Computer on the Big Screen!

Ok, so I have my big screen with my projector hooked up, my sound system integrated into my room...why not hook up my PC? When I first bought my PC parts, I did so with the intent that eventually it would be a media and gaming PC. I built it with parts from newegg.com, tigerdirect.com and frys.com. With an ASUS crosshair motherboard, 4gb of ram, 1.5 TB of harddrive space, an Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS video card and an AMD Athlon 64-bit FX-62 dual-core processor, this thing rocks. Well it's getting old now, well over a year. But it still has no problems at all with the latest games.

One of the features of my video card is a converter that came with the video card for component video out which with a 25 ft component video cable plugs right into the back of my home theater system. Well, not quite... I also have a Wii and an Xbox both with component video connectors. So I bought an autosensing component video switch with 4 inputs on it. It hides well behind all of the components and I never need to mess with it.

So I plugged my computer video into there and in my nvidia control panel, I set up my new display through my component video as a dualview, so I had a different desktop on the bigscreen. For my audio, my computers motherboard has a wonderfully handy coax audio output that I ran to one of two in the back of the Onkyo HTS.

For my test, I launched my Netflix account in Internet Explorer. Since I had my dual-view on, I dragged my browser over to the big screen, maximized the browser window, selected my movie and ran it full screen. Everything was wonderful, just like watching a DVD from your own DVD player. Of course, don't try it if you don't have high-speed internet. A full movie download will take you many hours.

So now I came to a problem. After my movie was over, I decided to watch a DVD. Now there was no audio! Apparently what is happening is when my computer audio is hooked up to the home theater system, the audio from the DVD player, as well as the Wii and Xbox will not play. So my fix, at least for now unless I find a better solution, is to unplug the coax for the computer audio fromt he home theater system when I'm not using it. Not the best solution of course, but it's a start.

Another thing that I did is whenever I'm not specifically using my big screen, I use my Nvidia settings icon in my system tray to set my nView display settings to Single Display (for my primary monitor) so that my mouse would not go off of the right side of my screen, and it also will not send video out to the home theater system.

Now, if I want to...I can use my bluetooth mouse and keyboard and use the big screen as my primary monitor! Not very practical at the moment, but possible :)