Playing Creations from a PC with a Home Theater and HDTV

[George Tyndall]

My guess is that many if not most members already know about this, but for those of you who, like me, are still learning, I would like to share the method that I’ve just discovered for playing the Creations that are located on my PC’s external HDDs utilizing my wife’s home theater and HDTV. All the Creations were produced with PRE/PSE7 using the equipment described in my signature, but for playback I am using an HP PC whose OS is Win7, including Win7’s fabulous Media Center software. The GPU on this PC has only DVI out, no HDMI.

Additional equipment includes a DVI to HDMI adapter and a Y adapter from Radio Shack that plugs into the PC’s green speaker port -- the one that outputs audio for two stereo speakers or headphonse. The Y adapter has two female RCA sockets, one labeled R and one labeled L. The home theater is an Onkyo with a 7.1 speaker system.

Here is the procedure:
--Connect the HDMI Out on the PC to the one of the HDMI In ports on your home theater
--With a pair of RCA cables that are male on both ends, connect the L and R cables of the Y adapter to the L and R Audio In ports on the home theater that correspond with the particular HDMI In port that you have selected on your home theater’s system.

For example, my Onkyo has two HDMI In ports, one for the Cable TV and one for a DVD player (plus an HDMI Out port that goes to the HDTV). Because I will only rarely use my Blu-Ray DVD player now that I have discovered this method of playing directly from the PC’s HDDs, I’ve used the Onkyo’s HDMI In port that is supposed to be for the DVD player, plus the L and R Audio In ports that are also supposed to be connected to the DVD player. When I turn on the Onkyo, I select DVD as my source and, oh my, the home theater somehow converts two channels into 8 the same way it does when playing a Blu-ray (or SD) DVD by connecting only the L and R channels.

Here’s the fun part: Taking care to adjust the volume on the home theater to a level that will not cause my neighbors to call the security guard, one can sit back with Media Center’s remote control in hand and browse to all the locations on one’s HDDs that contain media that one would like the Media Center to keep track of, including MUsic, VIdeos and PIXtures.

When viewing, for example, one’s Music files, Win7 Media Center lays out the album covers for the files on the screen. While controlling the audio volume with the Media Center remote control, one also has the ability to bring up the “Visualizer” and the program proceeds to put on a fabulous light show to the beat of the music. Alternatively, one may select Pictures and, while the audio continues to play, the program will put on a slide show of all the images that one has previously asked Media Center to track.

[tiny]

Nice setup!

Just to add to this, if someone wants a slightly cheaper alternative, they can pickup an Xbox360 for under $200, even less if one shops around or buys used, and that has the WMC software on it. It also, as of last week, added support for external hard drives, so you can store all files locally if you wanted to, especially if your network isn't able to smoothly handle the streaming of files.

Another alternative is a PS3, which has a Blu-Ray player. However you pay a pretty premium extra for that support and you lose the nice WMC interface, but still are able to browse files stored on any computer on the network and stream them.

Lastly, I am not up to date on this tech, but I know they have those little boxes that have HDMI out and have hookups for hard drives, along with great codec support. While the cheapest ones don't support streaming or network connectivity, I believe the newer ones do have that option for a little more. Again, you lose the nice WMC interface, but the advantage here is crazy good codec support.