My setup continued...
Moving into the adjacent room (living room/home theater) we get to my HTPC setup! Here is my Sanyo PLV-Z4 720P projector:
Notice the concealed wiring:
Below you can see the surround speakers (all speakers are Paradigm). I had to go 6.1 b/c using 7.1 would have been difficult due to the open area toward the kitchen. All the wiring is hidden in the walls. 10AWG w/ hand soldered gold connectors to a triple-gang faceplate behind the entertainment center.
Here is the front shot. Screen is 95" diagonal viewable custom-made 'Light-Fusion' which uses a Mississippi-mud painted acrylic mirror to ensure all available light is reflected back towards the viewer.
Close-up of entertainment center. I built this thing as a temporary fix when we moved in. My brother-in-law promised to build us a custom cherry entertainment center. I bought the raw wood, and he did get started...but then he got my sister pregnant. It's been 2 years now. We are currently looking for something that will fit...
You can see the triple-gang faceplate on the wall behind the equipment. Also pictured is the PVR for the satellite dish, the IR receiver for the HTPC, my modded Wii, DVD player, modded PS2, component A/V switch, and 7.1 receiver. I recently retired my VCR, and tape deck.
Here are the guts of the HTPC. Its an E5200 & a P5Q-EM OC'd to 3.6GHz (300x12). No optical drives..don't need them. DVDs can be played on my DVD player, but most movies will come from the server. I just used an old IDE 40GB HDD for the OS...again the main storage is in the server. I think I'm going to put my extra gfx card in here eventually so that some games can be played out here. I used to have my main rig pull double-duty as my main rig and a HTPC w/ some creative wiring, but w/ a dedicated PC for HT it is much easier to control and I can still game or OC while my wife/son watches a movie.
One remote to rule them all! Well I guess it's really 2...I also have a IR keyboard to go on the web and what not.
This is what pulls it all together. Before I had a remote for the projector, stereo, PVR, etc. I programmed the PVR remote to control most other things, but it could never control the projector, and a lot of the more advanced controls were impossible to program. The Logitech 880 is easy to program, and the macros are easy to setup. 1 button, and the system automatically turns on the right gear and turns off unneeded gear...even the HTPC!
When the HTPC is turned on (actually it just wakes up from sleep) it goes right into Vista64-MediaCenter. Here is a shot of the movie selection screen:
And here is the money shot!
Edit: just noticed I need to re-align the projector...