Media Room walkthrough - Part 6

Step 6 - Enjoy


The room is set up, the projector is mounted, the furniture is arranged. We're finally at the end, right?

Not exactly.

Before I regale you with what still needs to be done, let me show you what I have and how it all looks.

The pics below show the media room in action, first with Halo 3, and then Rock Band. The pic below is the Halo 3 match loading screen, in 108" of glory. To get a good perspective for how big this image is, look at the bottom left and see if you can make out the silhouette of the front speaker. That speaker is about 6" tall, approximately.





Here's a shot of the screen from the foyer. The two openings you can see here, the mini-arch in the middle and the opening on the left, will end up being covered by a curtain to block out additional light and distractions. But more on that later.

And again from inside.

The projector in action. It has two lamp settings, low and standard, and the light intensity between the two is really not very noticeable. Plus, the projector makes almost NO noise when on the low setting, the lamp life is doubled, and there's hardly any loss of light. So I keep mine on low almost all the time.
Another shot from the side.

Here's my daughter and my nephew playing Rock Band.

Another pic. And no, my nephew isn't posing for the camera... that's really how he plays Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

A shot from behind, to get a feel for the scale. They're sitting about ten feet away from the screen.

And here they are standing next to it.
It also gets used for things besides XBox games. I've watched quite a few movies already, and the atmosphere when watching a movie at night with the lights out is just amazing. I'm totally hooked. So far, I've watched Casino Royale, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters 1 and 2 (yeah, #2 sucks, but hey, it's the Ghostbusters), one of my daughter's Bratz movies, Superbad, Willow, Black Hawk Down, and a few others I can't remember at the moment.

So all in all, I'd say the media room experiment has been a rousing success. However, I still need to do quite a few things to finish it off, and I'm also looking toward some potential future upgrades.

The to-do list for the current media room includes the following:


1. I need to get curtains up on the two openings from the foyer that I mentioned above.


2. I need to get curtains and black out cloth on the window to the right. I bought some of the material already, and have it tacked up there for now, but I need to get that finished. The light coming in from that side window during the day, even with the blinds closed, was enough to almost completely wash out the right side of the screen, making it nearly impossible to see anything there.


3. I need more BOC and curtains for the four back windows, to help seal out of the light.


4. I need a solution for getting the wires and cords out of the way.


5. I need to figure out the furniture layout. Currently, I have 2 chairs, the papasan, some bean bags, a stool, and a little rotating/reclining gamer chair. If needed, the media room could probably seat 4 people comfortably. I'd like to get that up to 5, 6, or even 7, but unfortunately some of the furniture in there is too big, and the room itself is pretty narrow, making it hard to squeeze too much in there. I can make rows of seating, but that's also a problem, since I don't want any seating too close to the screen, and I can't go too far back since that's where the foosball table is.





A quick side note: another project I'm working on, is building a device that will raise or lower the curtains I put on the side wall remotely. I bought a cheap remote control car and took it apart, intending to get at the motor. I want to wrap the curtain around a metal rod, hang it at the top of the mini arch, and use the motor to raise/lower the curtain using the car's remote control. If I can get that working, then next I may try and make a curtain for screen itself, so I can remotely raise the screen curtain and make it feel even more like a movie theater.



Here's a pic of the car. You can see the motor at the front of the car, near the solo front left tire.

And yes, there are probably existing products I can buy to do this, but doing it myself is waaaay more fun. Plus I get to take things apart and see how they work.

Next are the upgrades that I want to start looking at:

1. A 1080p Projector. It's first on my list, but in reality I probably won't get it for some time. Good 1080p projectors are expensive - I think the low end ones are around $2200 - so I'll have to put this purchase off for about a year I think. Once the prices come down, I'll start looking into it. And the 720p one I have is good enough to hold me off for a while.

2. A Playstation 3. I want to get one of these because of the built-in Blu-Ray drives, so I can start collecting BR movies. A blu-ray movie on a 1080p screen will be pretty incredible looking. I'm thinking I'll get one later this year.

3. A new receiver. I'll eventually want to get a higher-end receiver that can do some upconverting, among other things. Expect this to cost anywhere from $750 to $1000.

4. New speakers. Not too worried about these, but I'll have to do it eventually. Estimating around $300-$500.

5. Furniture. Mentioned this already, but if I start having more people over, I'll need to get something that they can ALL be comfortable in for long periods of time. You can't watch a 2hour movie lying on bean bags on a hardwood floor. You just can't.

