Thursday Podcast Roundup

Joining me this week is Oebele Beetstra from OABSoftware talking about his great range of apps for Windows Media Center. Oebele has been developer for Media Center since the XP days and has a great collection of apps including email, Twitter and stock apps.

When we first started our podcast there were five competing technologies vying for your living room. Today its pretty much down to LCD and Plasma. Most would say LCD is running away with the market but Plasma is hanging in there. So what about LED? LED is not a new TV technology but rather a different way to light the LCD. A Liquid Crystal Display is a glass panel that works by controlling the opacity of segments of itself by varying the electrical signal. Each individual segment, called a pixel, acts as a shutter to control the amount of light being passed through. The light source is what we will be focusing on today

Getting the most our of your HD system and the Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark Blu-ray setup and test disc.

We go back to High Def Digest for our next story, too. Amazon accidentally outed pricing on three of Samsung’s four new BD players for 2010. Most notable is the BD-C6500, which promises 15-second boot and disc load times, for $299 and the BD-C6900, likely to be one of the first 3D players available, for $399. Does the pricing on the C6900 indicate where the 3D market will start for BD decks?

Robert reveals his Silent Home Theater PC Parts, iPad: Is this the ultimate remote control? Recording Over The Air HDTV, Will your next HDTV be 21:9? The Blu-ray Releases for February 2, 2010.

We start this year out with Ian’s discussing some of his HDMI findings at CES and, like everyone else lately, we look at the implications of 3-D on the requirements – especially for HDMI 1.4. We then start our dive into the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) aspects of HDMI.

Far be it from us to stay away from the latest juicy new idea in home theater technology, 3D. It’s been all over the news and the blogs for a while, recently culminating with a huge display at CES. Whether or not the technology actually catches on is a discussion for a different day. Today we’re going to talk about the technology behind it. The human eye is an amazing thing. Put two of them working together and things really come into focus (pardon the pun). The truth is that your brain uses the fact that each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle to create depth perception. This whole “two images at once from slightly different angles” concept is the basis behind 3D technology.

Even though I promised not to bring it up, Josh forced the issue and we end up spending part of this week’s show talking about Apple’s latest device, the iPad. While neither Josh nor I can personally see a lot of use for the device when compared to your standard netbook, some people seem to think it’s a great thing. We at least try to relate it to Media Center as with the right apps, it could make an interesting addition to your digital life.

No guests this week, but there’s still plenty of HD related topics to talk about. Of course that includes 3D, but after that we had time to discuss a new Blu-ray player from Oppo, future possibilities for digital distribution and exactly what we’re expecting from NBC’s costly Winter Olympics coverage. After that the talk turns to the legal aspects of the latest action from the FCC, and Microsoft’s patent infringement lawsuit. We wrap things up with an evaluation of DirecTV’s multiroom beta, and just what happened to all the hype over connected HDTVs in 2010.