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We sell Plasma screens and projectors occasionally and of course TV tuner cards but the true HTPC stuff not yet.

To tell you the truth hadn't thought about it much. Must admit that you are the only one who has ever asked me about HTPC items.

I could probably get it, if you can tell me the manufacturer and model number of the item/s you are after

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pffftttt....leadtek....no thanks....I went top shelf and got a Hauppauge PVR-250....well almost top shelf, and a Sigma X-card

Does the job VERY nicely

The X-card outputs to the TV at near DVD quality, and I can do all my TV recording on HDD

..well its inevitable that a topic about "who is best out of betty and wilma" and cartoon characters is only going to go into bad territory.  

What sort of a/v tech stuff? private home theatre, industry stuff or ? my old man is a bit of an a/v tech himself in melb actually.

sound video and lighting installation and operation on a short term basis mostly....the occassional permanent install

fairly basic.....

pvr has a hardware mpeg2 encoder and analogue tuner

xcard has hardware mpeg2 decoder, therefore taking all the load off the CPU for both encoding and decoding

120Gb 8Mbcache HDD for recording and storage

733 celeron and 512Mb RAM, more than adequate considering above

pioneer dvd rw for playing and burning

the xcard also has DTS5.1(think thats it) sound out

control is via an application called "joveplayer" and the xcards remote

thats about it really

and a NIC to network to my leech box so I can play all the movies I download straight to the TV

works quite nicely, and the picture quality is better than I was getting with the tuner in my TV, and equal to the output from my stand-alone dvd player

yup, you and the rest of australia :) (and me). The saddest thing i ever saw was about 2 years ago at Telstra, one of their wanky display "this is what we do" places, had about 5 state of the art 108cm plasma screens sitting there just displaying bullshit like "telstra - the way of the future" and basically a powerpoint presentation, over and over, and probably still to this day. I had tears in my eyes.

I wonder wheter plasma ever hit mainstream before big screen LCD ?

the only issue i have with lcd is the brightness, even though the lumens count keeps getting higher as new models come out, in full daylight there is still a washout issue

gimme a plasma anyday, even though you don't get the same screen size as a projector, the novelty of a big screen wears off after a while.

I used to bring home projectors from work all the time, but after a while you kind of get over the big screen thing

I used to bring home projectors from work all the time, but after a while you kind of get over the big screen thing

You do? :D prob is the depreciation on home theatre is almost worse than a car or a PC. Advantage is the PC is generally under $1500, where as home theatre isn't :)

i know police can defect you for gauges being above or on the dash or something similar to that never heard for being defected with gauges though.

but with the boost controller its different i know cause most people put it where police cant see unless the really look for it.

How in depth have you gone with your home theatre Warrick?

//start waffle

Hmmm....probably didn't answer the question there....went off on a bit of a tangent:D, and also I tend to misunderstand questions and give the answer as I understood the question to mean (if that makes sense :S)....lol

Not too in-depth is the answer I guess.

No surround sound...it's never been something that I was interested in from a home point of view. I used to run a pair of Inkel power amps (300w RMS per side or 600w bridged), one driving a pair of Peavey 12" and horn PA speakers and the other driving a 10" sub, but sold the Peaveys as they were more a pure grunt speaker rather than a "high fidelity" speaker. Now I just have a pair of Tannoy bookshelf speaker and the sub, but I rarely use the system for the "audio visual" experience, more just for music.

And on the visual side just a 29' TV.

One day when we do some renovations and have a dedicated "theatre" room, where I can do a permanent installation, I guess I'll get more serious about it.

//end waffle

during the week (apart from thursdays :)) I really only drive to and from work, which is like a 2 km journey each way, so the car doesn't even get at chance to warm up....kinda defeats the purpose. I probably should buy a pushy or catch the train.......

Nahhh I only live like 6kms from my work so my line doesnt have too much time to warm up either, bought a pushy, and have only used it to get to work when the car was off the road, I just couldnt be bothered riding, not when the line beckons :D

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