Basement Home Theater

Equipment

• Panasonic AE7000U projector
• 92 inch widescreen Elite Screen (retractable with remote)
• Pioneer VSX815 Dolby digital/DTS receiver
• Definitive 5.1 speakers with powered sub-woofer
• Dish 811 HD receiver (bought on ebay and just used as a HD unscrambling box for OTA channels) – connected through component to projector (40ft)
• Microsoft MCE remote. I have the Harmony also programmed to be used in the basement

HTPC Specs

• Silver Stone LC10B case
• AMD 64 X2 4000 2.1ghz processor on ASUS board with 2GB RAM
• Windows XP & Mediaportal
• EVGA 8600GT DDR3 512mb graphics card – DVI to HDMI to my Panny (40ft cable)
• HP IR receiver
• Lite-on DVD burner
• SPDIF audio out to my receiver
• Two IDE drives with all my personal data
• 1 Samsung spin point 1TB drive that has a backup from my WD 1 TB in the main PC
• I also have a WD 160Gb external drive that backs up my personal data

Software

I use Mediaportal primarily in my basement. All the movies that I have in my family room HTPC are mapped through network folders in mediaportal and I get the same interface in both places. I also have a copy of PowerDVD running on this machine to watch Bluray movies. I am a big NFL fan and watch all the games in my basement on the big screen. I use the Dish HD box primarily during the NFL season to unscramble the OTA signals. I bought this box in ebay for around 100$ in 2005 and preferred that rather than getting it from dish and giving a 2 year commitment.

If there is a need to watch any of the Recorded TV from Vista Mce, I just use windows media player because of all the dvr-ms issues.

Codecs

CCCP Codec pack with FFD Show and Haali Splitter and AC3 Filter