Anyone in the market should be aware that just getting HDMI is not enough. According to this article at cnet not all HDMI devices are compatible – nice. It was interesting to read Dvorak’s rant about HDCP in last month’s PC Magazine about what will happen when someone who bought a Sony TV two years ago, plugs in a new Sony blue-ray player only to find the player refuses to send HD content to the non-HDCP capable TV. Already I can picture non-technical yuppies flipping out at innocent Best Buy clerks – ‘listen sonny boy, I spent half your yearly salary on that [bleep]ing TV so you’d better make it work or..’.

Wikipedia details differences between versions of HDMI, which are principally higher bandwidth on video + new audio codec support (lossless TrueHD and DTS-HD). The question is would play a lossless codec straight to a TV’s built in speakers?

What is next? Probably a black market for boxes that accept any version of hdmi input, handshake with hdcp and output to DRM free DVI/ hdmi/ component video.

Video Cables:
DVI/ HDMI are the best – these carry purely digital signals. HDMI is an upgrade on DVI, you can buy converters between them both, but DVI cannot carry audio signals or handle HDCP.
Component video is the second best choice. It is (generally) analog and can carry any resolution up to 1080p; I have no experience, but would worry about picture quality at 1080 with a long cheap cable.
S-Video, composite. Look at a calendar, it is 2007 in a few days time!!!
VGA – not a bad choice if you must, but it is the equivalent of coding in Pascal because that’s the only compiler you have handy.

Monster HDMI/ DVI cables:
No, no, no! You just do not need high-end cables for digital signals traveling short distances. In the analogue days we were always struggling for ‘the clearest sound or color’ – with digital if the signal is not working you know immediately. Have you ever heard of $100 premium monster IDE cables for a hard disk? Did not think so, but I could start a new business PremiumCablesForSuckers.com I happily ran a 480p Plasma on a fifteen foot DVI cable from froogle that cost under twenty bucks. Mileage may vary with the higher frequency of 1080p, but I’d try the cheap cable before splashing the cash on a premium brand.

Sound Cables:
Yes monster cables ‘may’ help when joining an amp to speakers, but 99% of the audio quality is a function of the wire’s gauge. 12 gauge mains cable from the Home Depot will kick the pants off 16 gauge Monster cable – trying to route 12 gauge solid core through your walls is not that easy though, ask me how I know I settled for an off brand 14 gauge multi-core for surround speakers and short runs of expensive cable for only the front speakers.
Of course all your digital cables should be optical. These no longer need to be special ordered from NASA, and can be found on Froogle for under a dollar if you look hard enough. I have a box full of different lengths + optical splitters/joiners – they cost peanuts and work fine. Coax digital cables also work fine, but would you rather be Buck Rodgers or MacGyver? Buy the optical

Resolution:
HDCP is beginning to matter. People with real lives (mortgages, kids and everything!) are starting to buy 1080p projectors/ LCDs…. before you do make sure you read up on HDCP (High Definition Content Protection). All new HD players will have HDCP, and consequently to play content at 1080p, your HD Monitor must also support HDCP. If your monitor does not support HDCP then the player will revert to a lower resolution Note: Wikipedia says HDCP will work over DVI, but I would play it safe and use a HDMI cable.
In all likelihood HD DVD movies CSS-equivalent will soon be cracked [are you there DVDJon?]. Many people in the know will play 1080p content by means other than HDCP enabled boxes, a hacked xbox 360 or PS3 perhaps? HDCP like DRM will only harm the masses who are not even aware of the acronyms. Pirates and the tech-savvy will simply steer around them.

Screen Type:
Linux or Windows, Optimus Prime or Magneto? Yes this is religious territory, but here goes:
Plasma: Now start at $700 for 42″, great picture in brightly lit rooms, some screen fade/burn over time, bad dark levels, will soon be pushed aside by LCD + eventually SED
Projectors: Really big screens for not much money. Front or rear projection. Your own screen and projector in a basement is the ultimate in Home Theater but it had better be pretty dark in the room. Probably not suitable for a main TV, though many people choose the rear project units and seem to love them
LCD: 40″ 1080p is currently $1500. Prices continually falling – in raw materials terms these must be cheap to produce and will surely cost next to nothing soon. Their refresh rates and viewing angles have massively improved recently
SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) looks promising but don’t expect to be affordable until 2008 at the earliest
CRT: Forget it, large flat screens are now so cheap it is not worth considering a CRT, although CRT has the best picture quality of any technology. They simply become to large and heavy to make a screen to rival the benchmark 42″ Plasma.