So that's about it. The media room has been a blast so far, and my original concern that I might not get a whole lot of use out of it has been completely blown away. I'm still working on it, and I'll post the additional changes I make if people really want to see them, but it's already at the point where I can watch movies or play games every night and still be amazed by the effect. In fact, my eyes were hurting for the first week because they had to dart all over the place just to see everything on the screen.

Hopefully, if anyone else wants to try to put together a modest media room, they can get some use out of these blogs. I know I didn't have totally accurate accounting on all of this, but I hit all of the main pieces, and anyone trying to do the same thing shouldn't get surprised.

That's all for now. I'll let you know how the RC curtain project goes next. Apparently I need to learn a lot about gear-to-weight ratios. :)

Media Room walkthrough - Part 5

Step 6 - The Projector

So now that the rest of the room is pretty much done, there's only one thing left to do... mount the projector.

Now, this is probably going to end up being the most expensive part of the entire process, because good projectors run anywhere from $500 to $5000, depending on what exactly you want. As usual, I was lucky, since I could rely on my friend Jared and his expertise in the subject. In fact, he had just recently gotten a new projector for Christmas, a Mitsubishi HC 1500, that was pretty highly rated and well thought of. He got his from Best Buy for somewhere in the $1200-$1300 range, which includes the protection plan they're always trying to sell you. When I started projector shopping, it was still around $1000 in price at Best Buy.

I checked around and looked at a few other models, but in the end I went with the solid bet and decided on the HC 1500. I checked on Amazon.com and lo and behold, it was selling for around $775! So I ordered it, along with a 25ft HDMI cable (around $30), and a ceiling mount for the projector (around $60). So with tax, I think the whole order cost me in the neighborhood of $950. And on top of that, I would get it in only 3-4 days.

The first two pics are of all the boxes and other stuff strewn about the floor when I got my delivery. And yes, it looks - and feels - like Christmas morning.

Here's a pic of the mount. This will let me hang the projector from the ceiling. Getting this thing mounted was a Herculean effort, and a story which I'll probably save for another post.

The box for the mount. I know... it's tough to contain your excitement.

The HC1500 is a 720p projector, with about 1600 lumens, which makes it plenty capable of handling my meager video requirements. I think ultimately, I'd like to get a 1080p projector, but the decent ones at this time are still around $2000 I think, so that will be a purchase that will have to wait just a little while longer. This is a budget media room, remember?

Here's a shot of the projector itself. It's very compact, not too heavy, and pretty easy to use. You'll see in this pic that it's actually sitting on the box, which is turned on it's side, and set up on top of my foosball table. Not the most ideal setting, but I really wanted to try it out. :)

The back of the projector. The power cord on the left, and the HDMI cord right next to it. Also has an S-Video port and a VGA port (and cable) so I can plug my laptop in if I want to.

Now, I didn't actually get this mounted until a few days after I got everything, and that's partly because it wasn't easy. I mentioned above that it was quite the task, and I'll save you the details, but it mostly had to do with not having all the right tools to get this done.

As you'll see in this pic, I attached the projector mount to a piece of white-painted wood, purchased at Home Depot (I think it was only like $6), and then attached the wood to the ceiling. The reason is because it's tough to be able to perfectly hit the cross beams in the ceiling just right with such a small mount. So the piece of wood lets me securely mount it to two cross beams, instead of just one, and thus feel a lot safer about hanging an $800 piece of equipment from my ceiling.

Here's a better view of the work. You can see that the wood is nailed to the ceiling and the mount is bolted to the wood. I put the nails in a different angles, to help hold in the wood, but i think ideally what I'll need to do is go back and screw it in. And I bolted the mount towards the back end of the wood, which allowed me to set the zoom on the projector about halfway and have it still fit comfortable on the screen.

In the above pic, you can also see two silver bolts in the bottom of the mount, nearest the projector. The mount comes with an Allen wrench that lets you loosen or tighten those bolts, and adjust the orientation of the projector. This way you can get the picture aligned just right, then tighten everything up to hold it steady.

In this pic, you can see that the power cable and HDMI cable are actually running from the projector, across the ceiling, to hanging hooks that I put in by the rear right speaker.

Here's a close up of the hooks. They're just the standard hooks that you screw into the ceiling to hang things. In this case, I'm using them to keep the cords out of the way.

Now the wire/cord situation is still less than ideal, but I haven't yet come up with a solution. Ideally, I'd have some of that plastic stuff that you can attach to the ceiling/wall and run the wires or cords through there. And that may be what I end up doing. But for now, none of it is in the way, and it's all behind the viewers anyway, so no one has really even noticed or said anything about any of it.

