Much to my wife’s displeasure (especially as we’ve house hunting lately) I refuse to live in a place where we can’t center the main room around the home theater install. For those with a less permissive spouse, Atlantic Technology’s new down-firing might be just the thing to get good room shaking bass into a compromised space – trust me, your […]
Read more
As more content becomes available via search, it is increasingly important to use a real keyboard to interact with devices in the home theater. Unfortunately, with most keyboards lacking the capability to control infrared (IR) components, they can only supplement a traditional remote (or series of remotes) which reduces the value of when applied to the problem they are intended […]
Read more
Every time a new release of HTPC Blu-ray software comes out I am amused by the standalone v. HTPC discussions that crop up here and at AVS Forum. While there is validity on both sides of the argument, there is one point that doesn’t get much mention, which makes the PC side a clear winner for me – SlySoft’s AnyDVD […]
Read more
If you stay on top of the current deals, you surely noticed that both of the InfiniTV models dropped $100 over the last few days on Amazon and other retailers. One-off discounts aren’t generally news, but today it became official with Ceton announcing that they are changing the MSRP of their Digital Cable Tuners (DCT) to $199 making it the […]
Read more
My first exposure to DLNA devices was lacking. It was the clunky standard that everyone “supported” in their own way, but no one really did well enough to call “working”. Fortunately it has slowly evolved on both the device and software layers to the place we are today, where DLNA is actually useful for many things like control and media […]
Read more
Given the positive conversation I had with SIGMA DESIGNS at CES I was a little surprised to see a rumor floating around that the SMP8910 had been suspended. If true, this would be a major setback for those waiting for Dune HD’s Pro media player so I fired off an email to find out. Fortunately, my contact at SIGMA was […]
Read more
When we dropped in on Onkyo during CES I was impressed with InstaPrevue and MHL, but a little disappointed in my ability (or better said, lack thereof) to pry any details from them regarding the 2012 lineup. Given the vague answers received, I was a bit concerned that those features wouldn’t make it into enough of their products to really […]
Read more
With AMD’s Trinity APU/IPG coming in the near future it is great to see what OEMs are planning to do with the part. No word on price or timing, but Arctic has released a picture and some [subject to change without notice] specs for their next generation small form factor (SFF) HTPC built on the CPU/GPU combo. I think it […]
Read more
Netflix has provided over the top (OTT) video streaming via its “Watch Instantly” service for quite sometime, but until yesterday there was little to fundamentally differentiate that service (besides convenience, and the need for high-speed Internet) from a trip to the video store or the mailbox. Introducing original programming changed that – moving the company in a more interesting, welcome, […]
Read more
When we were at CES, CyberLink was showing a beta version of PowerDVD 12. There were some advancements in the product versus its predecessor, PowerDVD 11 – most notably automatic refresh rate switching, but the best part was that they gave me a copy to bring back and test on a variety of systems to provide a preview of what […]
Read more