HTPC Home Theater PC setup & review with BenQ PB6200

There are plenty of detailed discussions about high definition and picture resolution on the internet, so I'm going to try and keep it simple for the purposes of this article. The highest official High Definition TV format in the USA is 1080i - interlaced 540 line fields with 1920 pixels per line. It is the 'Holy Grail' of picture quality (at the present time) that I want to display on my PB6200 projector. After that comes 720p, 720 progressively scanned lines making up the picture (1280 pixels per scan line). Plain old NTSC TV resolution is 480i, with an approximate maximum horizontal resolution, under ideal conditions, of 440 pixels per line (see the terminology table at the end of this article for the difference between 720i and 720p).

It's important to keep in mind that a regular DVD (at this time) is pressed at a resolution of 480p, so we are limited to using upscaling techniques to achieve 1080i or 720p until a new DVD recording format has been established. These upscaling techniques insert interpolated content that doesn't really exist to simulate the higher resolution. It certainly improves the picture quality, but it's not even close to real HD that we will get with the next generation of DVD disks.

There are a few movie and documentary DVD releases that feature the new WMV HD format from Microsoft that can be viewed on a PC DVD player using Windows Media Player 9 (or the new version 10), but you'll want at least a 3 GHz PC to watch the 1080 high resolution versions. I downloaded some WMVHD clips and found I could watch 720p (with the occasional dropped frame) with my new laptop (played from the hard drive), but 1080i was out of the question - it pinned my CPU to the max. Nevertheless, 720p was superb on my projector and I'll be really happy if I can get similar results from a regular DVD.

When playing video on your PC, you can monitor the performance of your computer by watching the performance graph in the Windows Task Manager (right click on the taskbar to bring it up). If you have a PC with Windows XP, you can download some real HDTV clips and try it for yourself (provided that the new Windows Media Player is installed).

Remember Bruce Brown's "Endless Summer" surfing documentary in the '60's? Well, his son Dana has created what could be called the sequel: "Step Into Liquid". There is some truly awesome footage in this film, and it comes in a 2 disk set - one pressed in the regular DVD 480p format, and the other pressed in the WMV HD 720p format. The HD version can be played on your PC DVD drive, or a DVD player that supports WMV HD playback (my Zenith does not), and the standard DVD can played back from any regular standalone DVD player (or HTPC). 

Aside from the sheer enjoyment of watching towed surfers released to go screaming down 70' waves 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, it is a good set to get because you can more directly compare true 720p (on the HTPC) vs upscaled 1080i (on the Zenith DVD player). While switching back and forth (an A-B switch would be nice), I thought the HD 720p was slightly clearer than the upscaled 1080i on the Zenith, but I could not get the Dolby 5.1 to work properly (the narration channel was severely attenuated), even on Windows Media Player 10, and it wasn't worth sacrificing the superb full Dolby experience that my Zenith 318 puts out (the sound is half the film, in my opinion).

To summarize, if you're watching DVD on a regular TV, the DVD player will be generating an interlaced output, sending 480i to your screen. If you have progressive scan output from your external DVD player, and a monitor or projector that will accept it, you'll be watching 480P. If you have a PC with a DVD player built in, you'll also be watching 480p, and bona fide 720p if you get one of the new WMV HD disks, such as Step Into Liquid (some of these new WMV HD disks are also pressed at 1080i). 

You can obtain a considerably better picture by upscaling regular 480p disks to 720p or 1080i, provided that you have a display like the PB6200 projector that can accept these higher scan rates via RGB, component, or digital inputs. The upscaling can be done in three different ways:

 -using an HTPC and appropriate upscaling software
 -using a dedicated DVD player with built in upscaling hardware (eg Zenith DVB318)
 -using an external 'black box' to upscale any video source prior to display

We'll be discussing the first two methods in this series, and I may try an external stand-alone scaler at a later time. This particular article deals with using an HTPC to process DVD video; a following article will discuss the alternative of using a dedicated DVD player (Zenith DVB 318), if you just want to watch DVD without messing around with computers at all (you'll live longer).

So I hooked up my PB 6200 projector to the external monitor connector, put a DVD (LOTR) into the DVD drive, and turned on the projector. The BenQ hunted briefly for an input, and promptly displayed my computer screen - nice! Whereas my Dell laptop can only display the screen content on either the LCD screen or external monitor, but not both at the same time, this new unit can display on both screens simultaneously, making it much easier to control. 

I launched Windows Media Player, started the DVD and immediately ran into the first "gotcha" ... the video portion of the screen was displayed on my laptop LCD, but the window was blank on my projector image. It turns out that the video can only run on one or the other, not both at the same time.

Fortunately, the ATI display driver has a lot of flexibility, as you can see in the driver control panel on the right, and I was able to reverse displays, making the projector the primary screen and the laptop LCD the 'external' monitor. At that point, I had the DVD output on my projector screen, running very smoothly. There is an alternative "video overlay" method of doing this with the ATI driver, but I found that reversing displays produced the best result. Later, I discovered that using only the projector connection (with the LCD laptop screen turned off) gave me an edge in processing power, which allowed 720p sources to play smoothly.

I played extensively with the resolution settings on both the laptop and the projector, but even though both are capable of 1280 x 1024, I found the best results were obtained with both units set at the native resolution of the projector @1024 x 768 (this is known as 1:1 pixel mapping).

After watching a few films, I decided I wanted more control over the picture display parameters than Windows Media Player offers, so I embarked on the long journey of finding the ultimate software player for my HTPC. I also hadn't really improved the picture quality from my Dell laptop - it was running at 1024 x 768 too. The video jerkiness problem had been solved by upgrading the Dell 333 MHz Celeron CPU to a P3 600 MHz, and both laptops were producing a similar level of quality.

I was anxious to start some upscaling experiments that I couldn't do on the Dell, and I was planning to try out Dscaler (a public domain upscaling software program), but it turned out it won't work with ATI video chipsets. So, on I went on a quest to find an alternative. There were a couple of brands of players thrown in with my laptop software bundle, but they crashed very shortly after being deployed, and they were very quickly deleted from my hard drive. I just don't have the time or patience to mess with things that don't work, and I sometimes wonder if manufacturers go to the trouble of actually having someone sit down and try out some of this stuff ...

I purchased two of the top rated DVD software players, WinDVD Platinum, then TheaterTek, and my experience with them will be the subject of the next article. In particular, I will be discussing the use of FFDshow (a third party public domain DirectX upscaling filter) with TheaterTek. The issue of getting full Dolby Digital audio out of the system also turned out to be not trivial at all, and it will also be the subject of a seperate future article. There is also another issue around PVR (Personal Video Recorders) that we will be exploring; see the Hauppauge tuner card above (it can also control your satellite or cable receiver to change channels when recording a program).

My Zenith DVB 318 1080i upscaling (Faroudja scaler chip) DVD player has arrived, and I'll be writing about that too, comparing it to the HTPC experience. It is fairly unique in that it provides the upscaled 1080i on the component output, for all of us that don't have a display that accepts DVI digital input. I am getting excellent, hassle free results with it on my PB 6200 component input.

I have heard some people say that the digital output of the Zenith at 1080i is not significantly different from the analog component output. If this is true, this may be because both outputs are a result of artificial upscaling from 480p. Keeping the signal within the digital realm may not be so important until the next (first) generation of HD DVD.

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