Cinematic

And so it begins... after testing out the concept for a couple of weeks last year, I've started the official conversion of the garage room into a "proper" home cinema.

The room was initially a garage, and the the previous owners converted it into an office, complete with desktops, masses of power sockets, nasty fluorescent lighting, carpet tiles glued to the concrete floor and a weedy electric heater. It wasn't a very "cosy" room to say the least.

The plan was/is as follows: New insulated floor, raised up off the concrete underneath; installation of a decent radiator, fed off the existing pipework in the adjacent utility room; strip lights removed and replaced with adjustable downlighters; speaker cables chased into the walls terminated at a binding plate; relocation of power sockets; laminate floor, painting, new skirting and architrave.

So here's a few photos.

Firstly, the subfloor, complete with nice warm Xtratherm insulation:

And the boarding over the top of it:

And the ceiling spotlights...

Speaker cables fed through wall cavity down to below skirting level:

And the binding plate on the main wall:

And finally the radiator!

At the moment, I'm enduring the tedium of painting everything, and then I'll be wallpapering the main end wall which will be behind the TV and AV equipment. Then it'll be on to laying the flooring before tidying it all up with skirting and architrave. Once all that's done I can reward myself with a brand new 40-inch TV! I'll post again when I'm a bit nearer to completion.

New Apple TV - installation and setup

As you're probably aware from my terribly geeky unboxing video, I've got my hands on one of the new 2nd-generation Apple TVs this week. I thought I'd go through what I've learnt from setting it up and using it, in case this can be of benefit to anyone else.

Firstly, hooking up the cables is incredibly easy: 1 power cable, 1 HDMI, 1 ethernet. You don't even have to use ethernet because the Apple TV has built-in wifi, but seeing as my router is six inches from the Apple TV and the wifi at LowFidelity Towers is a bit flaky (blame the Victorian architecture) I thought I'd settle for trusty CAT-5.

Once I'd plugged everything in, I immediately got a picture on my telly from the Apple TV, so no problems there. However, I couldn't find my iTunes library under the "Computers" menu. When I went to it, the Apple TV told me I'd need to enter my Apple ID username and password so that it could use the Home Sharing feature of iTunes. I dutifully entered those details, and... nothing. It told me that I'd need to activate Home Sharing on my Mac too. I was fairly certain it already was on, so I went and checked. Sure enough, yes, it was already enabled. So what gives?

I decided that the age-old IT remedy of "turn it off and on again" might help, so I went to iTunes "Advanced" menu and turned off Home Sharing. Then I reactivated it, re-entering my password. Hey presto, there's my iTunes library showing up on the Apple TV now. Don't know why this step was necessary, but it worked.

Next thing was to play back some media. I'm routing the HDMI through my Sony STR-DA2400ES home cinema receiver, so the theory went that this should carry both video and 5.1 audio signals. Music worked just fine and dandy, the sound coming through in stereo just as I'd expected. I then played one of my Handbraked m4v files. Picture was lovely, and the sound was coming through - but only in Pro-Logic, not Dolby Digital 5.1.

I went into the Apple TV's "Settings" menu, then into "Audio & Video" and found the option for "Dolby Digital Out". There are three settings: Off, On and Auto. I opted for "On" and tried the movie again, and this time got beautiful 5.1 straight away.

Next step was to get the Apple Remote app working on my iPod Touch. The app was already installed, so I then went into the "Settings" menu again, then "General", "Remotes" and finally to "Remote App" where it tells you to turn on Home Sharing in the app itself. Sure enough, on the Touch it was now asking for my Home Sharing username and password again. I typed them in, and immediately I had access to an "Apple TV" library from the main screen.

