the showroom floor, but this ruins the screen quicker and makes the image inaccurate.

Fill ratio: the ratio of lit and unlit area of a pixel. The higher the fill ratio, the smoother the image is. A low fill ratio results in a "screen door" effect.

Screen door: Where the image looks like as if you are looking at something through a screen door. It is often an easily visible grid of dark lines on an image.

Antennas & TV
CEA Antenna Selector
Titan TV

Screen "Lines of Resolution" (italicised textis a quote from a post by Skywise)
"Yes, what they're talking about isn't really resolution, it's detail. What confuses the issue even more is that it's not even the actual information being shown on screen that they're discussing. It's a perfect square adjusted for the aspect ratio. However, since you're interested in the horizontal resolution you can't adjust that - the result is you adjust the frame to 720x540, and then make a square in the center of that frame. The result is a 540x540 square, which is then the max "resolution" according to traditional TV math."

Beware that the claimed screen "lines of resolution" may be just a measurement of the phosphors and not necessarily what the electronics can drive. But higher phosphor density can have an upside of a less-grainy looking picture even if the electronics or signal isn't that high resolution.

[Skywise]

Iirc the fill factor is about 97% for LCOS, 90% for DLP and 70% for LCD respectively. These numbers will of course change as technology improves, but the general relationship holds true between them.

The main points about a projector's video quality are:

- de-interlacer/scaler
- contrast ratio
- color accuracy

In many cases the internal scaler can be bypassed by using say a progressive DVD player, scaler or HTPC. Thus it's not such a large factor when buying a projector, but if it does have a good one (FLI) it's more of a bonus for use with other sources like game consoles.

Contrast ratio is one of the most important points, if not the important one after de-interlacing. The human eye is most sensitive to changes in luminance (or shades of gray if you will), and so detail and the illusion of depth in an image is determined primarily by this. DLP tops out with the best CR, with LCD and LCOS following behind. 1500:1 is considered really good, and anything more is really just icing.

Color accuracy has been a long time problem for display devices. Most DLP designs use only one chip for display, and thus has a bit lower accuracy than say LCD or LCOS. There are 3-chip ones, but they generally cost more than most save people want to pay. The other issue is that the native white point of the bulbs used in these projectors is not the standard 6500K used for calibration. This is usually compensated for digitally, but lately some projector manufacturers have started using optical color filters to "anologally" correct the color. LCD and DLP use the same type bulbs, but LCOS use hotter ones and require more cooling and different color correction.

In addition to this there's such things as screen choice (depending on projector and setup), resolution and brightness. In general brightness shouldn't be a factor in choosing a projector for home theater use. The only point it becomes an issue is if it's going to be used for something else, like say business.

Resolution choice for a projector should be minimum 853x480 for NTSC content, and 1024x576 for PAL. These are resolutions needed to display anamorphic content without loss. Above that the only way it helps is that it can reduce the fill factor on problem devices such as LCD. Most projectors will take HD input but with few really expensive exceptions none can show 1080i without downconverting it. In general though a projector with a high contrast ratio will perform better than one with a low CR, and higher resolution.

[JeffDM]

HTPC
Due to potential complexities, a home theater PC is not for everyone. It requires a certain amount of patience to set up a basic one, and a lot more work to make it easy to use for others.

Base system
There are countless sites that cover part selection & assembly or purchase of PCs, I will probably not go into it here. What you need to have really depends on what you plan to do with it. Check the requirements and suggestions of the software and hardware you plan to use, and leave a margin for expansion and upgrading.

To find who makes quiet products for use in a PC, try http://www.silentpcreview.com/. Keeping the HTPC quiet is often desirable. Keeping the fan and drive noise to a minimum prevents distraction from a movie. Keep in mind that keeping the computer cool and quiet might require compromises such as better fans, bigger heat sinks. I don't suggest just buying slower-flow fans or slowing them down unless you are certain that the components will still operate within factory recommendations.

