Simon’s Blog

I spent some of last weekend visiting friends who are having a pretty sophisticated multi-room home media installation. You know the kind of thing: cinema room with projector and screen; screens in bedrooms and receptions rooms; music almost everywhere; IP-based programmable lighting system for different “mood” zones. In the “network cabinet” there’s a bank of digital satellite boxes, digital terrestrial boxes, DVD players, lighting system, multi-room AV amps, reference AV amp. Oh yes, and a media server built on Windows Media Center.

The Media Center OS itself is great. The way you set up of the video picture is by far the best way I’ve ever seen of setting up a screen/projector. There are little clips of high-def video that play, that let you adjust brightness and contrast to get the best picture. However, the graphics card manufacturers and HDTV manufacturers have a long way to go. Connecting PCs to high-definition displays is way too complicated and flaky - especially in a multi-room environment. In fact, in the end, after much discussion and experimentation, the decision was taken in my friends’ installation to abandon digital connecitons, and go for connection of the Media Center PC to the HDTVs around the house via VGA.

I have no doubt that this is the right decision for today’s technology. But this needs to be sorted out. Using VGA is retrograde, when HDMI works so fantastically well with other audio/video sources. There is a big potential market out there for PC graphics cards with multiple HDMI outputs.