Finally, I wanted to set up my Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote to work with the Apple TV, rather than use the bundled Apple remote from the box. I went into the Logitech software on my Mac, and added a new device. I opted for "Media PC", then "Apple" as the manufacturer and typed the name in as (rather obviously) "Apple TV". I didn't get a lot of feedback as to whether this was correct or not from the software itself so I had no clue if it would work, or if the device even existed in Logitech's archives. I decided to take a chance that it was okay, and set up a new activity as "Watch Apple TV", which turned the TV on, the AV receiver on and set it to the correct input and then turned the Apple TV on. I updated the remote (still no clue whether this was right or not at this point) and once it had done its thing, I pointed it at the system and hit the button. Sure enough, everything worked seamlessly. Everything on, on the right inputs and all the buttons on the Harmony working correctly. Not only that, but because the Harmony has buttons for previous and next chapter as well as fast-forward and rewind, I could also skip chapters in my movie files - something that I couldn't work out how to do with the Apple Remote.

All in all, absolutely superb so far. I'm very impressed!

New Apple TV unboxing

Well, it has arrived - and I thought I'd have a go at doing a brief unboxing video for you. So here it is in all its glory...



I'll post a proper update once the AppleTV is actually up and running, but for now that's your lot!

2010 - The year we make contact?!

So it's customary around this juncture to say things like "Happy new year", so erm... HAPPY NEW YEAR!

In the past, I've liked to tell the world my new year's resolutions on this blog (here, here and here), but to be honest I don't really have many this time around. Nothing important or interesting enough to share with you all anyway.

I have decided to do a bit more of this blogging malarkey though - apologies for being a bit lacklustre recently.

Things are largely the same here, with the addition of some new gadgets courtesy of Santa: A very nice pair of Grado SR80i headphones, and a 22" Samsung LCD television for the bedroom.

My purchasing plans for the coming twelve months are modest (not as much spare cash floating around when you've got children) but I do have my eye on an Apple Magic Mouse, and if the predictions about the Apple tablet computer come to fruition I may have to do some serious saving to get my hands on one.

But for now, that's about it from me. We'll talk again soon, yes?

Controversial?

After getting my new HDTV just after Christmas, I decided that the DVD playback from my Sony DVD/HDD recorder (which I've had for five years, so it's practically prehistoric) wasn't really up to much on the new screen. The player had no option for any kind of upscaling and was plugged in via SCART so the picture really wasn't looking very clever.

I decided that an upgrade in the DVD department was in order and it came down to two choices. First - the expensive option - was to go down the Blu-Ray route. A decent "entry level" player currently stands at about the £175 mark. The DVD playback is supposed to be good as it handles SD upscaling pretty well, and then you have the brave new world of HD blu-ray movies to get into. However, BD discs are pretty expensive at the moment - in the region of £15-20 each so things would get pricey fairly quickly, even if I only got 2 or 3 discs to start with.

The thing that I had to consider was not only the cost. The TV I bought was not a particularly expensive one - in fact, really quite a bargain choice. It's not 1080p, and only 32" and I sit about 3.5 metres away from it. With that screen size at that distance on a 720p set I wasn't entirely convinced blu-ray was the way to go.

Option two therefore, was to go for the budget option - a DVD player with HDMI and upscaling. You can get these for anything between £50 and £100 and the results are supposed to be pretty good. I had heard good things about Toshiba's latest foray into DVD upscaling, called XDE, but their first XDE player - the XD-E500 - was supposed to be £120 so I discounted that as too expensive (almost into blu-ray terroitory really).

However, I'm a regular visitor over at AVForums.com and I spotted a post about the XDE player that said Comet were selling it in the January sales at half price. That's more like it, I thought, and promptly headed out to get one.

I have t0 say I'm extremely impressed. The picture quality, upscaled to 1080i via HDMI with the XDE trickery switched on, is fantastic - really crisp and sharp. Much, much better than what I had been getting on a five-year old player via SCART that's for certain!

My DVD collection is fairly sizeable (250 discs) and I'm pleased I can wring out some more enjoyment from it. I'm going back through favourite movies just to watch them in new and improved XDE-Vision! Another bonus is that the player came with a free 12 month subscription to LoveFilm so that's about £60 worth of rentals too.

The real icing on the cake though is the price of DVDs at the moment. I picked up a 2-disc special edition DVD of Mission Impossible at Sainsburys the other morning for £3. The equivalent blu-ray is £20. Case closed.