Memory
Currently 512 megabytes is recommended, although I personally could do pretty well with 256 if I needed to, and still not run out of room. Memory is inexpensive, so getting a little more isn't a bad thing.

Hard Drives
Currently the best warranty goes to Seagate, with their 5 year warranties on all internal hard drives. The warranty may vary by country, so check before buying.

A single large hard drive is probably the best for quiet operation. For Windows use, I suggest a 10-20GB system and program partition, with the rest of the drive as one large data partition. This is nice because the operating system might occasionally corrupt its own partition because of high file use, a seprate data partition is often still fine.

Storage Review is a place where you can find performance information on drives, for HTPC, the part of most concern is drive noise and drive heat.

The next up for performance is to buy a small capacity fast hard drive and use it for the operating system and programs, and a large and slow hard drive for data. This allows the operating system and programs to start up and react quicker. This option is only recommended if you have a good means of silencing and cooling two drives.

Optical Drives
I recommend at minimum, a standard DVD-ROM drive, although a DVD writer can be bought for very little. A Pioneer DVR-108D can be bought for less than $100 and it can read + & - standard discs, as well as dual layer discs. Advice for re-flashing drives can be found elsewhere on the internet, and is only recommended for experienced computer tweakers. I personally have one DVD +/- writer, as well as a CD read-only drive that tests well with Exact Audio Copy for making good rips for MP3s.


DVD software players
WinDVD (currently latest version is 5.0 Platinum)
PowerDVD

Currently no software DVD player has good deinterlacing quality necessary to get the most out of most animation on DVD. dScaler 5's MPEG decoder shows some promise, but as it is alpha level code, the results are mixed.

Divx and other digital media players: Divx site

Some programs can be used to set up audio jukeboxes.

Video Output
Unless you plan to play 3D games, there is little merit to buying the latest video card. I personally would recommend ATI 8500 or ATI 9500 or better cards because of their HDTV dongle compatibility. Matrox seems to have the best color scaling and TV output for composite or s-video. nVidia supposedly has the next best TV composite or s-video output followed by ATI. ATI has the edge in component output though.

Video Input
If you have a TV tuner or video capture card, try this software:
dScaler
It takes a little while to tune everything in, but I think it is well worth it.

Recommended video capture cards:
Flyvideo 2000 or nearly any Philips SAA 713x based tuner card
possibly any Connectix Cx2388x based card.

The Holo3DGraph series has a lot of the best features, and includes a FLI 2200 or FLI 2300 hardware deinterlacer, but it is very expensive, starting at around $400 for a used or refurbished original card (FLI 2200 based), up to $1200 for the second version (FLI 2300 based) with a DVI add-on. Both Holo3DGraph boards seem to be discontinued now though.


HTPC Sound
First, try the on-board sound chip, especially if it has a working digital audio output. For the price range, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card has been a favorite in the past. Other recommendations include Chaintech AV710, Maudio Revo and E-Mu 0404. For best sound, a good external sound box is preferred.

For gaming, Creative products are often most recommended.

Personal Video Recorder Software
For the Linux inclined:
FreeVo
MythTV
I don't know much about Windows equivalents of these, although Intervideo sells a WinPVR. They are on version 3, which I hope is better than version 2 that I've tried.
Nvidia includes Intervideo's solution.
ATI AIW come with their own PVR program. (Which is excellent.) ATI AIW's are also natural video capture cards. In their price range they have no equal.
There is also Beyond TV.

Video Editing
For budget solutions, try these sites:
DVD-R Help
Doom 9
Virtualdub
AVI Synth

You may try commercial software as well, although I recommend avoiding Pinnacle's Studio program. Compared to other software, it is inefficient, less flexible and a lot more crash prone.

