Re: Watching media PC to TV

In <863934a9-9411-4024-a70c-452ec4bd7a13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
ric <publicmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 28 Mar, 13:19, Tony Houghton <h...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You can't use any old 70mm fan (not that they're very common anyway)
unless you shave off one of the corners or something.

I'm sure you're probably right that you can't use all 70mm fans in
existence, but the first one I tried fitted very nicely with no
shaving off of corners (as is needed with 80mm ones). It just pushed
in and fixed with the rubber shock mounts it came with. TBH, the
standard one the xbox comes with isn't that loud anyway when throttled
down to 3-4% of normal speed. YMMV, I guess.

Maybe the fan is something else they changed in different editions. I
haven't got my XBox in bits at the moment, but I'm sure when I looked at
it I could see it wouldn't be easy to replace and then I read something
in one of the forums about how to modify a standard fan or where to buy
special fans that fit. And is the speed throttling only available with
special software like XBMC? I haven't modded mine, apart from bodging
in a PC DVD drive because the standard Thomson one wouldn't read any of
the (somewhat battered looking) discs that came with it, and the fan is
always at full speed.

I've a v1.1 with passive GPU cooling, quiet case fan and it's
about as quiet as my Sky+ box in operation with XBMC.  If you're
really sensitive to noise, you can ask the HDD to spin down
during playback, too.  If you're upgrading the HDD then it'd make
sense to get a quiet 5400rpm drive to put in there.

Strange you should compare it to a Sky+ box, because one of the
reasons I was going to bring up for an XBox not actually being any
good at all for a media box is that it can't receive TV. Maybe it
can stream it from a PC, but I want a one-box solution.

I used to think that the no-TV tuner thing was a deal breaker, but I
don't believe there is a one box solution that's any better.

A PC, optionally SFF. The only way I know of to get a decent SD TV
picture out of one is with a Matrox G450/G550, but they're easy enough
to come by on eBay, and with LCD TVs the situation is reversed because
they have VGA, DVI or HDMI.

In my
case, Sky+ is my main over the air source (no freeview signal, no
cable available) and so that mandates a sky box. I'm more of a watch-
content-at-my-own-pace rather than plain live TV sort of person,
anyway.

Later this year you should be able to get FreeSat, but whether you watch
TV as broadcast or record it you still need some way to receive it.
Currently I've got a Sky dish with no subscription and a PC with two
DVB-T cards hooked up to a CRT. I mainly use the Sky box for watching TV
(probably more efficient than the 1.2GHz Celeron) but the PC for
recording anything or watching non-FTA channels (Dave, E4 etc).
Eventually I'd like to have a HD satellite card in a PC hooked up to a
flat-screen TV. The advantage of this over Sky+ is that if there's
anything I want to keep I can record it to DVD without any loss of
quality. My nephew and niece love watching the same films over and over
again, and with DVDs they can watch them in their rooms and without
clogging up their family's Sky+ drive.

XBMC will play recorded content from your PC, from your NAS, as well
as play the new BBC iPlayer sources over the internet with the
appropriate scripts etc.

Or a PC could do all that without the XBox. I haven't tried iPlayer yet.
What's the quality like?

When Sky+ failed to record an episode of Mitchell and Webb last night
the iPlayer plugin got it for me over the net within 5 minutes when I
wanted to watch it this morning. Sure, you can't plug a TV tuner into
it, but dismissing XBMC as "not very good at all" is kind of contrary
to a very large number of people's opinions...

The other reason I wouldn't use it for a media centre except
perhaps in a bedroom with a rarely used 14" TV is the atrocious
picture quality.

Not sure what's wrong with yours but mine looks great, even over
composite. You're aware component cables are available, I take it?

My XBox is actually hooked up to a Dell 20" 16:10 monitor which happens
to have composite and S-Video inputs. It's great as a monitor, but I
suppose it's possible they fitted really lousy circuitry on the TV
inputs. The XBox came with what I presume is its standard composite
cable which shouldn't be causing such bad picture degradation. I bought
an S-Video cable from eBay which could be blamed, because it's got the
thinnest S-Video lead I've seen, but if it was just the lead making that
much difference I'd expect the original lead to be better despite being
composite.

The video playback's better than most DVD players for optical media
and downloaded AVIs look brilliant if the source is decent quality -
it also copes very nicely with playing NTSC content on PAL TVs without
going out of sync, which is more than can be said for a lot of other
players.

OTOH what TV can't show both PAL and NTSC these days?

--
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk

.

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