HD Porn Player

I finally bought my HD porn setup! Well, I got a player and I've ordered a couple of external hard drives to go with it. The player is the Western Digital TV HD 1080p Media Player and I got it for £69 from Amazon. You can get the same one in the US for $120 or less.

As you can see, it's a smart looking black box with its own little remote control. The box itself is only 10cm across at the front and 4cm high so it sits quite neatly on top of my DVD player. But don't let the size and the price fool you, this thing has some impressive features.

So how does it work?

Well, basically you plug an external USB hard drive into it and it catalogues any media files it finds on the drive. You can then choose the files you want to play using the remote control. It's really easy to flick through the available files and choose the one you want. Then just click ‘Play' and off it goes.

Setting up the WD TVHD is really easy. Just connect a HDMI cable from the box to your TV. The HDMI cable is not supplied, which is annoying as it does come with a composite video cable. But that's no good for HD! So you need to buy the HDMI cable separately. I got one for a few pounds - don't get ripped off by the expensive ones some shops sell.

Once you have it all cabled up, just power it up and plug a USB drive into one of the two USB slots. So far I've tried it with a couple of different USB flash drives and an external 3.5" USB hard drive and it worked just fine. The first time I plugged in the big drive it took a while to index all the files. But once that's done once it saves an index file onto the drive so you don't have to wait every time.

Having got my big external hard drive plugged in I started to flick through the files it had found. Nearly all of my porn videos were found straight away and played without any problem. These were a mix of mpeg files, avi files and Windows Media files downloaded from various Internet sites. They aren't HD videos but they still looked pretty good when played on a widescreen TV through the WDTVHD. It also found all my MP3's and photos so I can get a porn slideshow going whilst listening to music!

So, that's about as far as I've got. I have my first HD porn player set up and ready to be put to good use. Now all I need is some HD porn. You can be sure I'm going to have plenty of fun in the next few weeks looking for the best sources of HD porn videos that will play on my new system!

It will be difficult to set up a HD porn theatre without understanding a little bit about screen resolution. We have learned from my previous post that 720p and 1080p represent different resolutions of HD video with 1080p being the highest. But how does that relate to the traditional screen resolutions that we use for PCs?

Well, if you think of a PC screen as being made up of rows and columns of pixels then the screen resolution is stated as columns x rows. Common screen resolutions you may have seen are 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. To check the resolution of your own screen, right-click on an empty area of your desktop and select ‘Properties'. Then click on the ‘Settings' tab. You will see your current screen resolution.

Now, this is what HD resolutions look like when converted to traditional values...

720p = 1280 x 720

1080p = 1920 x 1080

Notice that the second value (rows) is the number of lines of the HD video.

What is the best format for me?

To determine the format that's best for me I first looked at the manual that came with my LCD TV. The manual states...

PC Resolution: 1360 x 768
HD standards: 720p and 1080i

The ‘PC Resolution' is the maximum resolution the TV can display (when connected to a PC). In my case the TV can display up to 768 lines of a TV picture. This is obviously enough to display 720p but not 1080p.

But what about 1080i? The manual says the TV supports it but it doesn't support 1080 lines of resolution? The answer lies in the conversion. Remember that interlaced formats are not playable on LCD TVs without conversion? Well, the conversion in this case also reduces the resolution and makes it fit into 768 line limit. So, even if I were to come across 1080i video on the Internet, it wouldn't be any better quality than the 720p videos.

So, the conclusion, in my case, is that my TV is best suited to playing 720p porn videos. Now all I have to do is find a place to get them and a way of playing them :)

What is HD?

If I want to create a HD porn player on the cheap then I'd better start by understanding exactly what is meant by HD. So I did some digging and this is what I found...

A HDTV (High Definition Television) is a TV that is capable of viewing video signals at a higher resolution than standard TV or DVD. That means it can play HD channels broadcast over cable or satellite (in the UK at least) and HD movies from dedicated HD players such as Blue Ray players.

So far, so good. But as I looked further I found that there's more than one screen resolution that can be called HD. In fact, there are three main resolutions to be aware of. They are known as 720p, 1080i and 1080p. I will try to explain the differences...

A TV or computer screen is made up of thousands of tiny coloured dots called pixels. The 720 and 1080 in HD represents the number of lines (rows of pixels) that are used to make up the picture. So 1080 is higher resolution than 720. However, the ‘p' (progressive) and ‘i' (interlaced) make a difference. Without going into too much detail an interlaced video only takes up half the data of a progressive video and is therefore lower quality.  The net result is that 720p and 1080i are roughly similar quality whilst 1080p is currently the top of the range in HD.

Do I care about interlaced video?

Interlaced video was designed for traditional (CRT) TV sets. Computer displays and LCD TVs cannot play interlaced video; instead it must be converted (de-interlaced) into a progressive form. Although interlaced formats are used by some broadcasters, so far I've only seen progressive formats (720p and 1080p) offered for download on porn sites. I suspect that will be the case even for streamed video on the net. So, no, I don't really care about interlaced video :)

Next time I'll go into more detail about screen sizes and resolution.

Bye for now :)

Can I use my old kit?

The first thing I thought about when I saw the price of dedicated HD systems was reusing some old equipment. I have a laptop that I use on a daily basis. It's several years old and when I tried downloading some HD sample videos they didn't play but it might still come in useful for something. I also have some older desktop PCs but I don't want them in my living room as they are too noisy. I have a DVD player that plays DivX movies and has a USB port. And, of course, I have my HD TV - a Samsung that I bought last December.

It seems like there should be some way of using all this to get HD porn onto my TV. I just need to find it. I will begin by asking the question ‘what is HD?'

HD Porn on TV - Getting Started

Let's start out by setting some goals. What do I want to achieve?

Firstly, I want to be able to watch HD porn on my HD TV. OK, that was obvious, but what else do I want? I want fast access to a big selection of porn without getting up to change disks. Currently the only way I can watch porn on my TV is by playing DVDs. I hate getting up from the sofa to put another disk in the machine. It's even more annoying if I flick through the disk and find nothing I fancy so I have to get up and change it again. So, fast access to loads of porn is essential. And so is a remote control. Some way of organising my collection would also be nice. And a way to instantly hide everything when the girlfriend's mum comes round. I don't want her flicking through the channels and finding Teen Cocksuckers 21 instead of Eastenders :)

So, on the face of it there doesn't seem much to it. But then I started searching the Internet and it began to get scary. There were so many different options and many at shocking prices that I simply can't afford. That's when I realised that doing this cheaply would take some research. And that's also when I started thinking about putting all my research into a blog.

So next time I'll start looking at the PC and TV equipment I already have and see if I can adapt anything to be used in my new HD porn system.

See you again soon!