HDTV on HTPC
ATI has direct support for component analog output on certain video cards. It requires an adaptor direct from ATI. It is model specific, click here for info: ATI Component Dongle FAQ

fractured78 says ATI supposedly does not support HD over DVI. (Jeff: huh? don't they support WXGA? Most digital HD-type displays are WXGA)

I have a DVICO HD tuner, it seems to be pretty decent. They say 1.6GHz CPU for non-ATI cards, and really I think they should say 2.0GHz or better, because some frames do drop, the higher the CPU, the better the decoding. For ATI display cards, 800MHz CPUs are supposedly all that is needed because they have on-board MPEG2 decoding.

For linux Video Input:
Under Linux, the Bt8x8 and Cx8x8 chips are generally the best supported of the available video capture chips. Other types of cards do work but I haven't experimented with them, check the hardware support lists. AVS Forum has a Linux HTPC subforum, please go there for more information.

Thanks to Citizen Klaus, fractured78, mulveling and Skywise for input.

[fractured78]

Just a couple minor things:

Windows PVR software:
Nvidia includes Intervideo's solution.
ATI AIW come with their own PVR program. (Which is excellent.) ATI AIW's are also natural video capture cards. In their price range they have no equal.
There is also Beyond TV.

Also:
You neglect to mention a PC's audio jukebox capabilities.

Audio:
The new Envy based sound cards are much better than the Turtle Beach one for audiophile level audio. (Creative takes the cake when it comes to gaming though.)

HDTV:
ATI has the HDTV Wonder which allows both for ATSC tuning and HDTV PVR.
Also might want to go over the current state of component output support and DVI output support.

IE: ATI has better component output support, but it does not currently have HDTV specific DVI output support.
Just thought I'd expand upon this since there was some questions about it. ATI cards can and do put out HDTV resolution via DVI which will work fine for projectors and for TV/Monitor hybrids. According to this article however it seems that an ATI card will not put out to a strictly HDTV TV via DVI. If you read the user posts after the article this is apparently because the ATI card will not open its DVI port if a proper EDID is not present. However, a user was able to force it using PowerStrip. (An extremely useful program that I use myself.) Hope that clears it up.

There are also "Windows Skins" for lack of a better word that can take control of the PC for all media stuff. IE-myHTPC (haven't used it before though)

You may also want to mention, in brief, about the availability of fans, power supplies, etc. that are extremely quiet.

[Citizen Klaus]

[ QUOTE ]
fractured78 said:
You may also want to mention, in brief, about the availability of fans, power supplies, etc. that are extremely quiet.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's such a can of worms right there that I'd just include a link to Silent PC Review and let the readers take it from that point on.

[fractured78]

Good idea

[mulveling]

[ QUOTE ]
fractured78 said:
Audio:
The new Envy based sound cards are much better than the Turtle Beach one for audiophile level audio. (Creative takes the cake when it comes to gaming though.)


[/ QUOTE ]
Correct. Just to add, the Chaintech AV710 has replaced the Turtle Beach as the overwhelming favorite budget soundcard choice. It's based on the Envy chipset like the Maudio Revo, and at less than $25, it is considered better than anything until the E-Mu 0404 at about $100.

[Skywise]

Actually the budget audio card is on board most motherboards already - i.e. free. While previously onboard audio wasn't exactly up to par, most these day provide what I call acceptable quality. You're not going to notice much difference between a regular card and that, if you're only doing media playback. For a HTPC used primarily for jukeboxing and/or DVD playback the SPDIF output will provide no loss quality wise whatsoever. If you're a gamer, then nforce based ones are recommended though, due to their ability to recompress 3d audio into Dolby Digital for use on a surround system.

However, if you're actually serious about doing audio work (editing, sampling etc) then an outboard audio card is recommended. By that I mean one that uses either USB or Firewire. These aren't affected by the electrical interference from the computer and should provide as close to noise free input/output as you can get.

[fractured78]

Unfortunately Nforce (Soundstorm) audio died with the NForce2 chipset. [img]/images/graemlins/sad.gif[/img] If you want an Athlon64 system you're SOL and stuck with AC97 junk if you stay with integrated sound. The new Intel integrated sound chipset looks promising, but that's not out quite yet. (I think, I don't pay attention to Intel based motherboards much.)