htpc lcd display free sample

View or sort your movies however you wish: by title, actors, genre, year, or even sort by rating or file size. Choose from several display styles: List, Icons/Big Icons (Cover view), or Filmstrip

The user interface is a snap to learn and use. Standard menus, layouts and views let you choose your style of display. Most remotes are supported and you can configure the keys however you want.

It runs on basic hardware, connects directly to your TV and displays your TV Series, Movies, Photos and Music in a much more dynamic way. All in the comfort of your living room, on your big screen LCD or Plasma TV or projector!

That’s only the basic features! By using the hundreds of plugins and skins available, you can do almost anything—like monitor your HTPC; view sports scores or local movie show times; stream or download web TV, Apple Trailers, YouTube videos or internet radio; even start up MediaPortal playing music from a predefined playlist.

A project that I took on over this past Christmas break was to get my HTPC to display on an LCD display mounted in the PC’s case informaton about the TV program actively being recorded by the Windows Media Center DVR, so that I could see what was being recorded even when the attached TV was off.

The basic hardware/software setup for this project was: LCD Display: An nMediaPC PRO-LCD-B display, which is a blue LCD display that can display 2 rows of 20 characters, and fits into a standard PC case 5 1/4” drive bay.

This project turned out to be significantly more complex that I originally planned on it being, although after nearly a full day of tinkering, I did finally get it to work!  The remainder of this post is a set of instructions for what I did to get the LCD display working to display the active Windows Media Center recording (leaving out many of the missteps and dead ends I encountered along the way, although I do include a couple of the major ones as an appendix at the end of this post).

The install was fairly easy; the PRO-LCD-B has two connections: One to a standard disk drive power cable from the PC’s internal power supply, and one to a 4-pin USB connection on the motherboard.  My HTPC’s motherboard (a Gigabyte AMD GA-MA785GM-US2H) had several such 4-pin USB leads available on the motherboard, even with all of my case’s front and rear USB ports already hooked up.

(When I powered my PC back on, I *think* I saw some stock/default text on the LCD display, but I’m not 100% sure about this – and I’m not about to voluntarily revert my HTPC to that state at this point just to double-check.) :-)

(Although at this point my next step at this point was to install nMediaPC’s “M-Play Home Center (MHC)” software to drive the LCD display, this turned out to be a dead end, and I recommend you skip it if your goal is to get your LCD display to show the actively-recording Windows Media Center program.  See the “Dead Ends” appendix at the end of this post for more on this.)

Uncompress the “lcd_smartie_v5.4.2.92 Beta” folder and its contents from that .zip archive.  I put this folder onto the root directory of my C: drive.

None of the out-of-the-box drivers that come with the LCDSmartie 5.4.2.92 release work with the PRO-LCD-B.  However, there is another driver available on the LCDSmartie site that did work for me: the “L.I.S VFD” display driver.

When LCDSmartie comes up, it should show a small window showing the content that it is sending to the LCD display (although nothing will actually appear on the PRO-LCD-B until the steps in this section are completed).  Click the “Setup” button in the lower-left corner of the window to bring up the Setup window.

In the LCDSmartie setup window, in the “LCD Size” dropdown in the Display Size section in the top-right corner, select the “2x20” value (the display size of the PRO-LCD-B).

Next, still in the Display Size section, click the Plugin tab.  In the Display Plugin dropdown, select lisvfd.dll.  (This option will only appear if you copied the lisvfd.dll file into the LCDSmartie “displays” subfolder in the previous step.)

For the next step, you need to know what COM port your PRO-LCD-B is running on.  To determine this: Bring up the Windows 7 “Devices and Printers” screen by opening the Windows Start menu, typing “devices” into the text field, and selecting the “Devices and Printers” option that appears.

Then, return to LCDSmartie.  (It doesn’t appear in the Alt+Tab list on my machine, so you may need to select it from the Windows taskbar).  In the LCDSmartie Setup dialog, in the Display Settings section, in the Plugin tab, in the Startup Parameters field, enter “COM4,38400” where “COM4” is the actual COM port value from the Devices and Printers section above. If for whatever reason you couldn’t find the FT232R device in “Devices and Printers”, then an alternative here might just be to try entering different values for the COM port number in this field to see if you can get something to display on the PRO-LCD-B screen.

