Below Belief

There is tons of info out there on the web about home cinema/home theatre. A lot of it is badly out of date. And very little of it is organised into practical experience/recommendations. It’s a minefield. And that puts it beyond the interest of a lot of people because it takes a lot of digging to figure it all out. There are so many different options, combinations and configurations.

So, here’s my practical experience of starting from pretty much scratch and building a credible (but not overly expensive) home cinema system out of a mixture of parts I had already and some exciting new components. Be warned: this is not for the feint-hearted…

By the way, I’m not an audiophile. I won’t be entertaining any “gold-plated cables” (especially not the digital variety). I don’t believe that beyond a certain point purity of connections or the number of thousands of pounds you spend on electronic equipment makes enough of a difference to make it worth it. I am taking my system from being a relatively “ok” normal TV system to having some nice features – but I’m realistic about it. It’ll be “good enough”, cost an additional total of about £600 (for now). And a focus on simplicity (for the end product). Getting there might be complex.

First off, my requirements:

* Access to a variety of input sources via an HD-ready TV as simply as possible
* Surround sound capability for all input sources
* One remote to control everything – with simple activity-based commands so you don’t need a degree to figure out how it all works
* Access to the internet and to iPlayer etc for watching internet-available TV sources (less reliance on PVR, more on demand)
* PVR via an existing Humax box
* DVD/Blu Ray via existing players
* Access to photo, movie and music collections stored on my central server and played via the TV/Surround sound.

What I have already:

* Samsung 32″ HD-ready LCD TV
* Humax P9200T PVR
* Sony surround system (old)
* Samsung Blu Ray/DVD
* Pioneer DVD player (multi-region)
* Roku Soundbridge music client
* Central music server on a NAS (mt-daapd)

My plan: (after a lot of digging and choosing)

* Purchase an AV receiver which acts as the “hub” for both sound and video and switches sources for the TV
* Purchase a “HTPC” (Home Theatre PC). Actually a small, lightweight Linux box with a HDMI output which is used to connect to the Internet.
* Configure XBMC (Xbox Media Centre) software such that it can play iPlayer etc via the TV for TV on demand

After lots of research, I selected the Onkyo 507 AV receiver – it has enough HDMI inputs and less of the gimicky/high end features but is great value at about £200. I also selected the Asus Revo Aspire as my HTPC because it is small, quiet and has good reports of being good enough to handle HD quality video sources without jerkiness etc. It can also connect to a large local USB drive which may end up being my central backup and media server (in due course).

I also found the Harmony One Universal Remote – which has been a godsend and really works well to replace the (otherwise) eight remotes which make for a dizzying array of options when just trying to use everything.

I’ll be adding more to this most, as I go:

Setting up the Harmony One Universal Remote:

Actually this was the easiest bit. The Harmony is a great device – a little long winded to set up, but it does what it says it does. I’ve completely replaced the use of about 8 remote controls with a single one and life is much easier!

The best bit is it can automate the “startup” process which is otherwise an exercise in memory (which input source has to be on for this to work?) – and it actually means that the customisation features found on the “more expensive” AV receivers (which I didn’t get) are unnecessary. So, when I press “Watch TV” on the remote, it turns my TV on, moves it to the right input, turns the AV receiver on, puts it on the right input and bingo, the TV works. It takes a few moments to do this all, but it’s much easier than remembering.

Setting up the Onkyo AV receiver

Setting up the Asus Aspire Revo and XBMC

Texas view of the world?

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Here, “hacking” means finding a better (perhaps cooler, perhaps non-obvious) way to do something, and I’m a big fan.

(terminology of hacking explained here)

Sites like lifehacker.com are focussed mainly on the software side of “life hacking” but others, like ikeahacker.blogspot.com focus on the physical – in unusual uses of Ikea products.

My favourite ideas are based on “re-purposing” – the exploitation of loop holes in retailers’ or manufacturers’ products or marketing efforts to obtain working and useful products for a specific purpose at far less than the usual cost.

Usually the modification process is a fun project in it’s own right and often there are communities of willing volunteers on line helping out with ideas to make them work better or test different options.

The best example so far is my dell mini 9 – a 300 GBP fully functioning Apple Mac mini computer at a very low cost and very portable.

Other examples are a free sample pack of different filter papers, supplied by a company which caters to the film industry and supplies those filters in huge size. It just so happens that the free sample pack are cut to just the right size to fit over a regular sized flash-gun on an SLR camera and come in a handy booklet so you can select the best one for colouring your flash.

IkeaHacker shows innovative uses of Ikea projects to solve unintended problems or even do something crazy – for example this pimped chair with underseat heating…

Or try these fun photography hacks to take better pictures.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – Clay Shirky’s really intelligent thoughts about the future of newspapers, summed up by this one:

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

And similarly on changes in the book shop industry

Fascinating.