The Daily Button: October 29th, 2008

Stay tuned for another great guide from Matt. After I finish posting up The Daily Button Matt’s guide will follow in a few minutes :).

Content

In a yawner of aannouncement, Hulu has announced they now have movie trailers . Woo Hooo

Home Theater

Keeping wires out of site is an absolute neccesity in the WAF department. It is a good thing that CEPro has an article up on how to feed wires through inulated walls .I read the article and I am still not brave enough to tackle drilling up walls.

I beleive S&V’s review of the Onkyo TX-SR706 was posted up in the forum the other, however, if you missed it you should check out the review here. The MSRP on this bad boy falls in at $899 and you get all the latest and greatest CODEC support, HDMI switching and 1080p upconverting.

If you are interested in a receiver that costs about twice as much and adds multi-room audio, a higher end video processor and a high-end automatic room compensation syste, check out Audioholic’s review of the Sherwood Newcastle R-972 receiver.

HTPCs & Extenders

Remember that little Xbox 360 announcement with Netflix? It got a little better with the announcement of Netflix having 300 HD movies on tap for streaming when the new UI launches.

If you are too lazy to scroll down, you will want to check out the Windows 7 Media center preview info we posted yesterday.

We have talked about PlayOn in the past as a means to stream Hulu (and others) content to your game consoles to compliment your existing media. Lifehacker has a bit more info . Remember the price to play this time around is $30 bucks. Reading comments on Lifehacker seem to indicate that getting it to work is a mixed bag.

Plex, the Mac XBMC fork, has release V 0.5.22. New in this versions is tweaks to the H,264 decoder, a skin update and of course the usual bug fixes.

Hardware

The video card market has never been better for HTPC enthusiasts with IGP and cards much below $100 offering full H.264 offloading from the CPU.Heck, you can even eke out decent performance in most modern video games a $100 card. Enough talk, check out Bjorn 3D’s review of the 4670 from AMD.

Another solid budget card to add to the mix is AMD’s recently announced 4830. The Tech Report took a look at it and found it to be a worthy competitor in the mainstream budget arena. You will also want to check out Elite Bastard’s review.