TV and Photos in Windows Vista - Media Center Annoyances
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If you have the Home Premium or Ultimate edition of Windows Vista, then you also have the Windows Media Center component, which allows you to use your PC and some sort of TV tuner card as a DVR (Digital Video Recorder). Commonly known as a TiVo™ (just as a novelty flying disc is commonly known as a Frisbee™), a DVR lets you pause, rewind, and record live television broadcasts.
Of course, you don’t have to stick with Media Center. If you don’t like the program, if it crashes too often, or if you have only the Home Basic, Business, or Enterprise edition of Vista, you can try any of several alternatives.
Free DVR software includes GB-PVR (http://www.gbpvr.com) and MediaPortal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net). Commercial products, while not necessarily better than their free counterparts, include Meedio (http://www.meedio.com), SnapStream BeyondTV (http://www.snapstream.com), and SageTV (http://www.sage.tv).
Each product has its advantages and disadvantages. When choosing a media center application, the most important consideration is an on-screen interface you like. Aside from that, it should support HD programming and DVD burning, work with a wide variety of remote controls, accept plug-ins or extensions that add functionality (such as news readers and weather forecasters), and not crash.
Watch TV on Your TV
Unless you like watching TV on a 16-inch screen while sitting at your desk, you probably want to hook up your Media Center PC to a real television set. Unfortunately, this is not always as easy as it sounds.
When you connect a TV to your computer (or is it the other way around?), you should see your entire desktop, Start menu, et al., on the big screen. If you see nothing at all, your video card’s TV port may be disabled. If you’re using a laptop, you may have to press a special keystroke combination to “activate” the TV-out and external VGA ports. On some Dell laptops, for instance, hold the Fn key while pressing F8 to switch between the internal display, the external display, and both; consult your computer’s documentation for details. Press these keys repeatedly until you see a picture.
If you see everything except the video rectangle on the big screen, then you have a video overlay problem. See “Fix Other Playback Problems,” earlier in this chapter, for details.
Next, make sure you’re using the right kind of cable, and with cabling, there’s certainly no shortage of possibilities.
The first rule of mating a PC to a TV is to keep it all digital, if you can. If your PC has a DVI port (standard on all new desktop PCs and upscale laptops) and you have a high-definition television set, you can do precisely that.
If your computer doesn’t have a DVI port, you’ll need to replace your video card with one that does. If you’re using a laptop, you’ll need a DVI-equipped video card for your ExpressCard slot (or PC Card, if it’s an older model), and these can be very spendy.
Now, any modern HD television set will either have a DVI or HDMI plug (tired of acronyms yet?). If it’s DVI, then it’s a simple matter of connecting your PC to your TV with an ordinary DVI monitor cable. HDMI, luckily, is basically the same thing as DVI, albeit with audio, and you can get HDMI-to-DVI adapters readily from small, mom-and-pop computer stores or on eBay.
As you’re setting up your nifty, all-digital home theater PC system, you may hit a roadblock in the form of HDCP (High-bandwith Digital Content Protection). HDCP is a nasty form of copy protection imposed upon high-definition content, such as that from an HD DVD or Blu-Ray drive, or HD cable signal. (For those interested, there’s a rant about this in the preface.) An in-depth discussion of HDCP is beyond the scope of this book, but suffice it to say, it may be the reason you’re getting a black screen instead of the movie you’re trying to play.
If your TV has no digital video inputs—or if they’re already being used—your next-best option is to use a DVI-to-composite adapter (also available on eBay). Although your TV’s composite inputs are analog (not digital), they do support 16:9 wide format and progressive-scan video, which will still look a lot better than S-Video or (gasp) RCA connectors.
Many HDTVs have only a single digital (HDMI or DVI) input, which may already be occupied (if you’re lucky) by a DVD player with a digital output. If you don’t want to settle for an analog connection between your PC and TV, you’ll need a HDMI or DVI switch, the best examples of which can be found in some high-end digital home theater receivers.
If your TV is not high-def, or if for whatever reason digital just isn’t going to work, then you’ve got to go analog.
If your PC has a TV-out port, it might accept a standard S-Video plug, or barring that, an ordinary RCA plug. (If it has a proprietary connector, you may need a special adapter from your PC manufacturer—at extra cost, of course.)
If your computer lacks a dedicated TV-out port, see whether your TV has a 15-pin analog VGA port, in which case you can simply use a VGA-to-VGA cable and connect your TV like a monitor. Otherwise, your PC may support TV-out directly through its VGA port (an admittedly uncommon feature), in which case you can get a VGA-to-RCA or VGA-to-S-Video adapter pretty cheaply on eBay.
So, to sum up, here are the connection methods you can try, in order from best to worst.
| Computer side | Television side | Signal | 16:9 supported? |
|---|
| DVI | DVI or HDMI | Digital | Yes |
| DVI | composite | Analog | Yes |
| VGA or DVI-to-VGA | VGA | Analog | Maybe |
| S-Video | S-Video | Analog | No |
| RCA | RCA | Analog | No |
Once you’ve got the cabling in order, the next step is to set the resolution on your PC to optimize the picture quality. Set it too low, and it’ll look pixelated; set it too high, and you might have overscanning problems (where the video runs off the screen). If in doubt, try a few standard resolutions until you have one that looks good; 1024 × 768 usually works pretty well. If you still have trouble, use PowerStrip (http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm) to find the optimal resolution and timing settings for your TV.
Next: Fix Broken TV Listings >>
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 This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks for the Cranky Consumer, written by David A. Karp (O'Reilly, 2008; ISBN: 0596527624). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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