Vista MCE on a CRT

[DionM]

I have a Vista MCE and Samsung 32" LCD combo running in the bedroom at present, and very happy with it.

My wife loves the media centre experience and I have ripped my sons kids DVDs to the HDD (saves him scratching them trying to load them himself) but we'd like to take the experience out to the lounge room as well ...

However out in my lounge I only have a 76cm WS CRT (Philips HD model, with S-Video/component/composite/D-Sub inputs). I have in the past tried to get it to display a Windows desktop with various video cards but never had much luck - problems with overscan etc.

If I only use it for the MCE frontend, should I have more luck? I would be using an old PC I have - Opterton dual core machine with a 6600GT video card (basically my old desktop PC - I now have a laptop). It has Component output available.

Will the UI be usable and easy to navigate? I really don't have a need to replace the TV just yet (I'd rather wait until it blows up or Full HD screens get cheaper).

[Tak]

Hi Dion,

I used to run a CRT (replaced when it blew up )on a 6600GT for a while and was more than happy with the results provided a never had to use the Windows desktop which was impossible to read and suffered from overscan. I never really noticed any overscan in the Media Centre and seem to remember using the zoom settings to make things right but the advantages of having a media centre in the lounge far outweighed any sort of issues.

Can you not just give it a go while the family's out - if they come back and it's all running then you're a legend. If it doesn't work then noone need know

Cheers,

Tak

[Swallowtail]

It works fine on a CRT - from my hazy memory (I had it component into a Grundig 81cm widescreen CRT TV) the only way you can get Media Center to accept that the CRT is widescreen is by component connection - svideo and composite it will only do 4:3. I never tried d-sub VGA though, that should also give you widescreen options.

Over component you'll need to set Media Center to run at 576i or 576p if your screen can do it (my Grundig would only do i), and it should work fine. Media Center is designed to work with overscanning devices, so the controls are all fine. I had some colour blowout issues (very harsh saturated colours, impossible to correct with adjustments either on the PC or on the TV) with component connections from an nvidia card into the CRT, so it will be interesting to see how you go with yours.

I just set up my PC to autologon and autorun MC, so you never really have to worry about the desktop. If you have to go to the desktop, little things like making your taskbar taller can help in the event of serious overscan. You also soon get to know all the keyboard shortcuts for resizing windows!!

[WozfromOz]

I'm running a Sony CRT at the moment.... damn thing won't die....

I have no problems running it via a component output on the pc and in my case the dvd input on the TV.

The only thing I find is it wants to run with wide screen for the most part which gives you the black line top and bottom for TV transmitted like that.... then you need to use the zoom function for images transmitted in the 4:3 format otherwise you have a small image in the centre of screen.

I also have to run low resolution as swallowtail mentioned but it seems to self detect that.

The other thing I find painful about any of it is that you really need a monitor available if you are doing changes or updates etc because some of the windows don't display properly

But for media centre alone it works perfectly.

Woz

[DionM]

Thanks guys.

My TV does a vareity of resolutions (including 1080i @ 60Hz, IIRC).

I don't have a Vista licence for it so I haven't tried it yet, so part of my question was also to whether I should buy Vista (currently XP Pro).

I'd probably log into it remotely to do fixes/changes.

[WozfromOz]

I started with vista 64bit and had dramas that were probably more hardware related than anything else, but when I swapped out the hardware I also went to 32bit vista and it's worked well for me.

Only issue's I've had have been from me tinkering.

Woz