shwango! blog

i’ve still been playing around with divx, but had got tired (or bored) with watching the movies on my computer monitor. (21″ ain’t bad, but my 36″ toshiba is much more enjoyable!) but the cash funds are at a minimum – so what to do?

well, snag a p3 500 with 256 megs and a nic from work, get a ati radeon 7500, and a philips sonic edge sound card. oh, and snag a friend’s old dvd drive.

i’ve found a p3 500 is sufficient to play most divx movies.

i couldn’t find any of the 7500s with s-video anymore. looks like the new model is composite only. the composite out is shared with the vga out, so whatever is on the vga display shows up on the composite out. i haven’t tested the dvi out yet, but will test soon on my sister and her husband’s new 50″ sony. (yes, i’m jealous!) the composite out has shown to be very usable – not to much less than s-video – for watching movies and basic navigation. (don’t get it if you want to surf on the tv, the resolution is not good enough, use dvi.) i’m not going to be doing much gaming on the system, so for $80 the 7500 seems a good choice so far. also, the new design – termed “low-profile” – doesn’t require a fan which is nice for trying to keep the machine noise down.

the sonic edge card is an amazing deal. for $40 you get a 5.1 surround card with s/pdif digital out – with dolby digital and dts pass through – i’ll post about connecting the cable soon since there’s not much documentation about it. only problem – no linux drivers yet.

to make things easy on me, i’m using windows xp pro as the os. i know a lot of people have complained about windows xp, but i haven’t had too many problems. {knock on wood} and there’s a lot of cool software for xp. bsplayer is a really great media player, especially for divx/xdiv. and xp has some cool networking features that used to only be on linux and bsd. i don’t have networking run upstairs yet and usually just use wireless on the laptop, so to network the new pc, i connected up the docking station to use the built-in ethernet adapter to connect the new pc to the laptop. then used the xp bridging stuff and internet connection sharing of xp to link the new pc to the lan via the laptop’s wireless connection. worked like a charm!

i’m still tweaking things, but pretty cool so far. i’m still have issues getting dolby digital to play properly – to speeds up and slows down…