The title says it all, AnandTech got their hands on the lowest end versions of the new Radeon HD 4000 series and they liked what the saw for HTPC uses. AnandTech Like the rest of the Radeon HD 4000 series (4870, 4850, 4670 and 4650) the new Radeon HD 4550 and 4350 both support 8-channel LPCM over HDMI. This makes […]
Read moreChris Lanier recently summed up the poor misguided path of Media Center since becoming a part of Windows Vista: Media Center’s number one problem has been failing to define itself in the market. Enthusiasts and power users want features not currently provided by Media Center, most of which Microsoft has shown little interest in actually implementing, and they want it […]
Read moreWell AnandTech showed up with a nice little why proper HDMI audio support matters article. The article has some good graphics to show how the flow of protected data works. One nitpick is that they seem to use "protected audio path" synonymously with support for bitstreaming the advanced audio codecs, which isn’t accurate. They also spend all their time talking about audio from Blu-ray discs […]
Read moreCNET are the lucky SOBs who got their hands on Samsung’s new 950 series LCD, this is their second generation local dimming LED backlight LCD set. This new technology is what is geting LCDs into Plasma territory for black levels, I talked about it recently in htpc_user’s thread about getting a new HDTV. Cnet was quite happy with the TV: CNET In short, […]
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AMD announced the mid-range (and perfect for HTPC use) 4600 series cards today. Below are pertinant excerpts from their PR: The ATI Radeon HD 4670 and ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics cards feature AMD’s TeraScale graphics engine, with 320 stream processing cores, and are based on AMD’s advanced second generation 55nm process. The result is that even in today’s most […]
Read moreFile this one under "I’ll believe it when I see it", Chris Lanier has the scoop from a post over at The Green Button by Charlie Nilsson an MS employee about Switched Digital Video. Chris Lanier’s Blog We [Microsoft] are working to enable support for the CableLabs SDV Tuning Adaptor for Windows Media Center Digital Cable Tuners, ensuring that Windows […]
Read moreArcSoft’s Upscaling Technology, SimHD, Is Being Demonstrated at NVISION 2008 FREMONT, Calif.–(Business Wire)– ArcSoft, Inc. announced today that ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre, its universal multimedia player, now supports NVIDIA CUDA which provides DVD upscaling through Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Devising its SimHD post processing technology with NVIDIA CUDA, ArcSoft is accelerating TotalMedia Theatre’s DVD upscale performance on GPUs to deliver viewers […]
Read moreLong time home theater information staple Audio Video Science Forum just suffered a massive setback today: AVS Forum Community: On the morning of August 11, AVS Forum suffered a major failure in the database and backup storage. As such, we have no choice but to recover from August 2nd. This represents tens of thousands of lost posts and new threads for […]
Read moreThe Digital Bits has a bit of good news for Blu-ray disc prices from Warner The Digital Bits The other bit of good news is that Warner Home Video is apparently going to be dropping the price of their Blu-ray Disc software in the 4th quarter, as part of an aggressive holiday sales push. Starting in September, consumer prices for […]
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Lucky man and industry professional Gary "HD Guru" Merson has gotten his hands on one of the newest 9th generation Pioneer "Kuro" plasmas. These babies boast even darker blacks then the already very impressive 8th generation Kuro and a thinner bezel too. HDGuru So, how does the overall picture quality stack up? To quote Tina Turner, it’s “simply the best” HDTV I have […]
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