Making the HDTV Vision Quest?

DumbSwede asks: "I have embarked on a do-it-yourself HDTV project with a NEC 135LC quad-XGA projector purchased on eBay. But I have only found 2 HDTV tuner cards, AccessDTV and WinTV-HD, both far short of quad-XGA resolution (if I am reading the specs right, they max out at SXGA for VGA output). ATI claims to support all DTV resolutions and has quad-XGA resolution with its All-In-Wonder 9700, but has only a standard analog tuner built in. A search of ATI or NVIDA web-sites, give no recommendations on DTV turners to use in conjunction with their products (perhaps either accessdtv or wintv-hd will work). Any details and insights would be appreciated, as two or three days of web searching seems not to have provided me with total solution answers."

"Granted an 8' foot wide front projection system is probably over kill for my bedroom, but the heart wants what the heart wants. For now I have had to be content with XGA and SXGA DVD playback from my 300 Mhz Dell Laptop. So far, the results appear better, than the best HDTV setup I have seen playing progressive scan DVD, so I am anxious to get to the next level, now that HDTV is supposedly finally rolling out in my area.

As an aside, I have noticed that broadcasters are transmitting in a range of resolutions from 480p to 1080i, but all the HDTVs I have seen for sale are 720p or lower (although 720p on 720p looks pretty sweet).

NVIDA mentions the need for a digital TV tuner with compressed transport stream and software decoder. ATI I think needs MST (MPEG Stream Transport)

With the booming market in Graphics boards, one would think they'd be falling over themselves to provide HDTV solution information, but a site search of ATI, only gives HDTV details by way of a press release, and comes up short on how to best get the job done.

The plan is to buy a 2ghz+ system with DVD RW-/+ from Dell with Window XP (I have no desire to be a Linux pioneer on this project), and drop everything in and have it working within a few minutes. Easily converting my back video collection is a high priority with this project (though a AIW9700 would be overkill for this, and perhaps overkill for HDTV as well) and having a decent digital video recorder to time shift both HD and Analog TV shows. I would also like to have multiple monitor outputs so I can web-surf and watch HDTV on my big screen at full res at the same time (without annoying hiccups). I am not a really a gamer (anymore), so again, perhaps the AIW9700 is overkill (as well as being pricey), though it seems to have all the other essential features I crave (though earlier model AIWs should have them as well). With this kind of size and resolution, I may wish to get back into flight simulators again and getting back into gaming is not out of the question."

Comments

total solution answers...

[core plexus]

...will require a significant investment of time and energy. You already know this, after two or three days of searching. Might want to settle in for the long haul. Personally, I have yet to see anything on TV interesting enough to incite me to want to see it better. Some of those projectors are very nice, but you already know this, too.

How many mouse nuts does it take to make 12 pounds of mouse nuts?

Satellite

[T3kno]

Why dont you get a sat dish from DirecTV or DishNetwork (subscribe or pirate depending on budget and ethics) and use one of the HDTV receivers they have, I know DirecTV has a couple of HDTV receivers that support DVI/D-SUB out as well as the standard component and s-video. Just plug that directly into the projector, there are only a few channels that are broadcasting HDTV right now, but the difference is pretty noticeable, especially on a nice projector. My boss just got a 9 inch 3 chip DLP installed in his house (130" screen) and HDTV looks schweet on there. I prefer CRT's for the color though.

*GA

[captaineo]

Dontcha wish they'd stop using those stupid XGA/SXGA/QXGA/whatever acronyms and just tell you how many damn *pixels* the thing does horizontally and vertically...