This home theater configuration is set up in the living room... it's cobbled together from inexpensive bits that I had either sitting around or picked up cheaply. It consists of:

• Mitsubishi X-30U XGA DLP projector (1024x768 native @ 60Hz, projecting onto 112" wide painted wall)
• Creative Inspire 5800 5.1 "personal" surround speaker system
• PC with Creative Audigy 4 5.1 sound card, nVidia graphics, running Zoom Player, Girder, Powerstrip, and the nVidia PureVideo DVD decoders
• Motorola DCT6412 Phase I HDTV digital cable decoder
• VDigi VD-Z3 Component to VGA transcoder
• Switch boxes, cables, splitters, etc.

DVDs are stored on an external hard drive connected to the PC. This allows me to switch movies from the couch via remote control. I wrote a custom application in Processing to load DVD cover images stored in the directories with the DVD ISO files.

DVDs and other media files are played back via Zoom Player. It's a great piece of software, highly customizable, and has a lot of settings tuned for use in a home theater environment. This custom bitmap is displayed whenever Zoom Player is started, before a DVD or media file is loaded.

A "classic" screenshot of The Fifth Element (camera was tilted when taking the photo, oops!).

Another shot of The Fifth Element (camera was tilted in this one too).

HDTV content runs at 16:9 aspect ratio (1.78:1), while most movies run between 1.85:1 and 2.4:1. The projector itself is a 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio. While this results in some unused pixels, the letterbox is unobtrusive (and, in some cases, virtually undetectable).

On the other hand, some content that is taped and mastered in 4:3 (like IMAX movies), uses all of the available pixels on the projector. Shown below is a screenshot of the IMAX version of "Super Speedway."

Ambient lighting can be troublesome for front-projection. In the shot below, the dining room chandelier is turned on. This provides indirect, ambient light to show the loss of contrast, but the image is still viewable for low-quality (like standard TV) content.

Even with more direct light, from two lamps right in the living room, the image is still viewable, though it's very washed out.