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HDTV Guide - Page 4 - Games & Home Theater PC to HDTV

Hooking a PC into a HDTV

Hooking up a PC to your entertainment system is referred to as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). It can give you the following benefits: If you have a HDTV Tuner Card with an HDTV Antenna, you can watch & record free Over-The-Air (OTA) broadcasts, including CBS-HD, NBC-HD, Fox-HD, ABC-HD, and PBS-HD. If you have a QAM Tuner Card, such as MyHD MDP-130 or a FusionHDTV-5, it will let you hook up cable TV and watch/record the unencrypted HDTV channels, such as ABC-HD, CBS-HD, NBC-HD, Fox-HD, PBS-HD, and ESPN-HD. Those cards can also record Dolby Digital 5.1 digital audio that may be encoded with the video stream. Companies are required to transmit those channels "in the clear" (unencrypted). You don't even need to have a digital cable box, as they broadcast over basic cable.

You will need PVR software that can let you watch & record HDTV. Most HDTV Tuner cards come with recording software, but they do not provide all the bells and whistles that the Tivo-like softwares provide. MythTV is a Linux-based PVR software that currently supports HDTV. Snapstream BeyondTV, one of my favorite Tivo-like PC softwares, is coming out with a new Version 4 that will have HDTV support, and will be released by the end of 2005. People who purchase BeyondTV 3 today will get a free upgrade to BeyondTV 4 when it is released. Snapstream has no subscription fees. I know that Snapstream BeyondTV will only certain HDTV cards, including the ATI HDTV Wonder and the Dvico FusionHDTV3 Gold-T cards. People with MyHD cards may be stuck using their software that is bundled with the card.

Now you just need the computer to display on your HDTV. HDTV's are similar to a computer monitor in many ways, however hooking up a computer to an HDTV display may not work. Here's why: Those two signals are two different languages. Just because your computer has DVI output (usually DVI-D) and your TV has DVI input (usually DVI-I) does not automatically mean you can use a DVI-to-DVI cable between your PC and HDTV.

Look at the specs on your HDTV, even if it has a VGA input port, to see exactly what formats it supports: If you are unsure if your HDTV's VGA input supports Widescreen, or if your HDTV does not have a VGA port, then it may be best to purchase a DVI-to-Component Video Adapter for your video card, and use the HDTV's Component Video inputs. Since it may be difficult to get your HDTV to input a computer signal, it may be easier to just convert the computer signal to an HDTV signal using a Component Video adapter. I purchased an adapter from ATI for my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. I don't know if the ATI adapter works on non-ATI cards or if you have to buy an adapter specifically designed for the card, but it was easy to buy an adapter from ATI which specifically supported my graphics card (so if you have a Nvidia card, I don't know if the ATI Adapter will work). The adapter converts the computer's DVI signal to a selectable 720p or 1080i signal via Component Video that my LCD HDTV is happy with. Of course this assumes that you have an available Component Video input on your TV. My Proview 32" LCD has one HDMI input which I use for the HDTV cable box, and only one Component Video input which I use for the computer. Using an S-Video cable or composite cable is not recommended, because they produce a very poor image, and are not widescreen compatible. If you buy a Component Video adapter to convert DVI to Component for your PC, make sure the adapter supports your video card.

Front-projectors (Infocus, BenQ, etc) can accept any VGA or DVI input from a computer with no problems, as well as input from a HDTV signal.

Our first thought was to hook up a computer's DVI port to a HDTV's DVI/HDMI port, however we read several reports on AVS Forum about it not working for most people. The main problem is there are 6 different types of DVI connections, some of which are not compatible with each other. It is also difficult to find the correct native resolution that your TV likes through its DVI/HDMI port. The native resolution is often very strange, and it may take some effort to get your video card to output that exact resolution. If you can find your native TV resolution, and your video card can output at that resolution, then it should work great via DVI-DVI or DVI-HDMI cable, but will take a lot of work. We decided not to go through the painful effort, and we just convert the DVI computer signal to a HDTV 720p signal using a Component Video adapter. The Component Video port works great with most widescreen computer resolutions. Component is designed to be used with pictures, not tiny text, so some text on the screen may be difficult to read. I enlarged the font within Windows XP's Display Settings, which helps clear things up, and I changed the XP style to a black background with white text, which helps make the display more readable on my LCD HDTV.