I'd also need to get a new HDMI cable before I can do anything to cover it up. The 25ft cable works, but it's really the barest minimum in length that I need to connect the projector to the receiver and not have it pulled tight anywhere. What I really need is a 30ft cable, so I'd have the extra slack to have it run along the corners and not pull on either the projector or the receiver.

Also, I need to mention an additional purchase. The power cable for the projector isn't long enough to reach the outlet when mounted on the ceiling. But it is a standard PC-type power cord. So I just went to Fry's and bought a cord extender, which is basically a 1ft long power cord that connects two other cords. Using that, I attached a second cord that I already had, and more than doubled the length of the power cord, allowing me to run it across the ceiling and hang down to the outlet as you saw above. The extender was only a couple dollars too, maybe $3 if I remember right.

So there we go. I got the Projector, got it mounted, and got it connected, and all for around $950. That brings the running tally to around $1550 just to get to the point where we can use the media room, and if I remember correctly, the original budget was $1500. So I barely stepped over budget, but that's ok. It was worth it.

So now that we have everything set up, come back for Part 6 and see how it looks!
http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/media-room-walkthrough-part-6.html

Media Room walkthrough - Part 4

Step 5 - Speakers/Receiver

The lights are hung, the paint is dry, and the screen is mounted. Time for a break, right?

Wrong! We're just getting started.

Up next for our intrepid media room team (i.e., me, with the occasional assist from my parents) is setting up the speakers and the receiver. Now, here's where the cost calculations get tricky. I already had a 5.1 surround sound system that was several years old, but it still worked fine, and would have worked great for this setup. That means technically it didn't need to count against my budget.

However, not everyone has a 5.1 surround sound system, and to be honest, I ended up buying a new receiver anyway, so I'm going to add the cost of the system to our tally simply because it's an expected cost for something like this.

Now I got lucky, I bought the base model Onkyo receiver at Fry's for around $220. It supports 7.1 surround sound, and has HDMI pass through, which means you can plug in two HDMI cables from input sources, i.e. my XBox, and potentially a PS3 for the Blu-Ray drive, and output it from one port to the display, in this case a projector. So it's basically an HDMI switch.

I also already had the speakers, so my only expense was $220. In reality, a bare bones surround sound system would start at around $300, and the top of the line systems easily go over $1000. So for me, this added $220. For someone with no speakers or surround sound system, I'd budget at least $400 for a worthwhile system.

So let's get to this. In the pic below is a TV stand I bought at Target for $40. It's simple, effective, and black, so it doesn't stand out much in a dark room. Well, except for the shiny metal poles, obviously... oh well. Like I said, it was $40.


Here's a pic of the XBox from above. I ended up buying the wireless router since I didn't want to run a 50ft long ethernet cable from my router upstairs to the XBox downstairs. That cost me another $100, but that's not necessarily a cost for most people.

Here's the XBox from the front.

Here's the 'new' receiver, with 7.1 surround and HDMI pass through. It's an Onkyo TX-SR575, but I think that model is now being phased out for a newer one that's about $100 more. The one you see here was actually the display model.


Here's the old receiver. Still works fine, just needs speakers.


Ok, now let's talk about the speakers. In the pic below is the center speaker, mounted (well, in this case just sitting) on the top of the TV stand.

Here's one of the rear speakers, the rear right to be specific. It's mounted to the ceiling, and yeah the speaker wire is just hanging down for now. Eventually I'll need to figure out a solution for the wires, but that's for another day and another post.


Here's the front right speaker, in a lopsided pic. You can also see the subwoofer there on the floor.

The front left speaker.

Here's the back of the front left speaker. Now I ended up buying the speaker stands, including the mounts for the back speakers, for about $30 at Circuit City. They had one box left on clearance and I grabbed it. Go me!

You can see in the pic that it just screws directly into the back of the speaker, and the wire actually runs into a hole at the top of the mount, down through the metal rod, and comes out below, under the actual stand.

Here's another pic of the rear left speaker. It's hanging a little lower than it needs to, but I adjusted it later.

And the rear left speaker from the front. I used the staple gun from the screen to hang up the wire.
So there we go. Speakers are hung and receiver is set up. Now, here's the cost breakdown:

$40 TV stand
$220 Receiver
$100 XBox wireless router
$30 Speaker stands and mounts

so $390 for all that, which ends up being what I estimated the cost being for a new surround sound system for someone that doesn't have one. To make this easier, I'm rounding everything up to partly account for taxes. So $400 for this, and let's say $200 already spent.

So running tally is approx $600.

Up next, the fun stuff!

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/media-room-walkthrough-part-5.html