Sound:
The AV community seems to be agreeing that 5.1 sound is perfect for home theater system. 6.1 and 7.1 (SDDS?) have not made much impact. Make sure your receiver/ amplifier can handle DTS. DTS is ‘premium’ 5.1 sound and I believe is compressed less than most 5.1 sounds tracks. I like to think it sounds better, but my ears have witness too many loud clubs and rock concerts for me to be sure. If you live in a detached house and like action movies then buy a big sub – you’ll thank me later.

1080i, NTSC, PAL:
People almost never get this without 20+ minutes of explanation. Summary: all modern display technologies are progressive. If a LCD or Plasma says it is 1080i then it means that it will scale a 1080i image to its native resolution. Check the native resolution when buying a screen, telling a home theater buff that you just bought a 1080i LCD screen is like telling a web developer that Java coding will be easy because you did some JavaScript on your myspace page. He’ll probably pat you on the head before returning to his online dispute on whether Gredo or Han Solo fired first.
PAL, NTSC, SECAM etc also confuse most people. These days the conversion is done very well for you so don’t worry about this too much.

Resolution
Everyone understands the basics, if you want to recap then I suggest starting with the illustration at the bottom of this Wikipedia page on 1080p.
To summarise resolution: I have a 480p plasma which looks great playing DVDs compared to an old plain-Jane CRT 32″ TV. Most people consider 720p to be the start of real High Definition. Personally I bought the cheaper 480p as a stop gap to buying an 50″ 1080p screen when they become affordable. At this moment in time a 1080p screen with HDCP and at least two HDMI inputs looks pretty future proof – if you plan on keeping a screen for the next ten+ years, seriously think about spending the extra cash or waiting for prices to drop a little more.

As stated earlier I do not consider myself an expert in this area, but through Podcast Osmosis seem to have picked up some basics. Wikipedia had great coverage on HDTV acronyms, expect to lose a few evenings of your life there before buying that new HDTV. Buyers regret will happen anyway, whatever you buy will appear overpriced outdated junk by the time January 2009 rolls around.

42″ ED Plasma $799
50″ 720p Plasma $1499
43″ 1080p LCD ~$1500

Everyone who has been waiting maybe now is the time to pull the trigger? A year ago I blogged that Plasmas would never drop below $800 due to manufacturing cost being
probably similar to CRTs – it looks like I may soon be proved wrong! Personally I am waiting for a 50″ 1080p LCD to drop below $1000 before retiring the 480p ED Maxent Plasma which still looks great.

This is an external USB drive with an RJ-45 ethernet
port. My devices both have 320GB hard discs and allowed me to dismantle a dedicate
file server PC Now we only have one desktop PC
in the house!!, which is a far-cry from the five PC two years ago!! Simplicity
means more time for other hobbies, and this device has a very simple to use web interface.

So what are the pros and cons of the CN-550 which right now is the pick of the affordable
NAS:

Good:

Works seamlessly with final build of XMBC v1.0
Works seamlessly with Windows 2000, XP, and Vista
Can access files via a windows ‘machine name’, e.g. \\MP3s\Radiohead\
Maintainable via a simple web interface
Simple to user Folder security (SMB username/ paswords)
Can easily become an FTP server
Stackable

Mild Annoyances:

XMBC 2.0 does not recognize these devices (yet)
Only uses IDE drives, not SATA
Discs must be formatted FAT32
Very slow for large data transfers over RJ45 (use USB 2.0 instead)
One of my 320GB Hard Discs does not work with power saving – I simply turned off sleep
for that NAS device

Bad:

Reported not to work with some very large hard discs (750GB)

This is no big deal for me it was caught in time and I set the xbmc screensaver
to stars with a one minute delay. The default is dim (to 20%) after
three minutes which obviously was not doing the trick.

At a street price of $160->$200 this is by no means a cheap remote. Still, for $160 + two hours of my time (including teaching the remote xbox IR commands), we now have a state of the art media system that is simple to use. The only
glitches with the remote so far are that it rattles (weirdly almost every house guest to has the same urge to drop it on my hardwood floor!), it also can become a little confused when playing audio from the xbox, but programming a custom
key to resolved that.  It appears the only upgrade to the 880 is the 890 which also handles RF. The home theater buffs I asked I asked are unsure if this is just RF to a remote IR transmitter, or RF to device like an xbox wireless remote so I just bought the 880 + an xbox IR receiver.

