I’ve had a dream. It’s not as cool as racial equality for all…more of a selfish dream.

My dream, as Joey from “Friends” put it so nicely, was to have “a television that comes as if from nowhere!”

Well, my friends, the dream is alive.

That’s right, my home theater system has completed its stage 2 upgrade. Out with the noisy hot plasma screen, and in with the digital projector system!

I began the journey last March when I decided to free myself from the bounds of traditional satellite television (I had already given up on cable TV back in the early part of the century). I called up DISH Network and told them I wanted no more part of their funny business. “How will you get your news? How will you find out the weather?” the woman on the phone asked. To her credit, she did seem genuinely concerned with my television welfare.

“I guess I’m gonna have to wing it”, I answered.

Armed only with the Internet, I was suddenly free of the bounds of traditional television viewing. When you’re stuck in the TV world, you think differently. They use terms like HDTV. Best Buy is a place where you pick out the centerpiece of your living room. No longer for me.

I was going digital projector all over their asses.

I didn’t really have a specific design in mind, but I knew what the basic components were going to be:

1. A Digital Projector
2. Some sort of Source Media Box wired to the Internet
3. Surround Sound Audio

I had previously invested and pre-wired my house for 5.1 Audio.  Despite the fact they have 7.1 now, I really think we’re getting to the point of diminishing returns on additional channels of audio.  Can you brain really detect sound coming from 7 different sources better than 5?   It seemed like an expensive upgrade so I kept my existing Sony STR DE-885 receiver.

That’s actually where I started:  the audio.  The DE-885 receiver has S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format) inputs, so I wanted my media box to have audio OUT that supported this digital format.

Diggz HTPC Project - Screen Up

Next, I looked at digital projectors.   The key here, I discovered, is NOT to look at any projector that is marketed as a “Home Theater” projector.  That seems to add about $1000 to the price of the projector.  Do yourself a favor and skip that section at Best Buy and head over to the “Business” projectors.

These are typically a little smaller, and certainly cheaper than their home theater brothers, and they usually have the same technology inside.  This is an area where you can save some money if you look hard enough and really make some tough decisions about your viewing needs.

Here’s the thing about High-Definition:  there are many, many factors that contribute to the end result of the image that you end up seeing on a screen…any screen.  It depends on:

• What format the original footage was shot on?
• What compression was used to output the master?
• What compression was used to output the signal?
• What resolution formats your media box supports?
• What resolution formats your television/monitor/projector supports
• How you have things configured

I GUARANTEE you that MOST people who have HD Televisions, MOST OF THE TIME, are NOT watching true HD-Format content.

I went with a lower-end projector, in my case I got a really good deal on an open-box item at Circuit City, the  Optoma EP721 Projector.

I liked it because it has DVI input, a small footprint, and it was on sale.  At 2200 Lumens it’s not the brightest projector in the world, but it’s not bad. It’s a little noisy, but it’s hanging far enough overhead that I don’t notice it. It supports HD formats, but not the HIGHEST formats. Basically it does the trick for me, and I got a $600 projector for about $400.

Diggz HTPC Project - Screen DOWN

Two of the more important factors that I think many people discount when looking at projector specifications are what you’re projecting ON, and what your source is.

Which brings me to the source media box.

On a whim (actually the whim part was that I bought it at Best Buy because they had them in stock, when in reality I had already been looking at them online), I bought a Dell Studio Hybrid PC.

Basically this is a Notebook without the notebook case or keyboard.  Like a notebook, it has an external power supply, internal WIFI (supports up to N).  For audio it supports S/PDIF out and has BOTH HDMI and DVI Video out.    Plus it looks pretty cool, and it’s SUPER QUIET.

The Dell Hybrid is not without it’s flaws, and I may make another post just about it, but two of the biggest flaws were that its built-in DVD decoder is broken (but there’s a workaround) and you can’t use both the HDMI and DVI outputs at the same time.

This second flaw was a major setback because part of my dream was to have a second screen that I could use when I didn’t necessarily want to use the projector.  This saves bulb life and makes it so you can surf the internet while watching a movie (I love looking up trivia on IMDB).  When I had the projector plugged into the HDMI port via an HDMI-to-DVI cable, it worked fine.  But then I tried plugging in a second monitor into the DVI port, the HDMI port was disabled.  ARGH!

