The Daily Button: November 5th, 2008

Content

Hgh-Def Digest brings us news a review of a Will Ferrel holiday classic the Blu-ray version of Elf.

Home Theater

Having put up with what only can be described as anemic sound crap sound from my LCD for a year now, I can now see the benefit of installing on- wall speakers. I am not sure I am ready to pony up $7000 for an in-wall speaker set but S&V certainly thinks Totem’s Tribe speaker set is worth the pennies.

I must have been sleeping the last few days, I missed S&V’s review of Epson’s all-in-one theater system. For $6999, Epson’s Enseble HD comes with a screen, speaker set, 1080p projector, and universal remote. Not a bad deal considering what you get, its worth a read to check out what the individual components are.

If building a Blu-ray HTPC isn’t to your liking, you may want to check Amazon’s BDP-S300 + 4 movie deal for $142. This deal comes courtesy of Electronic House.

HTPC & Extenders

Media Extenders, such as Popcorn Hour, that handle just about any file format are getting pretty common these day. What impresses me is that they are getting down to the $100 price range. Why aren’t HTPC software makers taking notice? Microsoft? Maybe SageTV’s next extender will be based around this. At any rate, check out Mad Hat’s review of the new WD Media Player.

I reported a couple of days ago that Webguide was not dead and here is a video to prove it :).

If the price of entry for WHS was a little steep, you will be happy to know you can pick up a copy for $99 at New Egg.

iPhone and Open Source, those are two words that drive geeks crazy with nerd love. In this case, the combo is referring to the newly release iPhone interface for MediaPortal.

Hardware

Brent, of Geek Tonic fame, has a review up of the ever famous stalwart in the HTPC IR world, the USB-UIRT . 

Seagate’s newer 1.5TB may be tempting but The Tech Report is coming across reports that the new drive maybe causing freezing problems.

CPU3D and AMDZone both have reviews of the 4830 up. This is the 4850’s little brother with all the advanced CODEC offload