Once this is done, click OK on the LCDSmartie setup dialog.  You should now see some text from LCDSmartie (a scrolling LCDSmartie logo, and possibly some other information) appear on the PRO-LCD-B screen on your PC!

Once LCDSmartie is successfully configured to display information on the PRO-LCD-B screen, the next step is to get it to display what’s currently recording in Windows Media Center.  A plug-in called “LCDSmartie dll to display Windows Media Center status” by Dave Perrow can be used to do this.

The MCE_dll plugin will display the name of the channel being recorded, along with the channel number and the name of the program being recorded.  It gets the channel number and program name from Windows Media Center (via the TcpIpStatus plugin), but we need to manually supply the channel names.

To do this, in a text editor, open the MCE_dll.ini file that you previously placed in the “plugins” folder under the LCDSmartie folder, and replace all of the values with the channel numbers and names for your local channels.

Bring up the LCDSmartie Setup dialog.  In the “Screens settings” section, make sure Screen 1 is selected (set the value of the Screen field to 1), and then replace the values in the two large fields in this section (which represent what LCDSmartie will display on the PRO-LCD-B screen):

Finally, click OK.  If your Windows Media Center is actively recording something, you should now see the channel number, channel name, and show name on the PRO-LCD-B display!

A couple of the things that I tried that didn’t work: A piece of open-source software for Windows called LCDWriter by “andy vt” says that it will also get an LCD display to display what Windows Media Center is currently recording, among several other functions.  However, I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to successfully display anything to my PRO-LCD-B; and the 32-bit version (which can work with LCDSmartie display plugins via a wrapper dll) gave me a runtime error on my PC every time I tried to run it, so I eventually gave up on getting it to work on my PC.

The default PRO-LCD-B display software from nMedia has a lot of cool functions, and it was very easy to install and get initially working, but I was unable to successfully get it to display the recording program in Windows Media Center.  It also seemed to be slightly buggy in other ways (at least for me); for example, after exiting Windows Media Center, the PRO-LCD-B would continue to display “Channel Listing”, for example, instead of reverting back to the default date/time display.

Thanks to the authors of LCDSmartie, the lisvfd.dll display driver, the “Windows Media Center status” plugin for LCDSmartie, and the Windows Media Center TCP/IP Controller.  Without all of those open source projects having been developed and made freely available, I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project – or at least, it would have taken me significantly longer to code up a solution myself!

At first instance the MicroFusion Remote 350 appears to be quite the mess inside, though this is because of the pre-installed power supply, fans with speed controllers and the front panel LCD. The power supply is a decent little unit that has been slapped with a high-efficiency 80 PLUS certification. The unit itself boasts three SATA power cables, four 4-pin power cables and floppy disk power cable along with a 4-pin and 24-pin power cable.

Then there are the usual USB, audio and eSATA cables that need to be connected to the motherboard headers. There is an additional USB 2.0 cable which must be connected to the motherboard allowing the LCD monitor to interface with the supplied software in Windows.

For example, in order to access the 3.5" bay a thumb screw must be removed along with another less accessible screw but that"s the good bit. For some reason the LCD panel mounting bracket conflicts with the removal of the 3.5" bay and therefore needs to be removed first. The user will need to pinch and hold the side latches while pushing down on the top of the LCD bracket. The LCD will then tilt back into the 3.5" bay while the user must be careful not to touch the face of the LCD display.

At $190 the Antec MicroFusion Remote 350 looks to be a tempting offer providing users with an impressive cooling system, quality 350-watt power supply and a small LCD panel. The case itself looks quite nice and because it has been constructed entirely from steel it is extremely durable though at the same very heavy for such a small HTPC case.

Next, we will be checking out the rest of the cases in our round-up. Then don"t skip our thermal tests, round-up impressions and wrap-up before deciding on your HTPC case pick.

