At some level the concept of an entertainment center comes up for the home. In the past this might have consisted of a TV and stereo system, or even one or the other. Add a VCR, and now you can watch your favorite TV show even if you are going to be working late. Or well so long as you remember to set up the recording. And there was no power glitch that sets the clock to 12:00 blinking, and wipes out all the recording schedules.
A few years later people started getting a game station of some sort. Maybe a Genesis, or a NES. Since we considered that to be entertainment for the kids, that got relegated to the TV in the kids play room.
For Mom and Dad a few years later the DVD player came along, and you ran into your first major conundrum. The TV had one or possibly two speakers which worked well for watching the news, or sitcoms, but if you wanted to get a bit of that theater experience, you are going to need a bit more than the TV speakers. This is probably the first time people even considered using there stereo in conjunction with their TV. Up till then the Tuner on the stereo selected whether you were listening to the radio, a tape, or the record player. You may have had a CD player in th mix as well, but that was about it. Also most of our stereos were just that Stereo. If you wanted the Movie experience you had to add a few more speakers. First up are the ’surround’ back speakers. You do want to get that helicopter audio coming in from behind you right? The early surround sound systems actually fed the same signal to the left rear and right rear speakers.
For most people the next decision was a sub woofer. Get the really low sounds that were pretty non-directional. Sounds below something like 200 hz are so low that your ears are not far enough to provide the needed spatial information. Put that wherever is convenient. That takes the 2 channel stereo system up to 4.1. In many cases people would still run the speaker in their TV. It gave a great reference for voices and ‘center’ of attention activities. As a result many people who decided to migrate to a ‘large’ screen ran into a problem with the missing ‘center’ information. So add another channel for ‘center’ and we get the 5.1 that most people end up with. Today most ’stereo’ receivers support a 7.1 arrangement, and all 8 speakers are fed with different audio.
All that to support the ‘theater’ sound of movies. ‘Audiophiles’ all tend to go for the 2 chanel systems. What do you need more than that for to listen to the most important variety of entertainment around, music? I think in part that’s why dvd ’super’ audio has not taken off. Along with the fact that the media tends to be even more expensive.
In any case we’ve gotten to the point that along with the TV, VCR and DVD, we need an audio system in the mix. Where you go from here varies for different people. Some people went with the PVR. The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) takes the idea of a VCR, and gets rid of the tapes. When one of my uncle’s passed away we ended up having to figure out what to do with something like 500 VHS video tapes. Only a few of these were pre-recorded, most were recordings off the air, or from cable. That worked for him. By that time I had almost completely eliminated video tape from my own entertainment systems. I picked up my first Tivo as a DirecTivo.
Ah, I see I missed a device. The ‘Cable Box.’ Well to be honest, we had cable boxes because we were paying the cable companies to control what we watched on TV. And they didn’t trust that filtering the channels we had not agreed to watch would be sufficient, or they wanted control over who could watch the ‘pay’ channels. They still don’t, but if all you are looking for are the channels with commercials in them, then you could set up your TV with one of the new tuners to tune directly to cable channels. Ok, most people first did this with their VCR. After all, it made sense to be able to tape the game when you were on being dragged out to the mall for some shoping, but HBO would re-run the movies several times over several months, so we can probably find a time to watch that. So this box was ‘hit or miss’ for being in the entertainment center. Sort of like the game system.
On the other hand a couple of satelite services came up as alternatives to Cable TV. All of them required a receiver next to your TV. The one I had chosen was DirecTV. Since I already had this, it made sense to me to get the DirecTivo when I saw a really good price on it. This device allowed me to record a couple of TV shows while I was watching something that had already been recorded, or record one thing while watching another.
One of the advantages to the TiVo was that it was a ‘hackable’ device. Meaning that I could do a number of things with it that had very little to do with watching TV. Or that gave me advantages while watching TV. As an example, the TiVo would use a modem built into the system to call up the TiVo service and get schedule updates. However the phone line was not generally disconnected when that call was being made, and the modem in the box supported caller id. Through a software hack initially, you could add some software that would put the caller id information for an incomming call up on your TV. Mom’s calling on a Tuesday? Better take the call. About this time I had a network of computers at home, with a dedicated internet connection. One of the hacks that I installed was a network card. This allowed me to get rid of the phone line entirely after service had been established.
