How much?

A

AVMADMAN

Guest
I have tried to understand what you guy's talk about. but am suffering from information overload,

Just a few questions if you guy's wouldn't mind?

How much do HCPC's cost?
are they remote controlable?
and what's the best one to buy (subject to wife's approval)

Thanks in advance for any replies...
 
Originally posted by AVMADMAN
I have tried to understand what you guy's talk about. but am suffering from information overload,

Just a few questions if you guy's wouldn't mind?

How much do HCPC's cost?
are they remote controlable?
and what's the best one to buy (subject to wife's approval)

Thanks in advance for any replies...

Difficult to answer really:

How much? Low £00's to £1,500 if you include something like a H3D card

Remote controlable? Yes, for the tweaker there's an app called Girder that allows you to remotre control everything. If you have a H3D it comes with a remote and there are Pronto ccf's available so it's virtually a plug and play black box.

Best one to buy? There are a couple of companies who do pre-built, Jenz here on the forums does pre-builds also, most people build themselves, it's not as difficult as it sounds and there's loads of on-line info.

Steve
 
Agree with the above - if you can build a PC yourself (no great difficulties there), then it can ber very cheap. Getting it to be reasonably quiet can add a bit of cost, though.
If you just want it to feed a projector and an AV amp, then it will be reasonably simple to set up, too. An Infra red receiver such as the IRMan allows you to send remote signals to the PC - the aforementioned Girder then interprets these and sends them to the DVD player (i.e. WinDVD etc).
It is, however, a fair bit of fiddling, and I doubt I will ever get mine as "user friendly" as a stand alone DVD player. Even though I have a region free DVD Rom, and am using software (DVDRegionKiller) to get round the software region protection, some discs still require you to manually set the region.

I'm glad I've gone this way though - the picture I get from my AE100 is top notch, and I'm never short of something to tinker with :( :D

I found the best thing to do is lurk here for a month or so - you'll learn a lot. There have been some very helpful threads over the last 4 months or so, so it's worth going back and looking through.
 
It certainly sounds like it's easier than expected.....

I was thinking building a pc and using an LCD touchpanel as the monitor/remote.

Is there any software that would allow me to use a normal touchpanel to control all my av equipment such as:

amp, pj, tv, lighting, curtains, room controls?
 
Well, that sounds a bit of a tall order. You might do it if you used an IR tranceiver (i.e. transmitter AND receiver) such as the UIRT2 - you could trigger IR commands to go out to your other gear then. Sounds a major tinkering project! Girder might be a good piece of software to look at - it can do all sorts of stuff based on received commands. There are plug ins written for all sorts of devices - whether there is for any touchscreens I don't know. The touchscreen idea is interesting - I'd be interested if you find any cheapish suppliers. Coming to think of it, I have a contact who supplies them to retail as EPoS systems - might drop him an email....

R
 
Thanks for the reply RichardH

if like a monitor it is linked to the main unit wouldnt that make it easier..?

surely there is a big market for this kind of thing out there as crestron seems to want people to spend 6 grand on a remote when this should come out at least half the price and offer better service, a larger screen and the hcpc has the dvd player, scaler and all the other stuff which i am yet to understand!

MADMAN Enterprises! oh the possibilities!!!:D
 
On the side of the touchscreen you might check out the iPronto from Phillips. I have not spent a whole lot of time looking at it, but it seems to use the same software as the Pronto, but in a larger color touchscreen. Check it out here: http://www.pronto.phillips.com/index.cfm?id=496

Let me know what you think as I am looking into this one as well.
 

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