Practical experience of building a home theatre system
Monday, February 15th, 2010There 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 A lot of it is badly out of date.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 SR507 receiver
This was also fairly easy to set up.
The Onkyo is very simple to configure and works well with the Harmony Remote.
The main job when setting things up is simply mapping the various inputs to the appropriate outputs and choosing the optimum formats to make sure the quality is good.
There are a couple of things worth remembering:
- The 507 doesn’t do any Video processing – which means if you pass an input in (say Component) then you can only receive that at a component output. It won’t upscale to HDMI for example and you can’t pass component in and output it in composite etc.This confused me at first because I had a couple of SCART outputs (from the HUMAX and my old DVD player) which I wanted ideally to route through the Onkyo (because I wanted to use it to switch audio and video in one place) and I thought originally that I could switch them into the HDMI output to the TV. I figured out a better solution for this was to leave the video signals going via SCART and directly into the TV but passing digital audio (via Optical TOSLINK cables) via the Onkyo and then out to the surround sound system. By leaving the volume on the TV permanently down (since there was no option to switch audio off either on the TV or from the two outputs) this worked nicely – and the Harmony Remote made switching to each of the different input/output combinations easy.
- I couldn’t get the auto-configure surround sound setup to work – partly because my sub-woofer is a passive one and the Onkyo needs a powered one and partly cause my speaker setup is slightly non-standard. Anyway it didn’t matter – the default setup was pretty good and I might look at an alternative sub-woofer in the future.
- Finally I still have one problem – for some reason the Samsung Blu Ray HDMI output which plays perfectly when it’s put into the Samsung DVI input (via an adaptor) fails to display when it’s passed through the Onkyo… I’m led to believe this is some kind of HDMI handshake issue where either copy-protection mechanism or just the HDMI resolution gets screwed up by the pass through. Onkyo shirks responsibility for this but one of their local dealers was pretty helpful and suggested I try a “DVI Detective” which can be used to “con” a device like the Blu-Ray that some other device is on the other end. It’s £120 so I’m leaving this for a while – let’s see.
Setting up the Asus Aspire Revo and XBMC
This was definitely the toughest part. Linux (which I chose as the OS for the Revo for maximum flexibility and lowest cost and also to experiment with) is not terribly mature when it comes to HDMI, TV resolutions and/or sound.
I had to follow a bunch of guides online but this is the basic gist of what I did:
- Installed the latest Ubuntu install via a USB key (that bit was very easy)
-
XBMC installOnce you have that the OS up and running, you can follow any one of the great guides out there for installing XBMC install on Linux. Google is your friend. Check any one of them out. This part should be -relatively- easy.Then:Sort out the remote:Improving audio:Sort out the resolution with the TV:
- The remote was a bit of a challenge. I had bought a cheap CyberLink remote for the USB IR receiver and I wanted to use that to receive the Harmony One remote. I had to mess around getting LiRC to work to pass the right set of codes (google searching) for the remote, then map the codes I could then make work map to XBMC using the key mapping file lircmap.xml in .xbmc/userdata/lircmap.xml
- The next problem, in fact the biggest problem, was the resolution. The resolution the Revo used was fine but there was a lot of overscan on the TV (ie some of the picture was missing off the edges of the TV all the way round – enough to be very annoying). I tried a bunch of stuff – messing about with the EID values in the xdata.conf file etc but nothing worked. In the end, I upgraded the drivers and then used the “Overscan compensation” option which was then available. By default the Nvidia ION drivers with Ubuntu are the 185 version and the latest ones are at 195.
- Finally i had a problem with the sound on XBMC getting it to work it failed with some of the DVDs I tried to play – saying “incompatible”. More google searching got me out of that one.
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