Thursday Podcast Roundup,April 8th 2010

Interview with Cecil Watson of the LinHES project. Dan talks about upgrading his RAID setup to bigger hard drives. Pat will be speaking at SELF.

We finally are starting to understand the relationship of HDMI 1.4 to the requirements of 3-D as we discuss what the vendors actually are delivering in Installment 027. Along the way, we also talk about some of the latest news like networking Ceton (or any CableCARD) tuners, how Microsoft is looking to their Azure services as a platform for delivering TV and content from the cloud to all three screens, and finally starting to see products that leverage HDMI’s CEC capabilities across multiple vendors’ product lines.

Latest Blu-ray releases, the new TIVO, plasma display news, streaming movies, and more. Guest: David Vaughn, Movie and Product Reviewer for UltimateAVmag.com and HomeTheaterMag.com.

Episode 71
is here and this week we’re joined by our special guest, Pete Stagman of
NEDMUG. Pete recently published an article that will walk you right
through the complete setup of a media center system from installing your
OS to the tweaks you should apply to get the best experience possible.
He shared some tips with us on the show this week that a lot of people
should find helpful.

We have a full crew this week but to be honest, we were all pretty tired so at times it may have seemed we weren’t all there. Fair warning. Even so, we start off the show by following up on our recent purchases including Jon’s HD2, Sheldon’s Nexus One, and the recent XPERIA X10 and HTC Legend unboxings. We also have some news on Zune, Windows Phone 7, Palm, and a little X10 tidbits. We promise to come back at full steam next week with some iPad impressions, but this should hold you over until then.

3D basketball is a sight to see, but since we can’t show it to you ourselves, we all get to live vicariously through Richard as he shares his experience. Verizon has sour grapes over 3D so of course we just have to make fun — it’s only fair. Pouting isn’t the only thing worthy of our ridicule though, people who think Apple has plans to release an HDTV are pretty high on the list as well.

By now you know that Ara has built himself a nice HTPC out of a Mac Mini. We’ve received a bunch of email asking us to define a similar system using a PC. There far more options using a PC than a Mac and they come in all shapes and sizes. Ara touted size and quiet operation as a major factor in his love of the Mac Mini. So when we saw that Dell had a box that was roughly the same size as a Mac Mini we ordered one and put it through its paces. The Dell Inspiron Zino HD we bought cost $747, about $150 more than the Mac Mini. The Dell comes with something you can’t get on a Mac, a Blu-ray drive.