The idea of universal remotes is nothing new, as is the idea of interactive smartphones. What has only been done sparingly, and mainly with home theater PC (HTPC) focused consumers in mind, has been the leveraging of your smartphone with your home theater. Griffin has made a name for itself for more general consumer electronics components, but is aiming to […]
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Zediva, the company that wanted to break into the DVD rental business by streaming DVDs being played in remote DVD players rather than renting physical discs has been shut down permanently. We were pretty pessimistic about Zediva’s chances when the preliminary injunction was issued, but this injunction makes things final. Of course, the MPAA wouldn’t be satisfied with simply shutting […]
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Even before Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer’s Preview at the Build Conference, Steven Sinofsky had let the world know that although Windows Media Center would be returning with Windows 8, we would not see it in the first pre-release builds. One of the questions that was left unanswered was whether Media Center would return in essentially the same integrated […]
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The best part about today’s giant hard drives is not having to compromise on the quality of my music encoding. I typically encode with WMA Lossless simply because it works with all of my systems and devices. However, I know many geeks prefer to use FLAC because of its open source roots. Open source advocates now have the choice of […]
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A few weeks ago Microsoft dropped the veil on its Xbox TV plans, and at the same time released a video that provided a glimpse of the previously unannounced Xbox Companion App for Windows Phone 7. A few days ago Microsoft and Nokia had a big shindig at Nokia World to show off Nokia’s new Windows phones and Microsoft posted […]
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It seems no media streamer is complete these days without an accompanying mobile device app, and the Boxee Box is no exception. We liked the Boxee iPad when it launched a few months ago and it just keeps getting better. Like many other streamer apps, Boxee for iPad now includes remote control functionality, along with a collection of improvements to remote […]
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When Google TV launched last year, I had very little interest. The Logitech Revue was the least expensive Google TV device, but at $299 there was no way I could see it competing with an HTPC for the power user or the Roku for entry-level user. It just seemed destined to get squeezed out in the middle. Then the reviews […]
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I recently had the opportunity to utilize my extensive (though, not bullet proof) backup regimen and it managed to save my bacon in a fairly substantial way. While this certainly is not isolated to HTPCs, I thought it might be a good idea to remind people of the importance of regular, reliable backups. As everyone surely knows by now, SageTV […]
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Normally this would be a sick Halloween trick, but this is no treat either. Starting Monday October 31st Redbox is to raise its DVD rental prices by 20%. Going from a $1 a day rental model and bumping up its rental prices of DVD movies to $1.20 a day. You would have thought that services like Rebox would have learned […]
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The only reason I would probably ever pick up an Apple TV would be because of the tweaking options provided by the various software packages that have sprung up around the Apple TV. FireCore has built their business around a collection of such packages. FireCore has dropped updates today for two of their Apple TV software packages, the Seas0nPass jailbreak […]
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