I really wanted to like Hisense when the opportunity to swing by the booth arose. After all, what's not to like about the promise of huge, cheap TV that very closely mirror Samsung's outstanding industrial design. Unfortunately, I struggled to find a better case of the "get what you pay for" rule, with some of the lowest quality displays I witnessed at CES 2013. Now to be fair, there are certainly are times and places where a size matters more than quality (dorm rooms, digital signage, etc.), but I'm very confident that my home isn't one of them.

Hisense also stood out as the only vendor at CES (that I witnessed) where the before and after shots actually looked better in the before scenario. It's really hard to see in the "U-LED" shot (on the click through) that while the display on the left does have better blacks, it also crushes detail so much that the brighter, washed out HD on the right produced a higher quality image in person.

I saw a few new applications and some cool technology demos at ArcSoft's booth the most interesting was naturally TotalMedia Theatre 6 (TMT6) for Windows 8 "Metro" UI. Unlike CyberLink's touch focused player, this player is x86 with ArcSoft waiting to see if RT reaches critical mass before investing in ARM ports of their codec/container technology. There is a version of TMT6 for the desktop planned, but won't be available until much later in the year.

UDPATE

It looks like there will be a TMT6 for the desktop (coming sooner than I noted) and although the "Metro" app was sporting TMT6 branding will not be labeled this way when it arrives - more on the next page.

Click through for some galleries and a video of what ArcSoft was showing at CES 2013.

It's always interesting to stop by CyberLink's suite at CES, they have good demos and I like to know what they're working on in our space. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot that we're allowed to talk about publicly (yet) so for now it's just some pictures (on the next page) of their "Metro" version of PowerDVD Mobile for Windows 8. The cool thing about this application is that it brings container/codec support not available out-of-the-box to W8 x86/RT tablets and touch PCs. The UI was responsive and made it easy to play with the entire media library through a single, consistent UI.

Before CES SiliconDust teased us with a press release about DLNA + DCTP-IP enabling the HDHomeRun PRIME to expose live digital cable streams to devices without the hassle of implementing DRI. I got a chance to stop by, see the upcoming HDHomeRun products, get a demo of what will be delivered initially and talk about where Project Connect is headed long term. Some photos and a breakdown are on the next page.

There's always something cool just around the corner from Dune HD, so it is one of the first companies that makes it on my CES list and this go round was no exception. The two most interesting items have already be covered but there was a more that was worth mentioning too. Click through to get the rundown from our meeting with Dune HD and some picutures of the devices they brought along to the show.

It's hard to argue with the "just works" media playback experience Dune HD players provide, but the lack of a native movie "jukebox" harms the user experience. Third party solutions like My Movies and Zappiti (to name two) work around this issue, but unfortunately there was no way to force them to launch when the player starts up, requiring users to browse through the UI to find and start them - until now. Responding to user feedback Dune HD added the feature to its latest firmware launching soon on new players and coming a little later to the existing user base.

Click through to see more pictures of the upcoming firmware.

Some of the more exciting news to myself and other fellow HDHomeRun users they announced that Project:Connect will begin next week with software download on their website for new and existing hardware users of HDHomeRun Prime HDHR3-CC that will enable DLNA and DTCP-IP support. After the download users can browse the channel list and play live TV on any MPEG2-capable Digital Media Player (DMP) and Digital Media Renderer (DMR) devices. The PlayStation 3 will support DTCP-IP and will be able to play protected channels.

Andrew and Mike will be sending over some pictures later this week of this in action.

Click through to see the full Press Release