Well you know HD quality issues from cable and satellite providers has hit an all time high of public awareness when Crankshaft, a comic strip that focuses on a cranky senior citizen and his middle-aged children, gets their jabs in on overly compressed HDTV channels. I opened up the paper today at work to see this comic: This is clearly depicting […]
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The HQV Benchmark DVD is probably the best and most objective video processing test available today. Unfortunately there are still subjective comparisons that need to be made to give a final rating. Of course reference images are given to compare against, and if you see something that has totaly failed it is obvious. The less obvious is when the scores allow […]
Read moreJust kicking around some ideas for what would be an ideal next gen optical format (HD DVD and/or Blu-ray) ready HTPC. This is of course somewhat hypothetical as, alas, I don't have the hand's on knowledge… yet. This is culled from what I know from informal testing, user reports, and decoding performance benchmarks available on the web. Feel free to […]
Read moreChris Lanier has the second part of this excellent article on getting some basic home automation going with, of course, a Media Center PC as the controller. It's pretty slick. For the software side I will be using Media Center to do everything (naturally), and mControl from Embedded Automation is my plug-in of choice. I’ve got a copy from Embedded […]
Read moreAn interesting tidbit from AVZombie says that the 2nd gen Wii will offer DVD playback It won’t play them when it launches in the UK, but a second generation version of the Nintendo Wii games console will offer DVD playback, when it goes on sale in Japan late 2007. The feature is unlikely to stay a Japanese exclusive for […]
Read moreLooks like those in the UK might be getting some nice Fiber to the Neighborhood cable based Internet tech… Cable telecoms giant Telewest/NTL, to be rebranded as part of the Virgin empire next Spring, has confirmed that it is currently trialling 50Mb broadband technology. It expects to have the new service, which it says “blows our rivals out of the water” available to […]
Read moreBlockbuster Video this week announced two significant upgrades to its rental programs. First, Blockbuster Online users are now allowed to return movies either through the mail or into a Blockbuster store. The "Total Access" service includes one free in-store rental per month, but customers are awarded an additional free in-store rental for each movie returned to a Blockbuster store. Also […]
Read moreCortexa Technology has delivered the dream of a truly digital home for American homeowners. For the first time, home buyers can enjoy a fully functional digital home for about a few thousand dollars or about 2 % of the cost of an average home in the United States. With the launch of its newest home control system, Cortexa Technology leverages […]
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EngadgetHD (formerly HDBeat) has a cool article about how to change out your TiVo Series 3 CableCARD enabled DVR with a larger hard drive. The Series 3 shockinly only comes with a 250GB drive, which as many of us know, HDTV will fill pretty quickly. As much as we love the TiVo Series3, for $800 we would like a bigger […]
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Thomson just introduced a new H.264 encoder for high definition optical disc mastering. H.264 is widely regarded as the trickiest of the next generation codecs. So a new toolset that can help create good looking 1080p movies is A-OK with me! TIGER AVC, co-developed by Thomson Corporate Research laboratories and Technicolor, is an optical disc compression tool that supports both […]
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