Most HTPC-Cases are…mostly crap. Either they have a form-factor, which isn’t usable at all in common living-room-configurations or they are missing some major features you would expect from a HTPC.

Whatever, this shall not be the topic here. Instead we’re fetching a case, which features most of our requirements, and add a ‚useful‘ LCD-setup to it.

(If you have your HTPC Setup already completed with LCDd running and just seeking for the XBMC/Kodi integration, you might want to skip some lines here…)

First of: Forget about cases with integrated LCDs. They are usually crap. On the one hand they are ridiculously expensive for no reason, and on the other hand they only offer a very limited set of features and mostly require some specific windows-software. which never gets updated, and is will be usually incompatible with the next release of Windows, even if you tend to use the Microsoft-OS for a mediacenter-computer.

Instead, why not go the originally inteded ‚default‘ way? Long, long time ago there was a LCD-driver-chipset which was cheap, widely available, able to drive character-display with up to 80 characters in almost every configuration of lines and quickly become the de-facto-standard for displays in industry-applications. I am of couse talking about the Hitachi HD44780-Chipset. While no longer produced by Hitachi itself, tons of compatible chipsets are out there. Just grep Ebay for HD44780, and you will see they’re very affordable. Therefore you are able to get this easy-to-use and well-documented displays beginning at 2$. Much less than the extra value a case with a much more crappy display would cost you. The only thing you should care about is to get one with backlight, because this is optional, but most displays nowadays do have integrated backlight.

I got myself a neat case (and i really do not remember where i got this nor what model it is), which was really cheap and cost me something around 30 euros, which is of course quite affordable compared to the heavily overpriced HTPC cases.

Next comes the display. While there are many color/backlight-color variations available, there are some defaults regarding the size. They are given in the following sheme : 20×4 or 2004 , in this case meaning „4 lines with 20 chars each„. Most common sizes are 16×2, 16×4, 20×2 and 20×4. But much more interesting are the more uncommon sizes, especially the 40×2 one. This size is perfect for HTPCs, because many cases are (more or less) flat, but wide enought to fit a 40×2-Display in (and, to be honest: Really noone wants to read titles like „The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring“ or „Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1“ scrolling on a diaplay which is 16 caracters wide, right?).

You shall also keep in mind, that you most likely need a piece of extra hardware to interface the display. You can either interface the display directly if you have any kind of GPIO-Pins like on a raspberry pi (or arduino, or similar), use (or make) an I²C-Adapter Board (costs around 5 Bucks) if you have the possibility to interface I²C on your machine somewhere or try to get (or make) an LCD2USB-Adapter. The last ones are small PCBs, which use an atmel to interface the display and make it available via USB. This Board is OpenSource, so usually not available from any professional manufacturer.

But sometimes a batch of this can be seen and purchased via chinese ebay traders (but keep in mind, that the 40×4 displays use a 2-pin-row-layout at the side instead of a 1×16-pin-line which most displays use, if you got the wrong adapter, you have to use flexible wires instead of pins to connect them together). If you see one of these: get them, they’re rare! The LCD2USB-Project can be found here.

I was in total luck while buying a display, because I managed to find a blue/white 40×2 display with an LCD2USB-Adapter preassembled for around 20 bucks. And it also came with a 4-pin-wire soldered to the USB-Port, so no work at all, just plugged it it on one of the internal USB-ports onboard as it was intended anyways.

The case of course was not able to fit the display without some modifications, so i got myself a hacksaw and a file, and began to fit it in (no, I’m just kidding, I drawed a matching hole in inkscape, exported it to DXF and made a clean cutout with a CNC-mill, but you are likely stuck to a saw and a file because you don’t have access to a CNC-mill… ).

Interfacing the display on software side is really easy, on Windows you can use tools like LCDsmartie or on Linux you usually use LCDproc orLCD4Linux. However, the Kodi-Addon (on Linux) uses LCDproc. Depending on your distribution, you may have to compile LCDproc by yourself , because your distro-version is lacking the right drivers for your display, but this is well documented on the LCDproc-website. I will further explain the configuration using LCDproc.

