Posts Tagged ‘media centre’

Long time no see…

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Well things got a bit busy since we got back from Egypt. we got a new TV, then Xmas came and went and so much has been happening (although none of it interesting) there hasn’t been much time for anything.

However the other day I sat down and plugged a PC into the new TV. It is going to become a “Media Center” but I ran into a problem.

I was using the VGA connectors and I got a picture, but it wasn’t great, the TV would not support the resolutions that the Graphics card could supply and that Media centre wanted. I got very confused. Even the guys in the shop that sold us the TV was perplexed at my question on the best way of connecting a PC to the TV.

I like to think I am reasonably competent with computers, but getting the right resolution was proving a real pain, until I read an article that pointed out DVI connections use exactly the same protocols as HDMI, I know that the TV supports a resolution that it was not letting me select, so I bought a DVI-HDMI cable, plugged it into the TV and hey presto! The TV was recognised correctly by the Video card, and the resolution was changed to reflect the best resolution the TV can handle.

So the TV only handles certain resolutions through the VGA connector and others through HDMI. The manual doesn’t really mention that.

Ok now I am annoyed…

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I have been building a Media Centre PC, as the XBOX360s media capabilities were great but lacked a few features I wanted (Mainly proper Divx playback)

I needed a multi-channel sound card, so I bought one from maplins, it is based on a C-Media chip (8738), and was advertised as 5.1 channel output and included SPDIF in and out (so I could use an optical connection to my Amplifier)

Trouble is, if you want to actually USE the SPDIF output, you dont get multi-channel sound from it, only 2 channel, how ridiculous is that? Just to run salt in the wound, you actually have to tick a box setting it to 2 channel output before you can enable the optical output, thats just taking the piss.

Now I have to find myself another soundcard, but that means spending money on something else, something I have been trying to avoid…