I don’t actually have one built yet, but I’ve been working on designing one and this seemed like a good place to go to for whatever I need

I was lucky enough to attend the Electronic Home Expo (EHX) in Orlando this past weekend. The conference is a dream come true for anyone who is a fan of home theater networks. Home automation and video/audio streaming devices of all price ranges were demonstrated and displayed. Albeit, most of the price ranges were in the high end and something the average middle class person can’t afford.

Here’s a list of my notable highlights from EHX:

1. ControlWare software from Superna was really easy to use and could control multiple home automation protocols. Not to expensive either.
2. The Z-wave Alliance demo room showed off different manufacture’s devices all working together. Some of the other protocols, such as Zigbee are having big problems with interoperability.
3. PMC demo speakers, which cost $120,000 just for the left and right pair. Although a little pricey, the trailer for 300 never sounded so good.
4. Niveus and other HTPC manufactures were showing off their products. Some included CableCard support.
5. Window’s MCE plug-ins were everywhere so it was nice to see Pluto-CI demoing LinuxMCE.
6. Multiple companies showed off their home automation system and how it can be controlled by an HTPC.

In December of 2007 I built my own HTPC. After reviewing the HTPCs available commercially and reviewing many forums dealing with building your own HTPC I decied to take the plunge. My HTPC is enclosed in a Thermaltake Bach case with an ASUS P5K Deluxe motherboard, Intell Duo Core E6750 2.66 chip, 2048 MB Corsair memory, Nvidia 8600 GTS graphics card, a standard DVD drive, and a Sony BD-ROM BDU X-100 Blu Ray drive.. I replaced the cooling fan on the graphics card with a heat sink and replaced the standard CPU cooling fan with a Thermaltake 90 mm silent fan.

The HTPC was connected through a 3 year old JVC 420B receiver but I just replaced it with a Yamaha RX V463 reciever which now enabled me to play Blu-Ray discs that the older JVC refused to recognize. The TV is a 3 year old Samsung 61 inch DLP equipped with Polk Audio speakers and subwoofer. I am running Windows XP SP2 with Media Player and Cybelink Ultra software.

Problems with Home Theater Connection

I just purchased a Yamaha RX-V463 AV Receiver to replace a JVC RX-D402 AV Receiver in my home theater system.  The rest of the system consists of a Samsung  HL-R6168W DLP TV and a custom made HTPC running Windows XP Media Center which contains all of my music CDs on the hard drive, a DVD drive , and a Blu-Ray drive.

All of the connections before and with the Yamaha receiver are via HDMI cables. I have attempted to get the TV to recognize input from my HTPC connected via HDMI through the Yamaha receiver but the TV does not recognize the signals from the new connections at all.

What connections and settings should I employ to connect the HTPC to the TV through the Yamaha receiver?  Thanks for your assistance.

Barry Thompson