Imon / HTPC questions
Hello all
I currently use a hauppauge mvp and the excellent gbpvr app to view videos & pictures direct to my TV. Whilst this works well, it has some limitations that Im wanting to address - specifically it doesnt handle dvd's fantastically well, and im thinking of chucking the dvd player away and buying myself a nice little surround sound amp, then hooking this up to a Multimedia server with some added spdif goodness.
Rather than have an XP MCE 2005 box, I stumbled across Soundgraph's Imon suite of applications and hardware, but I have some queastrions that I cant find the answer to - hopefully someon here can help me.
I dont ever want to use the PC that im going to install imon onto as a PC, ie, I want to turn on the PC and have it load the Imedian software as soon as XP loads. I also want it to output to my TV immediately. I dont want to muck about with running the app or configuring the TV-out each time - I just want to turn the PC on, and 15 seconds later, its displaying on my TV ready for my input.
essentially, does imon do this?
If it does, im going to want the best AV output to the TV that I can get. I understand that the quality of tv-out cards is pretty poor - certainly far lower than a dvd outputting over a scart cable. what would people recommend? Im not going to play games on this server, so in that respect the GPU doesnt need tobe fantastically ballsy - all I want to do is play DVD's and every other video type the pc can handle - divx, mwv, asf etc etc
Would a hardware mpeg decoder be better? - if so, how would I play divx through it? what does the transcoding etc?
clearly I know naff all, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Alastair
I currently use a hauppauge mvp and the excellent gbpvr app to view videos & pictures direct to my TV. Whilst this works well, it has some limitations that Im wanting to address - specifically it doesnt handle dvd's fantastically well, and im thinking of chucking the dvd player away and buying myself a nice little surround sound amp, then hooking this up to a Multimedia server with some added spdif goodness.
Rather than have an XP MCE 2005 box, I stumbled across Soundgraph's Imon suite of applications and hardware, but I have some queastrions that I cant find the answer to - hopefully someon here can help me.
I dont ever want to use the PC that im going to install imon onto as a PC, ie, I want to turn on the PC and have it load the Imedian software as soon as XP loads. I also want it to output to my TV immediately. I dont want to muck about with running the app or configuring the TV-out each time - I just want to turn the PC on, and 15 seconds later, its displaying on my TV ready for my input.
essentially, does imon do this?
If it does, im going to want the best AV output to the TV that I can get. I understand that the quality of tv-out cards is pretty poor - certainly far lower than a dvd outputting over a scart cable. what would people recommend? Im not going to play games on this server, so in that respect the GPU doesnt need tobe fantastically ballsy - all I want to do is play DVD's and every other video type the pc can handle - divx, mwv, asf etc etc
Would a hardware mpeg decoder be better? - if so, how would I play divx through it? what does the transcoding etc?
clearly I know naff all, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Alastair
0
Comments
Any PC application can do this, basically the PC treats the TV out as a display like any other, it's controlled by windows rather than any specific application. So, as long as you have your display settings right (ie: you have your TV working with your PC) then it will come on at the same point as a monitor would during boot.
As far as imon specifically is concerned, if you're going to use it with the imon remote control / VFD package then it's a very good application. If not, then it's still good, but you should check out the interface first and see if you prefer that to Windows MCE since the interface is really the only significant difference between the two.
As far as I know, you can output from a DVI port on a PC straight into a HDMI(?) port on a HD ready TV. Failing that, the S-Video output on a PC video card is reasonable quality, I never notice a difference between it and my DVD player but then I've never specifically checked.
Not really sure about this one, I've never worried about hardware MPEG encoders since any reasonably modern PC is easily capable of encoding MPEG in realtime. Maybe someone else can help with this.
You can take a DVI<->HDMI cable and connect your PC to your digital TV provided your TV has HDMI. You won't need an adapter if your TV has DVI or analog HD15.
ATI builds an adapter that converts DVI to component video (YPrPb/YCrCb) provided you have DVI-I ports on your video card though nearly all cards have them these days. The outputs are RCA jacks though an SCART version might be available where you are. Component is better than S-Video but it's not RGB and thus might not be supported on normal European TVs.
nVidia claims that their cards are better for interfacing with TVs. Their drivers have some features like flicker reduction that make the output more tolerable. If you're shooting straight digital then it doesn't matter but if you're in analog I'd be shopping nVidia. Also, if you decide to use MythTV on Linux down the line you won't have to buy a new graphics card.
-drasnor
with regards the Nvidia / Ati question I've always found TV out to be much easier to set up with the Nvidia cards, my ATI cards can be a bit of a pain to get TV out working on.