The Basement Cineplex

I’ve been getting a lot of requests to describe what I put together for my home theater system after I posted pictures from my projector. The home theater isn’t quite complete yet. It’s still missing some pieces and the room that it all has to go in isn’t finished.

I picked up a infocus screenplay 4800 for $499 from woot.com. I’ve got it mounted with a ceiling mount from ebay, $12.

It’s only an 800X600 16:9 native screen but it looks great in the dark.
Any sunlight at all will kill it. It’s key to use a pc for your dvd player because it will work as a resolution-doubler. DVD’s displayed with a projector look impressively better through a pc compared to component outs on the DVD player alone. The 420p out of the Xbox is impressive as well. I don’t have any hd games or hd cable so I haven’t seen it do anything better than dvd quality.

For my home theater PC (HTPC) I have the following:

Athlon 1.4 running Windows Media Center 2005
1 GB Ram
GeForce FX 5900XT 128 mb DDR 8x agp graphics card
DVD Player generic 8x
CD burner lite-on 24x
Hauppauge mce 250 tv/radio tuner card: 140
Chaintech AV-710 Sound card with 7.1 optical out. SpDif passthrough is a must if you use your own reciever. ($25 from newegg)
Yamaha HTR 5750 (component switching, and component to s-video
upconversion are a must – for hdtv, ps2’s, and xbox)
Klipsch KSW-12″ powered sub
bose 301 bookshelf speakers for the front
bose 201’s for the rear
Bose VCS-10 center chanel

What’s left?
PC case that is quieter than a shop-vac
Build a screen, either with screen goo or out of normal projector screen material… i’m leaning toward the goo at the moment.

Finally, well… I’ve got to actually finish the basement.