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It appears my Philips DVP-5990 DVD player is simply incompatible with my Monoprice 4×1 HDMI switch. I finally did get everything working by connecting my DVR & Blu-Ray player to the switch and the DVD player separately to the receiver. That’s not how I wanted to do it, but at least it works. I do wish I had paid more mind to the naysayers ranting about the limitation of 2 HDMI ports on the Yamaha 663 though. I may very well get a new receiver within the next year, because this switch business is quite annoying.

The Blu-Ray player is quite nice though, moreso for the lossless audio than the HD picture, sadly. I still haven’t really been blown away by anything HD. It seems that one simply needs HD to get a picture close to what SD is like on a smaller TV, it’s like this big scam on everyone. I suppose I could say that the differences between an upconverted DVD and a Blu-Ray are subtle at best. I also suppose I could say that the improvement is worth the $200 I spent on the player, but it certainly wouldn’t have been worth $300 or even the $450 that most of the standalone players cost. The improvement being worth $200 is a bit sketchy though, especially that I spent most of that $100 I saved on those damned HDMI cables and switch.

It’s just my little technological struggle… which I’d rather deal with than being social.

So my Monoprice switch and a couple of HDMI cables arrived today. I bought that so I could have my DVD player and Blu-Ray player connected to my AVR at the same time.

It seems one of the cables is faulty, whenever the DVD player switches to output 1080p there are video sparkles and the audio crackles. It doesn’t happen with the other cables, so I can conclude it isn’t the switch or the device, so… I just had to order another cable.

It’s annoying though, it’ll cost as much to return the cable as it would to just buy another one. The money spent on shipping the first one is lost forever, so I might as well just toss it in the trash. Granted, at least it isn’t one of those ridiculously expensive (for no reason other than they can) cables from a retail store.

It later occurred to me that if the cable would pass 1080i without issue, I could just swap the one from the DVR, but then… I’m not disparately in need of the DVD player (and the Blu-Ray player will play DVDs too). I’m also not thrilled about having a malfunctioning cable in the system anywhere. The funny thing is that the DVR’s HDMI cable could suffer from the same 1080p transmission problem anyway. Thankfully the other cables all seem to be fine. My new cables will ship tomorrow, so it’ll probably be Monday before I have them. I ordered more than one, just to be ahead of the game. One of them is just 3′ long, so that might be better to use for connecting the switch to the AVR anyway, 6′ of cable is quite unnecessary for that purpose.

With the dollar plummeting and the state of the economy quite uncertain, I have decided to join the American Dream of Debt. I had lived without credit card debt for a very long time, but no more.

At the end of February I bought a 42″ 1080p LCD television. I already had HD service from Comcast as part of my DVR. At the end of April I bought a new Audio/Video Receiver, out with the old HTiB… finally. New speakers and subwoofer were then purchased last month and finally (relatively) completed the project this past weekend by purchasing a Blu-Ray player.

The new home theater experience is thus quite impressive, far better than actually going to the theater. I’ve been considering add front projection next year, it would be nice to have a massive screen to view films on, though realistically for my own personal viewing pleasure the 42″ is large enough.