Hi All,
I've been trawling these forums for a while and various threads have helped me along the way and I've now finally got my blue ray system up and running. I just have a couple of small queries that I could really do with some help on.
here's the story....
I've been building a MC system for my brother who has limited computing knowledge, so I've tried to make it as user friendly as poss. The system contains the mentioned ASUS motherboard with the Geforece 8200 chipset, amd phenom 9600 Quad Core processor, 4GB 1066 Ram, and an Antec Micro fusion case. I'm running Vista 64bit ( I didn't want to, but wanted to takle advantage of all the RAM) and using the onboard graphics. The case is small, (looks great btw) so getting a low profile HD graphics card might have been an issue, and maybe a bit bad in terms of heat production in the unit.
I got myself a copy of powerDVD 8 Ultra, but had a nightmare getting the thing working with my Sony Bravia 32" TV. I could get a blue ray Disc to work in 720p, but when i pushed up to 1080, it wouldn't have it.
Anyway, after much troubleshooting, driver installs, trying different codecs and programs (WinDVD, core AVC, anyDVD etc), i realised what the problem was. Turned out that my 1080 output meant the desktop was overscanned. I had been resizing it to fit the screen, and upon doing this, the DVD's just wouldn't work.
I finally realised what I'd been doing, set the res to 1080, and it worked beautifully. Crisp, clear and a fantastic picture! What a complete plum!
But...
As mentioned, I'm building this for my brother so it needs to be 'out of the box'. At the moment, without compensating for overscanning, i'm obviously missing the edges of the desktop. So my question is this, how can I fool power dvd into thinking the res is actually set at 1080, rather than the clipped 1066 or whatever it is? Added to this, if i run the res in 720p, would the blue ray videos automatically run in 1080p anyway? If this is the case, i'll leave his desktop at 720p instead. I don't think this is the case, and could be sounding increadibly stupid here... ;-)
But also, his TV is different so does the amount of overscanning of the picture depend on the TV in use?
My second question is linked to this. I'd really like him to be able to launch from inside Media Center and i found these instructions which should work, unforunately they don't.
Xbox 360 HD DVD Addon -- Works on an HTPC!? - AVS Forum
I'm wondering it it's cause i'm on Vista, I don't get the automatic popup upon inserting a disk, and don't get the 'other program' selection inside MC. Anyone have any experience with this, my knowledge of how MC works is limited....
3rd question: Completely unrelated to this, has anyone any reccomendations on some low profile heatsinks (i've literally got 7cm to play with) for my CPU. Either this or move to water cooling... Anyone any thoughts on this. This is unchartered territory for me. In the past all systems I've built havn't been as hardcore, so I've been able to get a pretty standard heatsink to do the job.
Sorry for the essay guys, but hopefully with a detailed description, it might help make things easier for you to help!!
If you want links to the components of the PC, let me know and i'll post them
Any help, thoughts would be most appreciated
Rob
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