By Mike Garcen | Published Friday, 03 September 2010
Amulet Devices Remote Control
"Voice activated." In the past just the words alone have made many cringe as implementations have been fairly weak and suffered from a myriad of different variables in the environment which made performance lackluster. Amulet Devices looks to change that with their own Remote Control and Media Center (MC) software implementation by embedding a microphone inside the remote as well as designing their own interface for controlling it. The potential for voice has always been there, and it looks like Amulet may be the first to get it right.
If you know of a podcast you would like added to the weekly roundup, please do e-mail me at mike (at) missingremote dot com and I'll make sure to add it's RSS to my list!
By Andrew Van Til | Published Sunday, 29 August 2010
SageTV STP-HD300
Those familiar with SageTV know that one of its major strengths is an consumer electroincs (CE) style extender, the STP-HD200, which really extends the entire experience – supporting everything from DVDs with menu support, to BDMV (Blu-ray folders) and MKV with PGS (aka Blu-ray) subtitles. The STP-HD200 was not perfect however, especially for those who use standby on the SageTV server or connect it directly to a TV, so when the opportunity came up to get an early look at their upcoming STP-HD300 which fixes both of those issues (and a whole lot more) it was impossible to say no.
Click through to watch the unboxing and read the full review.
By Mikinho | Published Wednesday, 01 September 2010
I'll update with the official specs when Apple updates their site but the new Apple TV was demonstrated today at the Apple Fall Event.
It is basically small, silent, "attractive" and cheap. It will be released in 4 weeks for $99. It can stream from iTunes and Netflix and play content from your network as well.
No Blu-ray support so out of the question for me but at $99 it is very difficult to compete against for those without an existing HTPC network or watch Live TV using a STB.
Apple TV has been redesigned to be small in size but big on entertainment. Rent from the largest selection of HD movies — many available the same day they come out on DVD. Watch Netflix titles instantly. Rent TV shows, commercial free in HD. And stream photos and music from your computer to your widescreen TV. Best of all, Apple TV is just $99.
By Daniel Schoerner | Published Wednesday, 01 September 2010
It's not often we post news from the Wall Street Journal, but this was smack on the front of the second section today and seemed worth sharing. I'm looking forward to seeing what Amazon can field for a subscription service. It'll be intersting to see which appliances can connect to the service, and what content they can get on the platform. Becuase at the end of the day it's really all about the content. Click through to read the full article at WSJ.com.
Amazon.com Inc. is working on a new subscription service that would deliver TV shows and movies over the Internet, ramping up the battle among Web companies to control entertainment in the living room.
The Internet retailer has in recent weeks pitched a Web-based subscription service to several major media companies, including General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, Time Warner Inc., News Corp. and Viacom Inc., among others, according to people with knowledge of the proposal.
By Mike Garcen | Published Wednesday, 11 August 2010
I'm not exactly clear on how this box is worth more than double of Patriot's Box Office with similar features, but hey...the interface at least isn't identical. I was concerned with the issues the reviewer had playing back Blu-ray filetypes.
You can pick up the Fusion HD for an MSRP of $219, with a little bit of variation if you shop around. It's a bit more expensive than other digital media players like the $149 WD TV Live HD, but it's a very different type of device. The biggest selling points for the Fusion HD, as far as I see it, are the playback of ISO files, BitTorrent functionality and the ability to install a two terabyte hard drive right into the unit. On these points it performs admirably.
By Mike Garcen | Published Wednesday, 01 September 2010
Today must be the day of pairs. Ok, maybe I'm a day late on this news, but great news for you free HTPC software fans as XBMC and Plex (for Mac) have released new builds. Looks like Plex ran into some issues with theirs, but appear to be actively working on fixing it. Either way it's great to see both groups continuing development.
Our mirrors (a big thanks to them!) were hammered badly as tens of thousands of downloaders tried to get the latest release, so in the morning we moved the main download site to S3 to ease of the pressure on the mirrors and get the app into people’s hands faster.
The improvements are too many to name, but head over to the milestone page to get an idea. By far the biggest new feature is the Add-ons system. Our community is full of talented script-writers, skinners, and designers; we wanted XBMC to display their full potential. The result is a powerful and flexible system that allows for complete customization of the XBMC experience. Gone are the days of digging for the latest version of buggy plugins, or incomplete skins in our forums. Most of our users probably never even made it that far.
By Mike Garcen | Published Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Right off the bat, I know I'm going to get a hard time for NOT picking Sam Raimi's awesomely classic Evil Dead. In my defense, I loved that movie, but I really didn't like it nearly as much as I had hoped having seen Army of Darkness first. So there you go. House 5th season is a great one as usual, and can't think of a worse movie idea than Marmaduke. Heard good things about Sons of Anarchy but never watched it.
Michael Caine has been around and played all sorts of characters, from ring leaders to Bruce Wayne's butler, always doing an awesome job of getting into the character. I had heard nothing but positive reviews about Harry Brown, but it was still as good as expected. The plot is Harry lives in an area in England run by a small gang which torments the citizens (it's better than I'm making it sound), and then Harry can't take it anymore. Great movie with good amounts of drama and suspense.