As Scott said this thing is butter, and seeing that 480p Plasma’s are in Best Buy for ~$1000 I think everyone I know will soon be in need of a remote like this: 

Regarding the Plasma purchase; my 2 cents is just buy a 480p off-brand $1000 model today. $2500 for a semi HDTV plasma is waste IMO as they are not 1080p and little HD material is available anyway; in about two years buy a real 1080p Plasma for $1500 and give the 480p to your kids who will then love you for ever. Regualar DVDs look fantastic on my Maxent Plasma; black levels are a little annoying at times, but well worth the $1000+ saving.

What I knew people were missing is that most modern video cards allow you to set a custom resolution which matches exactly that of your Plasma TV. I took several screen shots when using my year old GForce 4000MX
with the latest NVIDIA common driver, but don’t have time to make a decent post and decided to just blog the basics:

If you have a regular ED Plasma set the resolution to 852×480 (16:9 480p) and preferably connect via DVI/hdmi which is 100% digital from your video card to the TV so there is no need to buy those expensive ‘monster’ cables unless the distance is more than a few meters. Note that HDMI is backwards compatible with DVI and adapters are cheap. If you get it connected and the picture is not perfect try 854×480 or lookup the exact resolution of your TV; when you hit the right numbers you will know as the result will pixel perfect.

My Plasma has 2 component, 2 s-video, one DVI and one RGB input that I could use with the PC. DVI is perfect. RGB is very good, but not all pixels are crisp, s-video was not so good and I don’t have an adapter to try the component. Just use DVI/ HDMI and demote the PVR to component video as TV. Hopefully it won’t be too long before TVs have at least three hdmi inputs.

Other randon Geek AV Tips:

Running out of digital amplifier inputs like I was? New amps are expensive so just use TosLink splitters/ combiners which are cheap. I ordered a whole bunch of 3′ and 6′ toslinks cables for next to nothing at the same time. Obviously only  one device can be on at once or the optical signals collide. Oh yeah many people don’t realize that their laptop probably outputs a digital signal too; if bought the standard Phillips $16 toslink cable then you already have a 3.5mm toslink adapter. Look for a red light in your laptops 3.5mm outputs – that’ll be the digital signal.

Are you now planning to run DVI cables through your walls to the media-server closet? Use hdmi and adapters instead because the connectors are much smaller and you’ll get a much neater looking faceplate + be more future-proof; I am doing this soon and will have two video cards in the same media PC to drive a TV in the family room
and one in the media room. I use Powermids to control the PC via infra-red keyboards and it works great. Powermids will also be used when I finally get a decent entertainment center to hide the front speakers + ugly PVR, amp, xbox etc (look for optional mesh door fronts to hide speakers behind if you are in the market; Haverty’s are good value). When the xbox-360 is hackable each room will get a 360 and the PC will become a real server; until then it is needed to view content like h.264 as the old xbox with xbmc does not have the horsepower to play higher bitrates.

NVidia is the card I recommend mainly because some buddies from my first Masters degree are kicking ass for them right now. Other cards should let you set a custom resolution, but I am no expert in video cards. Unless you play PC games I recommend just buying the cheapest Nvidia based card that supports DVI out and I’ll bet it will support custom resolution.

Finally, why did I buy a cheap Maxent? Well it was $500 cheaper than the Panasonic ED I really wanted + it whatever I buy today will be replaced when 1080p 50″ Plasma’s are affordable, which I estimate will be a reality in about two years. For fellow cheapskates the Maxent is a very good TV; not quite as crisp as the Panasonic ED, but when viewing from 13  feet away you will barely notice the difference. The Maxent has removable speakers too which was must-have along with the stack of video inputs. Real geeks buy LCDs for the true 1080p, but unless you play games from a few away you are better off looking at 42″ Plasma for TV viewing today (Jan 2006). LCD prices are dropping very quickly so you can maybe bur the true 1080p 42″ screen later in the year for under $1000?

Microsoft is finally catching up and providing movie trailers, though strangely not
using h.264
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/content_provider/film/ContentShowcase.aspx

Arriving back from Austria I can use my own hardware in the Atlanta office and am
hence happy as Larry (apart from the workload). When time allows I’ll post more
about the setup in a post on workstation ergonomics, or more poignantly why I have
not had a stiff neck or bad back since 2001 despite having done little but write code
for the last 23 years.