Jacken’s Blog

I finally got around to replace the lamp in my InFocus LP530 projector. I bought it used, and the internal counter said that the lamp had only been used for 300 hours, and the lamp is supposed to hold for 2000 hours. Which is good, because they cost like $300. But the bastard that sold it must have done a reset on the counter, because when me and my wife was sitting watching a horror movie, the fucker exploded! Yes, exploded. I had funny brown spots on the back of my shorts after that one. There’s nothing like having something explode when you sit in the dark. So it’s been sitting on a shelf waiting for a new lamp. And now I got one.

I used to have it connected to my DVD player with an S-Video connector, but the picture quality was not very good. InFocus has chosen to use a non standard connector, so you have to pay extra to get a back panel with standard ones. Or buy their expensive versions of cables. The bastards. So anyway I decided to take an old dual processor Pentium II machine that was just gathering dust, and transform it into a DVI-D connected Multimedia machine. So I got a GeForce 4800 SE card from a game addict friend. He thought that it was unusable, being older than two years. But it’s plenty for just using VLC and PowerDVD. And it had the magical DVI-D connector.

My wife always know when I install Windows, because I get to use words I never use otherwise. The stupidity, the reboots and the user interface just brings that out of me. But I now have a HTPC connected to my projector and the picture quality is fantastic. But we are talking Windows here, so the DVD playback starts to go five times to fast every fifteen seconds. I haven’t even dared to connect the SPDIF connector to check if the sound works. I’ll continue tomorrow…

By the way, I’m using Windows because the DVD player software on the pc side has a lot more options for adjusting video and audio. And I couldn’t just put a G4 in the living-room just to watch an occasional DVD. That’s a perfect job for an old pc.