High Definition Bed Sheet

[htpc_user]

Saturday night I finally got a chance to set my projector up outdoors and watch a movie.  The weather was finally right temperature-wise and my wife had the whole day off from work.  It takes forever to set everything up since it’s just me…running wires, getting out all the equipment, getting the speakers out and set up, etc.  I put a queen-size bedsheet up between my 2 “speaker stands” under my car port (because of the probability of rain); I have an 8′ 2″ x 4″ mounted in a base that I made with some small Philips speakers from an HTIB attached to the top of the 2″ x 4″, and I have one for the right and one for the left.  I attached the sheet on each 2″ x 4″ with thumb tacks and c-clamps.  I sat my Mitsubishi 720p projector on a table, along with a Sony 5.1 receiver, and my PC.  My son wanted to see what Army of Darkness was about, and I’d never seen it either, plus I was anxious to watch some of the HD DVDs I picked up cheap from Amazon.  So I ripped the Army of Darkness HD DVD to the hard drive using the XBOX 360 HD DVD player and AnyDVD HD.  I mounted the image using Virtual Clone Drive and played it with PowerDVD Ultra 7 from the PC with a 2600xt video card.  The image size was probably around 90-something”.  I could not believe the picture clarity, and what I was seeing.  It was possibly the clearest thing I can remember seeing.  At the beginning of the movie, when they had Bruce Campbell chained up and were walking him toward the pit, they showed a close-up of his boots walking across the dirt and rocks; it was like I could see every detail of his boot and count every speck of rock and gravel.  We were sitting pretty close since we were limited by the length of the car port, probably 8 to 10 feet back.  I have watched DVDs outside with the sheet before and it looked good, but this is the first time watching something HD with the projector.  I didn’t expect an old movie like that, even on HD DVD to look that good.  Plus it was being down-rezzed to 720p since that’s what my projector is.  I was quite impressed with the HD bed sheet.

It was too bad that I had the audio sync issue.  We couldn’t take it, so we moved back inside to finish watching it (I thought my HTPC wouldn’t have that problem, but it did).  I spent 4 hours setting up and probably only 20 minutes watching.  Last 2 thoughts…the movie was pretty bad (I expected better from reading people’s opinions of it), and 2nd, I can’t wait to try out the 8′ x 12′ dropcloth when I know it’s not going to rain.

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