When it comes down to it, a TiVo really is nothing more than a computer that has a TV tuner card built in, and can present it’s output on a TV. Since the core of the system is a general purpose computer, you could set it up to show the pictures you had been taking, or getting scanned, as a slideshow, and eventually people were playing their music through this box as well. Why get up every hour to replace the CD, or after every couple of songs to select something else to play, when you could craft a custom play list ahead of time, and have it play background music for the party, or for that photo slide show you want to show your parents.
After a while though, TiVo, or more accurately DirecTV wanted more control over their version of the TiVo. And about the same time I moved to an apartment on the north side of a building with no balcony, or other means of seeing satelites which were all to my south. So I started looking at other solutions. Since I was already using Linux for most of my computing needs, I tried a couple of solutions that gave me functionality similar to TiVo, one of them being an application suite named FreeVo. I ran into a few problems there, but finally found MythTV, using Knoppix as an installer and base to run it under. For a few years that was all I used for watching TV.
I’m still using MythTV, but have changed to a different distribution, and currently am recording across two different computers.
About 3 years ago I picked up my first video projector. It was not a ‘great’ projector, it’s native resolution was 640×480, but would project a passable 800×600. Also the bulbs have an expected life time of 50 to 75 hours. Fortunately they are not particularily expensive, which is a bit unusual for projectors these days.
I’m actually on my 3rd projector now, as I needed a projector that supported some advanced HDMI support for my PS3. Also my PVR supports HDMI out, though not audio (yet.) For a ‘video switch’ I am using a Yamaha tuner. Since audio out through HDMI is not supporte yet on my PVR, I’ve been using a SB external interface with optical out into the tuner. This lets me do 7.1 input with only 1 lead for audio. Granted having it embedded within HDMI would be even better, but that will come in time.
As you might imagine, that amount of hardware takes a significant amount of space. Since I don’t have cable in my closets, or for that matter, much space there, I’m not keeping either of the computers I’m using to receive TV in there. If I were in a house I would have the cable and antenna feeds going to one room separate from the projector, and feed that essentially from a front end with no hard drive or if possible fans. I might even just run it all from the PS3, if I could figure out how to watch TV that way. (I can watch most of the rest of my content that way.) In any case I’ve had everything pretty much crammed together in too little space.
The base for everything was a coffee table that allowed me to put the tuner under, one computer on top, and the PS3. Along with the network firewalls, cable modem, switches, Access Point, Game controllers, antennas, CD player, Record player, and UPS to prevent power glitches from taking down the computers immediately, I had a narrow folding table above the coffee table, and the space involved a bit cramped. The big problem this causes is really heat. The one thing you don’t want to have to listen to when watching a movie, is the fan of the PS3 kicking in and wiping out the softer audio.
So when someone moved out, and tossed a wood shelf structure this last summer, I was able to pick up a bunch of 2′x4′ laminated pine boards, with the vision of making a better entertainment center for all the hardware. I just needed some way of supporting it. I picked up some 3/8″ aluminum rods, and some 3/4″ pvc pipe, and this weekend I finally took a day and put it all together. It’s not perfect, but for the moment everything is holding. I’m expecting it to hold till I can get a fix put in place.
The arrangement is that there are four boards acting as shelves. To either end there are 2 boards, with an overlap of about 3 feet in the middle The outside corners have a post running from top to bottom and 2 posts run through all 4 boards in the center, 2 and 1/2 feet from the ends. The aluminum rods provide ridgidity for the the posts, and the pvc pipe is cut in sections of 8 inches for the first shelf and center poles, and 16 5/8″ for the outside ends between the shelves. So that things can be moved about I put caps on the ends of the sections acting as feet.
One of the flaws is that when I assembled everything, I did so away from the wall. After putting everything back together, it turns out the aluminum rods are not sufficiently strong for moving the assembly back to the wall with all the weight on it. As a result the back center post has started to fold. I’ve provided a support that will hold for now. for the future I’m planning on a better base. First of all the ‘feet’ will have latteral support between them. I’m also hoping to get iron or steal rods, possibly threaded. If I get the threaded variety, I’ll add nuts and washers for better vertical support, and hopefully better structural integrity. (Less wobble.)
But for now, this will do.