With my Proview 32" LCD which supports 1366x768, I set the DVI-Component adapter to use 720p, and I set the PC's resolution to 1152x648, which is widescreen. It does work for me, but leaves about 1" of unused space on all sides. I think that's because the 720p resolution may prefer a 1280x720 resolution, but when I choose that resolution on my Radeon 9800 Pro, the image is blurry and is cut-off on the left side, so I settled with 1152x648 which looks great. Maybe this is a reason why my Proview 32" LCD was only $900 in July 2005. Despite the 1" of unused space on all sides, the display still looks good.

If you have AVI/Quicktime files that are widescreen and/or DVD/HDTV quality, or if you want to play DVDs through your computer, use a S/PDIF Optical Audio output from the computer to your Receiver to get digital quality surroundsound. This method is called "S/PDIF Passthrough" where it simply takes the original digital output and passes it through to the receiver without doing any processing. A plugin called "AC3Filter" is a great utility to install. Make sure your computer has a S/PDIF Optical Audio Output port to passthrough digital audio to your Receiver. If you want optical output and your computer did not come with one, a cheap $30 or $40 video card can do it. I purchased a Turtle Beach Catalina from a Microcenter store for $35 which not only gave me S/PDIF Optical Output, but also gave me drivers better than the onboard C-Media audio. If you do purchase a sound card, I recommend Turtle Beach and Creative Labs.

The S/PDIF Passthrough does surroundsound only when the source is encoded in AC3/Dolby Surroundsound, such as with DVDs and some AVI movies. Otherwise it will only do stereo sound. If you play games that support surroundsound audio, they work by using the three 3.5mm audio output ports on your sound card: front left/right, rear left/right, center/subwoofer. Your Receiver probably has RCA audio input ports (like the red & white illustrated here). You can pick up three 3.5mm to 2 RCA plugs to to your Receiver, then configure the game to output surroundsound. The Receiver will use the 3 stereo analog channels to produce 5.1 channel sound. Or, a brand new option is a Creative Labs DTS-610 which does realtime DTS encoding, which can take the 3 stereo analog channels outputted from a sound card, encodes it to DTS, then a S/PDIF digital optical connection to your Receiver.

Purchase a PC or build one that is powerful enough for what you're looking for, and has enough expansion slots and drive slots for what you may need. Some small computer cases are specifically designed to be added on your home entertainment system shelf along with your DVD player and Receiver, such as the cases sold at PCAlchemy.com. Keep in mind that some small HTPC cases may require a special small motherboard, and/or may not have many AGP/PCI/PCIe expansion slots available for you to use. Typically a graphics card will consume a AGP or PCIe card slot, and a TV Tuner card will consume a PCI slot, and a sound card could consume another PCI slot. Think about whether you may want to add a second hard drive, and will need space for that. The advantage to having a small case is it may fit well with your other electronics on your entertainment system, but the disadvantage is fewer expansion capabilities. Computers have limited expansion slots and room, so be sure to plan ahead with what parts you may need before you buy a case.

If you want to record and watch analog (non-HD) TV, watch DVD movies, and watch AVI/Divx/Xvid files, a processor of at least 1.5 GHz is recommended. If you want to play PC games, we recommend a processor of at least 2.4 GHz and a graphics card of Radeon 9800 Pro or better or GeForce 6600 or better. If you want to play HDTV video in HDTV quality, we recommend a very fast processor (3.2 GHz or above).

The PC industry knows that people will want to watch HDTV from their PCs on their HDTV screens, which the purpose of a new video technology called H.264. That video format takes up much less disk space than HDTV-quality Mpeg2, however it requires a lot of decoding processing power.

I currently use a Proview 32" LCD flatpanel HDTV screen with native 1366x768 resolution. Using a DVI-to-Component Video Adapter, I linked my Home Theater PC's video to the HDTV using a Component Video Cable. It works well, but I needed to remove the desktop background for the desktop text to be readable, and I changed the Windows XP display style to a white-on-black display with large fonts. With white-on-black, most webpages do not work well, but most things that I use work well (my desktop, Windows Explorer, Start Menu, watching AVI movies, selecting MP3s to play, games, etc).

Game Consoles:

The new Playstation 3 will be released near the beginning of 2006, and Xbox 360 should be released sometime around Christmas 2005. Both will have games that are designed to be played on HDTV widescreen screens, and will come with 720p/1080i outputs. More information on HD games as news is released can be seen on HDTV Arcade.

Playstation2 and Xbox can connect to an HDTV using a Component Video adapter, but most games are not specifically designed to use widescreen, so widescreen is not required. But those systems will look far better when hooked up to a HDTV screen.

Some Links:
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