10.5.7 and Display refresh rates

I’ve written previously about the setup of my HTPC and LCD TV, and this included setting the HThackintosh to the optimal resolution and refresh rate. Since then I’ve commented on the occasional small jumps in the picture, and after investigation I’ve put this down to differences in media frame rate and display refresh rate. Much HD content is 24 frames per second, which doesn’t go smoothly into 50 or 60 frame per second display refresh.

There are many threads in the Plex forums about using software such as DisplayConfigX to create custom display modes for refresh rate. There are also warnings that Plex has issues with display refresh rate and media frame rate being the same, resulting in audio sync loss. Auto switching display refresh rate to media frame rate is on the todo list for Plex, so hopefully the issues can be fixed.

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HThackintosh Remote Part 1

After building my Home Theatre hackintosh I used a keysonic RF keyboard/trackpad (above) for control, with the intention of adding a smaller remote control at a later date. Apart from size the keyboard is a pretty perfect method of control, equally suited to media centre duties, web browsing and general computer use. It is a bit bulky for just watching media, so the search began for the perfect remote.

Hackintosh HTPC part 4

In Part 3 I briefly touched on screen settings, and ended up using the analog output of the HTPC at 1920×1080, 59.9Hz. Picture quality was good, and to my surprise the pixels output by the video card were perfectly mapped to the ones on the TV. I used the free monitor setup displays at http://tft.vanity.dk/ for testing, and applied setting for colour and sharpness that had been previously been set using a Home Theatre setup DVD.

The setting that made the biggest improvement here was sharpness. On my TV, a Samsung 46A656, the default setting was 50 on all inputs. I had assumed this meant no sharpening but a quick run through the test cards on the setup DVD showed this to be anything but neutral. A black pattern of lines on a grey background showed very bad white edges around the lines, indicating too much sharpening. Dropping the sharpening to 10 gave a much better image, and the colour setting was dropped to 42 from 50 using other tests.

Hackintosh HTPC part 3

In part 2 I detailed the motherboard, processor and ram picked for the HTPC. The plan was to initially use the spare Nvidia 7300GT card and replace this dependant on space available in the final case. I had a spare Tagan 480w PSU and a midi tower case as a temporary home, and the 500Gb hard drive from the hackintosh (replaced with a new 1Tb).

The build was straightforward so I won’t dwell on that. The first choice was how to install Leopard. The 500Gb hard drive had the hackintosh install on it so I chose to boot this first and see what happened. It wasn’t much of a surprise when this started up fine as it had previously been working on an intel chipset motherboard. The only thing that didn’t work was audio, so the next choice was do I keep the install and remove unnecessary software/files or do a fresh install?

Hackintosh HTPC part 2

Having decided to build a hackintosh HTPC in part 1, the next step is picking hardware. This would normally include a display and this project is no different. The display this time though is an LCD television instead of the usual LCD monitor.

I had a short list of potential TV’s and the top was occupied by a couple of Sony models, the 40V4000 and 40W4000. The decision on which to go for would depend on what deals were available as the spec is similar, with the 40W4000 being a 10 bit panel (instead of 8 bit) and adding some multimedia features. Next on the list were Samsung’s 6 series models. A local retailer had an older Samsung 46″ 5 series and a Sony 40L4000 (a cut down 40V4000) hooked up to a Vista PC through a KVM switch, running at something like 1366×768 resolution. I increased the resolution to 1920×1080 and to my surprise the Sony showed an unsupported display mode message while the Samsung looked fantastic.