Thursday Podcast Roundup, March 11th 2010

MythTV vs Tivo vs AppleTV. MythMote Andorid remote control application.

We start out with a whimsical look at the Sony ApacolyPS3 (thanks to @doblu for the catchy title). A flaw in the calendar system rendered older PS3s useless for the better part of a day. 12 years later, Y2K finally catches up to us.

3DTVs get their big launch at Best Buy this week, but we kick off with talk of TiVo’s latest legal victory. We do talk 3D for some time though and can’t wait to see if the in store demos live up to what we saw at CES — we also take some time to try to clear up some confusion in regards to HDMI, 3D and all the requirements and standards.

There has been a lot of confusion regarding CEC, proprietary implementations (cross-vendor compatibility), and interoperability. Fortunately, there finally is a trend with many of the newer products to work across different vendors’ implementations. It still takes some sort of UI to set the CEC relationships up initially and certain vendors do a better job at that than others, but they are improving all of the time. My view is that we finally are starting to see a workable cross-product CEC solution from several vendors which actually lives up to the original vision conceived by the HDMI founders.

A new TiVo isn’t something that happens everyday — in fact the last time was almost three years ago — and because so many love and hate their TiVo at the exact same time, these same people get very passionate about the changes they expect. This is a task we weren’t willing to take on our own, so we invited Engadget Classic Editors Nilay and Paul (one is a die hard TiVo user and the other actually went to the event) and just for a little outside perspective, we also had TiVo expert Dave Zatz. Who’s been following the company as long as anyone we know. We went a little long and deviated off topic into the land of Media Center a few times, but overall there is some podcast gold in here — if we can say so ourselves.

Understanding HDMI and the latest improvements to the home theater cable specification. Guest: Jeff Park, HDMI Evangelist and Business Development Manager of HDMI Licensing, LLC.

We start out with a look at a great article from Anandtech on THX certification on HDTVs. The company started by Lucasfilm to ensure theaters perform to spec evntually branched out into home video and audio. And now that the THX Certified badge is out there, what does it mean? Is a THX Certified HDTV something that would draw you toward a purchase? Or is it more of a marketing piece now?

Can tiny speakers deliver quality sound? Finally: a quality Gangs of New York transfer! The difference between plasma and LCD refresh rates. And the Blu-ray releases for March 9th, 2010.

Last week Braden wrote that Cablevision is planning on rolling out network DVR (Cablevision To Roll Out RS-DVR In April) functionality in April. This technology has got us excited because it shows that Cable is pushing itself to compete with Satellite, FiOS and U-Verse. One area that cable still falls a little short when compared to these other services is the number of HD channels they offer. A new technology called Switched Digital Video is being deployed that will allow cable companies to increase the number of HD channels they offer. But not every is happy about it.

Back for the first week of March and while news is slow, we’ve decided to take a look at some of the great plugins that are available both within the 10 foot interface, and that simply compliment Media Center. Whether we’re talking about metadata retrieval, content management or adding new functions, the apps we cover during this show are just a sample of what’s out there. You’ll find links to all the applications we discuss right below.