Reverse View: Projector and 2nd Monitor

The workaround for that was to get an external USB HDMI Video card.   I bought this one from Cool Drives.  It works fairly well.

Once I had my two monitors (well, 1 monitor, and 1 projector) working,  I needed a screen.   My walls are textured, and oatmeal colored, and my dream was to have a television that comes as if from nowhere, afterall.

I picked a FocuPix screen. I sort of lucked out in this area because it was on sale and the dimensions were almost perfect for the image size my projector was throwing.

I think it’s really important that I configured and mounted the projector FIRST, and then picked out a screen. This allowed me to get a screen that fit the image I had.

I hung the screen on the wall (with a little help from Handyman Ed), and bought some curtains from Target to create a valence that hides the unit from view. When the screen is rolled up, you can’t see it’s there.

My next step is improving the control system. The Dell Hybrid came with a wireless keyboard and mouse that work fairly well. But there’s a remote for the screen, and the projector…plus the lights need dimming. I’m looking at X-10 solutions for controlling the lights.

The real dream is to press one button and have the lights dim, the screen drop, the projector come on and my Hulu.com queue loaded up.

Almost there

Well, I can’t, but these guys can. This is some really cool, really scary Philip K. Dick stuff. And it’s not on some secret alt-news conspiracy theory site…it’s 60 Minutes…

Watch CBS Videos Online

Edwin Hubble or Emperor Palpatine?

Actually it went more like, “That’s no nebula…that’s a GALAXY!”. And it was said by Hubble…not the aging orbiting telescope, but Edwin Hubble, the astronomer for who (whom?) the now-famous optical space telescope was named.

Prior to December 30, 1924, astronomers had thought that everything in the Universe existed inside our galaxy. Of course this had been a big improvement from the previous bunch that had thought that the Universe revolved around the Earth. But while all these Galileo guys were patting each other on the back and exchanging secret Copernicus high-fives, Hubble was pointing his nifty new 100-inch ground-based telescope at spiral nebulae, specifically the one called the “Great Andromeda Nebula“.

Hubble probably wondered if the Andromeda Nebula would be a good place to hide when your warp drive is down, after all, it worked for Kirk in Star Trek II*. He used some plain old mathematics to calculate the distance between stars in Andromeda and the big one that gives us freckles, and concluded something that shouldn’t be possible: it was EIGHT TIMES further away than ANYTHING in our Galaxy. Which meant it had to be OUTSIDE our Galaxy. In fact, Hubble was looking at a completely different Galaxy.

I think I just heard Keanu say, “whoah!”

Suddenly the Universe got a whole lot bigger. And Hubble won a whopping $1000 prize! Mrs. Hubble got a new pair of shoes out of the deal. And Hubble got a space telescope named after him.

* YES, I am aware it’s not the Andromeda Nebula but the MUTARA Nebula that Kirk uses to hide from Kahn. “Sauce for the goose.”   It’s also where Kahn subsequently detonates the Genesis Device, where Spock is reborn, Kirk destroys the Enterprise and Kirk’s son is killed. So yes, Mr. Smarty Pants, I know it well.

Father Christmas may not be real, but Father Time is very real.  And he’s tinkering with your clocks!

The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon’s master clock, said it will add an extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world’s atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (for those of us on the East Coast), when an extra second will tick by — the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.   So they’ve added almost half a minute of time since this crazy practice has started!    1.21 Gigawatts?!?!???  GREAT SCOTT!!!!!

Read more about it here.

Looks like the new Wolverine trailer will be giving the Trekkies time to pause from their Kirk-worship to drool at some Marvel Comic in-depth character analysis. Check out the trailer here:

You’ve really got to admire Hugh Jackman, though. He’s a fantastic actor, and quite a song and dance man as well…

So I haven’t written yet about the “in production” new Star Trek film, directed by “Lost” creator (also “MI: III” and “Alias”, J.J. Abrams.

Penned by blockbuster writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, (“Transformers”, “MI:III”), it is being touted as a “re-envisioning” of the Star Trek universe. Rumor is that it chronicles the early days of Kirk and Spock and perhaps the maiden voyage of the Enterprise-1701 (not, mind you, the Enterprise NX-01 which appeared in the television series, “Star Trek: Enterprise”, with the guy from Quantum Leap).

Today, a new “teaser trailer” appeared the ‘net:

Got my attention.