Update: After a huge fire destroyed most of my house in 2006, I've built a new home theater in 2007-2008. After 14 months of mayhem I'm finally back in my old (now restored) place but because I had no way to mount the Barco in the new HT, it has been sold and replaced with a "modern" DLP projector. Yes I know. It sucks but... the good news is that I now have a dedicated home theater room equipped with a JBL Synthesis Four speaker setup, two minibars, the retro cinema chairs and a shitload of Fatboy bean bags to lounge on. So yes, the fire sucked but I'm doing fine again :)
Below is an overview of my old setup, before I sold off some stuff and moved the rest of it into another room.

MY (FORMER) SETUP

Holy Smokes Batman! There's a spaceship on the ceiling!

The Projector
I used a Barco Data 800 CRT Projector, which was mounted to the ceiling of my living room and projected images on a 16:9 DIY fixed (yet portable) screen that measures 250x140cm. I purchased this projector from a fellow HTFORUM member for a very nice price. He had made the fatal mistake of underestimating the WAF of a Barco and had to get rid of it because his room was too small (according to him) or the projector too big (according to her). Remember kids.. always discuss your planned Barco purchase with your wife, girlfriend, cat or whoever else co-owns the room or you will be sorry later :)

The Screen
I used a DIY screen that is normally hidden behind some plants in my dining room. Because its very light i could easily pick it up and hang it onto two small chains in front of the windows in my livingroom. The windows could be completely darkened using a black roll-down sunlight-blocking curtain. The screen itself was made of a similar, but elastic white material that has been stapled onto a very light wooden frame. It was very cheap to make and evenly reflects light so it doesnt produce any hotspots due to the different angles of the CRT tubes. The cool thing about this elastic fixed screen is that it doesnt wrinkle so i can hang it above a radiator without any problems. I still use the screen today in my new home theater, though be it cut down to a slightly smaller size.

19" rackmount PC, Barco videoswitch & wireless keyboard

HTPC
The Barco was connected to a custom PC in a 19" rackmount enclosure that contained a 3Ghz Pentium IV CPU with 1 Gig of RAM, a 128MB Ati Radeon 9600 Video Card, a DVD-Rom Player and more than enough diskspace to store HD video material. Naturally, it featured a wireless keyboard and mouse so I could control stuff wherever i was in my room. The PC was stored in a closet to prevent dust from getting in and noise from getting out. The reason i used a PC instead of a stand-alone DVD player, is that the PC "upscaled" any interlaced low-resolution video material to the selected progressive output resolution of my video card without requiring expensive external scaling hardware or other video enhancement devices. More importantly, it allowed region and RPC-freed playback of DVD material and playback of HD and other digital videos and music and video that i download from the internet.

Sonic warfare
I recently threw the Soundblaster audio card out of my PC and replaced it with an M-Audio Revolution 7.1. This finally got rid of the SPDIF dropouts in audio i was experiencing whenever somebody flicked a lghtswitch in the house. The M-Audio card in my PC sends SPDIF digital audio through a DIY cable to my DTS-ES receiver. This in turn drives a 6.1 surround speaker setup consisting of JBL 4312A vintage studio monitors and a THX certified JBL center. The receiver is way too light for these speakers, so i will be adding an 8x180W amplifier (be afraid, be very afraid!) based on the 82 Elektor Crescendo Design as soon as i finish (re)building it.
Update: part of the amplifier was heavily damaged in the fire. The remaining (undamaged parts) are now for sale.

Wheeeee! My new retro cinema chairs :-)

Resolutions
I drive the barco at 1024x768 (progressive) pixel resolution for DVD and desktop use and 1920x1080 (interlaced) for HDTV/WMV-HD material. Custom video refresh rates and negative sync are provided by Powerstrip, a great video card tweaking utility that allows you to change virtually ANY register of your videocard. I had created two memory blocks on the barco, one that displays video at 4:3 and blanks top and bottom sections that are off-screen. The other block crunches video to 16:9 anamorphic (by decreasing VSIZE). This allows me to play anamorphic video at an optimal quality.

Software
DVD Playback is done with by PowerDVD, a software dvd player that in my opinion provides the best playback performance on this setup. Other digital video formats including HDTV streams are played through BSPlayer, Elecard and VLC. (Some material performs better on one player than the other). Unfortunately DRM protected content can only be played using mediaplayer, which gives a great performance on my new PC, but doesnt allow easy tweaking of the aspect ration when my Barco is running in anamorphic mode :-(
Update: The new home theater still uses a PC for HD playback, but now streams all media via a Playstation 3 that is connected to my new (DLP_ projector with an HDMI cable.

The Room
As strange as this may sound, many first time visitors didn't notice the projector as it was located in a spot that somehow is overlooked when entering the room. The new home theater (without a Barco) is in a dedicated room that most people will never see unless we decide to watch a movie. I miss the massive equipment on my ceiling :(

You can find some screenshots of the projector and screen in the Screenshots section of this website.

I finally replaced the two Ikea chairs I had with a seventies' cinema loveseat :-)

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