By Andrew Van Til | Published Wednesday, 01 September 2010
Am I the only one who really wants a job at the FCC today? They got their grubby hands on some of the first of the cool new remotes coming out--the Boxee remote and the Amulet Devices Voice Controlled remote! Hopefully there are no hiccups for either and we'll see them soon to market.
Amulet Device's intriguing voice-activated remote for Windows Media Center has long since missed itsoriginal ship date,
but it just popped up at the FCC, complete with product shots and the
user manual. Besides providing typical universal features like IR
learning, as a package the rechargeable battery-powered controller, USB
dongle, and companion Windows Media Center Plugin will allow users to
operate their home theater by simply speaking commands to the remote's
built-in microphone
Now we have some encouraging news for its planned November release date:
the QWERTY remote has hit the FCC. Called simply the "Remote
controller" (model numbers DSM-221, DSM-22), it looks to have passed
with flying colors, the FCC celebrating by ripping it to bits and
photographing every piece of exposed silicon.
By Andrew Van Til | Published Wednesday, 01 September 2010
I really enjoy getting a myriad of perspectives on anything I'm considering (does anyone else subscribe to "owners" threads on AVSForum before becoming an owner?) picking up, so it was cool to see Brent's take on the HD300.
The SageTV Extenders including the HD200 and now the HD300 extends
your Home Theater PC (HTPC) to your TV using a consumer electronics
device that is crazy-simple to set up and easy to use. Support for DVDs
(ripped or streamed) with menus, Blu-ray Disks (BDMV ripped or
streamed), as well as the more difficult formats such as MKV, FLAC,
files with subtitles etc just work. All at a lower price than required
with a full-blown HTPC computer.
Have you been wondering what are the different offerings between Hulu free, Hulu Plus & Netflix? Well here's a pretty darned long comparison chart showing off just exactly that.
Free Hulu doesn't have too much in the way of full seasons, but they're not without their gems. Especially older shows like Highlander and Doogie Howser. Though, putting Doogie Howser behind a paywall would be as cruel as requiring a subscription to Xbox Live just to play that Netflix Streaming you already pay for on your TV.
Plex is pretty sexy for Mac users, and they've been working hard on the next version. While you wait, here are some teasers of some skins some developers have created...pretty sweet stuff.
As if helping us with MediaStream wasn’t enough, they also have their
hands in their own skins as well as Plex ports of other skins, such as
the popular PlexAeon. Also adding to the skinning talent is Marc
(El Massman) who is, by his own description, “getting a load of bad-ass
skins ready for Plex 9″. Because we’ve worked so closely with the
skinners, porting over skins to Plex isn’t that hard at all, and
advanced features such as the media flagging is trivial to add.
All three of these great guys took some time to send me sexy
screenshots from the skins they’re readying (or already have finished)
for Plex/Nine, and without further ado, here you have them (not bad,
right?):
Pretty interesting report here on how people are digesting content. No surprise that the older crowd is much more stuck on actual Live TV watching than the younger crowd, but the numbers for TV are still over 50%. Wonder how long before that drops even more.
The alternatives to live TV are growing and basic cable is under assault, but no one single competing technology is taking over. People watch DVDs 14 percent of the time, online (including streaming video from services like Netflix) 13 percent of the time, saved programs on their DVRs 12 percent, and on-demand cable 6 percent. The survey breaks down online viewing into video from online sources like YouTube (9 percent) and streaming video from services like Netflix and Hulu (4 percent). For 18-to-34-year-olds, online video makes up 16 percent of their viewing time, and streaming video makes up another 7 percent.
This, dear friends, is a sad, sad day. ATI,
the name of hope for all PC gamers who were sick and tired of NVIDIA
rebadging the same GPU over the past couple of years, is to be no more.
The callous souls over at AMD have decided that our little consumer
brains aren't sophisticated enough to handle two awesome brands, so
they're just axing the use of the ATI moniker from here on out. Product
line names will be retained, with the Radeon and FirePro branding still
intact, but ATI Eyefinity will now be known as AMD Eyefinity. The first
graphics cards to, erm, benefit from the new nomenclature will ship "later this year," and the whole thing is said to have been motivated by AMD's move to Fusion APUs
-- hybrid CPU and GPU chips -- where it's considered beneficial to have
a unified branding strategy. Great, but did anyone consider the fact
that the graphics wars will now be fought between two teams wearing
green jerseys?
By Andrew Van Til | Published Monday, 30 August 2010
It's not very often that something lives up to the "Ultimate" billing (cough... Vista), but GeekTonic's guide to the fall TV schedule does it in spades. If you're like me and never watch commercials this is how I find out what's new.
Here’s how this works. With this post you get a listing of all of the
major US TV network premieres for September through December 2010. I
give you the premiere date and time, TV network and the season number
(in Season Premiere Column) for each series. The list you see on this
page is sorted by date. All times are for US Eastern Time. There are
some shows that may have a special premiere date and then follow later
that week in their normal time slot day - in these cases I only show the
first premiere.
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