Due to the fact that already a „lcd2usb“-value as connection type exists, this is all we have to do here, if we use one of the lcd2usb-adapters (which I highly recommend). Also mind the driver path. Your display drivers shall go there of course. Restart LCDd and see if the display shows something. If yes, your general setup is done. The rest relies to your personal taste.

LCDproc uses Clients (applications which use a display provided by a network-daemon provided by LCDproc to interface displays) to display Screens (of which you can define multiple and e.G. switch between them). In our case a XBMC/Kodi-Addon acts as Client for our display and draws it’s output to the LCD.

First place to go is the advancedsettings.xml inside ~/.kodi/userdata/ . I prefer to place some values here, which shall not be overwritten by anything else, and also a bit of the LCD-config:

The important part here is of course inside the -tag, the values are self-explanatory. Next, and much more important is the LCD.xml in the same folder. Here is mine as example:

$INFO[LCD.TimeWide$X$Y] I use this for screensaver, so when the system is idle. Assume your display have 2 lines, then you need  TimeWide21 in row 1 and TimeWide22 in row 2. On a 4-Line Display you need TimeWide41,42,43 and 44 when using all 4 lines for the big digits. Once you understand how it works, it’s easy. This displays big digits filling more than one row, in my case displaying the actual time. Valid for X and Y are 1,2,3,4, while 1 is rather useless for X of course.

One thing is left, installing the XBMC LCDproc addon inside Kodi (yes also in Kodi it is called XBMC… , dont know why, maybe there are 2 identical addons with different names, but i use this since a few years, so maybe it is different in your setup). Most values can be taken as they are, my prefered settings are

I do not want to miss my „widescreen“-LCD on my HTPC anymore. if you – like me – perfer to leave your low-TDP-HTPC-device always on, then you can achieve an interesting dual-use as clock, room-thermometer, rss-feeder, whatever.. I prefer the clock, because of it’s simplicity.

If you find this displays odd and boring, you might want to try one of this more fancier VFD or OLED displays, or why not build yourself a dot-matrix display out of LEDs, which runs with LCDproc? …but this of course relies onto the personal taste.

You are unable to find a simple, affordable HTPC-Case without many bullshit-addons? You might want to have a look at the cases frominter-tech,  they imho have some neat cases available.

lcd display htpc case provide the touch interface in smartphones, which are vital for them to function. Alibaba.com stocks a stunning range of high-tech lcd display htpc case with vibrant color depictions. Truly crystal-clear displays of lcd display htpc case are available covering various brands and models such as the Samsung Galaxy Edge 2, OnePlus 7T, Samsung Galaxy C5, and many more.

lcd display htpc case are the most commonly used displays, as they produce great image quality while consuming low power. Rather than emitting light directly, they use back lights or reflectors to produce images, which allows for easy readability even under direct sunlight. lcd display htpc case are energy-efficient, and are comparatively safer to dispose of, than CRTs. lcd display htpc case are much more efficient when it comes to usage in battery-powered electronic equipment, due to their minimal power consumption.

Some other advantages of lcd display htpc case over the CRT counterparts are - sharper images, little to no heat emission, unaffected by magnetic fields, narrow frame borders, and extreme compactness, which make them very thin and light. Some types of lcd display htpc case are transmissive, reflective, and transflective displays. Transmissive displays provide better image quality in the presence of low or medium-light, while reflective displays work best in the presence of bright light. The third type of lcd display htpc case, transflective, combine the best features of both the other types and provide a well-balanced display.

Whether as an individual purchaser, supplier or wholesaler, browse for an extensive spectrum of lcd display htpc case at Alibaba.com if you don"t want to stretch a dollar yet find the best fit.

Enjoy your HTPC with the assistance of WinX DVD Copy Pro, to copy DVD to MPEG2 file, clone DVD to VIDEO_TS folder, mount ISO image, or burn DVD to DVD...

