Several interesting news concerning 1394 that I missed last week. First we have the 1394 Trade Association releasing new specifications for set top boxes and tools to test compliance. Then we have the FCC allowing companies to make it an optional requirement. The timing of the two announcements doesn’t make sense to me. 1394 compliance is still required if you […]
Read morePretty basic stuff for most of us here, but useful to pass along to someone you know who may not be as technologically savvy. Buying the right HDTV is actually much harder than walking into a store and laying down some plastic—and certainly much harder than it should be. But there are quite a few things you can do […]
Read moreIf you don’t care about 3D or 24p and still want all the plasma goodness – you owe it to yourself to take a hard look at the G20/G25 family. Panasonic’s G20 series is strictly 2D and offers 50- and 54-inch models. As of this writing, they are exclusive to Best Buy stores. If you shop for either set […]
Read moreIt seems that it’s been a while since I last updated my blog. At that time I was looking at running the various Mythtv-based linux distrobutions. Among the distrobutions that I had mentioned are Mythdora, Mythbuntu and LinHES. At the time, I had tested Mythdora. Well, I recently found myself with a bit of free time so I decided to load […]
Read moreWow, I can’t remember any other week with this many Blu-ray releases of which I barely recognized any of them. I saw Beautiful, that was a pretty entertaining and messed up movie. But the pick is obvious… MissingRemote’s Pick of the Week Hot Tub Time Machine Plot is simple–4 buddies enter a hot tub only to be transported back in […]
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The question has been posed more times than I can count, and part of the fault lies on the HDMI specification itself which took computer manufacturers seemingly forever to figure it out. The holy grail of getting Blu-ray from your HTPC to your home theater was always being able to bit stream HD audio formats, such as Dolby TrueHD and […]
Read moreNoctua has an excellent reputation for making quiet fans, so if you have a full height HTPC case, this might be the right HSF for you. Noctua’s NH-U9B SE2 cooler is a special edition of the NH-U9B cooler for HTPCs or smaller cases. The NH-U9B SE2 now comes with two of Noctua’s NF-B9 92mm fans and adds support for […]
Read moreIf you have the budget, adding a SSD to your HTPC is a solid way to improve performance and best of all they are completely silent and produce very little heat. It is hard to believe that almost two years has passed since we first rounded-up some of the first solid state drive offerings for the PC. Since that […]
Read moreSilverstone has been making HTPC cases for the longest time, and they’re always a pretty solid option. They make some that are roomy enough to handle any specs you’d want to throw at it. And at $140 it’s not an unreasonable asking price either, although no volume knobs or VFD displays…if that sorta stuff interests you. Today we look at […]
Read moreLooks like eMachines is jumping on the SFF Nettop bandwagon. Priced at $299, doesn’t seem like an awful idea. And with decent enough specs, HDMI and an Nvidia graphics…maybe it can do the HTPC duties. Inside the small HTPC is an AMD Athlon II NEO CPU, GeForce 9200 graphics, and 2GB of RAM. In addition to HTPC duties, eMachines says […]
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