This is my "TV." I don't have live programming in my apartment, so all I have this for is DVDs and games. Getting an HDTV feed would be awesome, though.

The screen measures a little bigger than 105" diagonal; it's about 5 feet high by 6.7 feet wide. Among the ranks of material and equipment, it's actually pretty cheap but there are some sacrifices. It's in a 4x3 layout rather than a widescreen format because most of the DVDs I have are in 4x3 (mostly TV shows).

Behind the screen is my balcony. The sliding door and window that leads outside is as big as the screen itself. This poses a particular problem. With lower end projectors like the one I'm using, the room has to be pretty dark in order to get a good image, like how it is in a real movie theater. The solution was to get lots, around 8 yards if I remember correctly, of blackout cloth (which I got from Joann's at around $6 a yard). It's a type of specially treated cloth that blocks out light, completely. It also makes for a decent projection screen, as I've read from the people at AVSForum. So for me, it was a win-win situation. On one side it blocks out the sun (vampire-friendly environment), on the other, I use it as the projection screen. Because I have it free-hanging from the curtain rod, there are some wrinkles. However, it's pretty much invisible once the movie starts rolling. The borders (masking) I have are made of suede cloth. Velvet is the best material, but it costs $13.99 a yard or something like that. I got the suede cloth for about $1.99 a yard in the bargain bin of Joann's and it does pretty well for my purposes.

The total cost for me was $50 for the cloth, $5 for the iron-on no-seam hemming material to combine pieces of blackout cloth, $20 for the black suede, $25 for the industrial strength velcro that I used to hang the cloth with, $20 for some rods to stretch out the cloth, $5 for the foam board that holds up the bottom of the masking, and of course some double-stick tape and binder clips for minor alterations.

The system I have hooked up to project DVDs onto the screen is an Infocus X1 projector connected to a Panasonic XP-30 DVD player via component video (using DVD player's de-interlacing). It's also hooked up to my PS2 via component video (using projector's de-interlacing, which I believe is the same DCDi chip as the XP-30). The audio is fed through a Panasonic XR-45 receiver. It's the same slim size as my DVD player and has three optical inputs, one connected to the DVD player, one connected the PS2, and the other connected to a computer which pumps out music from my CD collection encoded in FLAC (80+ gigs of music in non-lossy format!).

The video is accompanied by a 6.1 surround sound setup, which cost me the price of a center speaker. Everything else, the front speakers and the surrounds, I managed to "permanently borrow" from my parents. It's not a very high powered system either on the receiver side nor speaker side, but I live in an apartment complex so that's not a big deal. Despite that, I do have everything calibrated, so at least it'll sound balanced.

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