Almost everyone owns or knows about PC (Personal Computer), and some are familiar with or even proficient in home theater. But what about Home Theater PC? You may know it, but may not know it well. What is HTPC? Is HTPC over traditional home theater? What’s the difference between dedicated home theater and HTPC?

Traditional HT: Home Theater refers to a system for playing movies/films at home mainly for family use. Understandably, traditional home theater is composed of signal sources (DVD and LD), AV receiver, speaker box (5.1-5.7), and display devices (TV, projector and PDP).

HTPC: On the surface, HTPC is the combination of personal computer and home theater. It refers to a device partially or wholly combining the capabilities of PC with a software application that can play back video, photo, and music, etc. More straightforward, HTPC can be considered as a conceptual home theater or a carrier taking computer as signal source and processing part. Specifically, HTPC is a personal computer preloaded with various multimedia decoding players, and capable of playing varied audio-visual media correspondingly and connecting to all kinds of display devices like digital audio devices, for example, TV, projector, PDP (Plasma Panel Display), and audio amplifier at the existence of corresponding interfaces.

HTPC: The configuration of HTPC is flexible. People can choose among all kinds of fittings and accessories with different performances under differed brands according to the actual needs and personal budgets. Because of the open architecture of PC, the updates become easy in operation and rational in price. A customer can change any part of PC once he does not satisfy with it.

HTPC: The processing capacity of PC is powerful and updatable. With the introduction of APU (Audio Processing Unit), many functions can be realized on a single HTPC. It has great leap in cost performance and space occupation. Besides, graphics card play a significant role in providing excellent display quality. Any output format at any revolution ratios and field frequencies can be set to copy with different displays by combining the graphics card with specific optimizers.

Traditional HT: Different requirements on movie watching are only realizable with the help of multiple devices working divisionally and separately in the traditional HT system. In detail, DVD player is responsible for decoding MPEG2 video, AV decoder is in charge of decoding and processing surround sound, while STB (Set Top Box) specializes in decoding HDTV, and so on and so forth. With respect to satisfactory video output, traditional home theater is at least in need of DVD player, line doubler at sky-high price, say, Faroudja line doubler and an extra D/A conversion. Moreover, currently common display devices such as LCD, DLP, LCOS/D-ILA and PDP for traditional HT are all displays at fixed pixels. Therefore, the signal input needs to be displayed at its own pixel. Likewise, only the signal input completely corresponding to its pixels can be displayed with good output effect, or else, the format is rudely disposed by stretching and flattening.

HTPC: The cheap storage and high capacity is the most outstanding aspect of HTPC. The considerable room of hard disk and technical development in virtual CD/DVD ROM, CD and DVD can be virtualized to be played on hard disk, which is equivalent to owning a CD/DVD library. Simple mouse clicks can help you enjoy movies as many as possible. In addition, the function of disk recorder can also achieved conveniently with some additional hardware.

HTPC: Rich software brings the functions of PC into full play. Generally, the software can also be operated on another PC on the same OS except for special requirement on hardware. Flexible combination of software can generate unimaginable functions.

However, Home Theater PC is not so good for a special group. As a computer, it is a little bit complicated and troublesome to operate for the elder generation. But conclusion can be drawn from the previous descriptions about the difference between HTPC and traditional HT that HTPC has an advantage over physical home theater, in terms of functionalities and usages.

Want to own a DVD library or a HTPC with infinite DVD movies now? WinX DVD Copy Pro, a DVD backup featured software, can help you backup DVD on your PC, such as copy DVD to MPEG2 file, clone DVD to VIDEO_TS folder, mount ISO image for playback on HTPC or media center, or burn one DVD to another DVD.

IMO Silverstone especially and less so Ahanix are specialized HTPC vendors. Either you didnt know this, didnt bother to do research, or didnt get a free sample from them. None of which is a terribly good thing.

Also, why the POS power supply along with the lousy thermaltake heatsink with a hot P4 system? Not too many people are building HTPCs with P4s, and they tend to use better components than Mad Dog and ThermalTake (no offense to the *bling* obsessed).