Touchesceen

Hi

I want to know if I can use a Touchesceen to control win Home/XP/Media Center Edition.

And what model or brand is better

thanks.......

I am planning to use a 7" touchscreen to remotely control a living-room based HTPC from the kitchen. It is true that accuracy is poor with fingers, but using a plastic pen (like what comes with a Palm Pilot) isn't bad at all. The biggest challenge with using your fingers (aside from prints) is that you can't see the mouse pointer under your finger so you get no visual feedback.

The screen I'm using is the Dynamix 706 from http://www.dynamixcomputers.com/. Positioning is accurate to within a couple of pixels (using the included plastic pen), and can be calibrated and recalibrated with ease. Native resolution is low (800 x 480), so you definitely need to operate in a 15' mode (e.g. Media Center), and may wish to use a higher res that gets scaled down by the LCD device. The 706 supports 720p res, which is decent for a HD-HT application. 1080i and 1080p are definitely not supported, however. Many software dialogs are entirely unusable with resolutions lower than 800 x 600, in particular the ATI Catalyst Control Center (which makes fixing a resolution problem difficult at best).

The two problems I have with MCE interaction with the touchscreen are (1) MCE is designed for arrow keys, not mouse movements, and (2) I can't seem to get the Theater mode working with MCE on my ATI 1800XL card when viewing TV etc. in MCE.

To give you an idea of the first problem, try using nothing but a mouse to control MCE. From the main menu page, it's not very easy to make the menu items scroll unless you can up-arrow or down-arrow. Most lists (e.g. songs, shows, etc.) have miniature up/down page buttons at the bottom, but the menus themselves do not. Also, depending on the touchscreen left-click configuration, simply running your finger across the screen can result in unwanted selections. But again, the plastic pen solves this quite well.

The second problem appears to be something with MCE. When I view a movie in WMP, I get the expected behavior in either clone mode or extended mode, with the movie playing in either the window (clone - non-theater), or full-screen (clone - theater or extended - theater) on the second screen. But in MCE, video only plays on the second screen in clone mode. That means that your primary and secondary displays are limited to the same resolution, which in turn means that you can't get better than 1600 x 1200 res on an attached HDTV. So no 1080i (or p).

If anyone has a solution to this MCE problem, I'd love to hear it.


As for controlling windows, I haven't had a problem with that but I will note that you shouldn't run the taskbar in auto-hide mode, because it is difficult to "touch" the very last line of pixels on the desktop, so unhiding the taskbar with just the touchpad can be difficult.