Dec 14 2006

News - Top 10 Home Theater Gifts For Dad

Are you looking for a few last week gifts for dear old Dad? About.com has you covered with 10 gifts that should make any proud Papa smile. All in all the least is pretty good. However, I would have a few more items dedicated to a QUALITY out of the box sounding speaker set and receiver. I am sorry to say, but a brand name HDTV will almost look the same as another one with a little time spend tweaking. However, a quality speaker set and receiver will be a big improvement over a HTIB.

From the article: 

Toshiba HD-XA1 Flagship HD-DVD Player The Toshiba HD-XA1 provides consumers with access to HD video content on a DVD-type disc. HD-DVDs and DVDs (which are upscaled) look excellent via the XA-1's HDMI connection. However, despite the excellent improvement in video quality, it takes about a minute to boot up and load a disc. Also, the resolution and video output settings cannot be changed while a disc in play. The HD-XA1 is well-constructed and offers great video and audio quality, if you don't mind some of its operational quirks.

 
Dec 14 2006

News - Monster Cable Fires 120 People

Monster is getting a very bad rap these days, I am not sure how longer it will be before it hits the general public. With news stories of them firing 120 people, its certainly not helping the cause. 

From the article:

Recent layoffs at Monster Cable have led to some bad local TV press for the company, inciting one San Francisco city supervisor to label Head Monster Noel Lee as "the Grinch."

The company is being accused of letting go long-time employees with small severance packages, according to the report from KGO, the local ABC television station in the Bay Area.

Dec 14 2006

News - Unexpected Remodel Spurs Tuscan Dream House

I love reading about Home Theater remodels and the story behind them. They need to have a show like that on HGTV and then maybe my wife could get me to watch it more. That's the ticket! HT Design in HD! All kidding aside, if you are looking for a few ideas on  your Home Theater project, Electronic House's most recent article is a good place to start.

From the article:

Remarkably, the Curcios never go near that gear. Instead, they grab the nearest portable Crestron touchpanel to select the songs they want to hear. The interactive touchpanel shows them the album covers and the song titles of their entire CD collection, which is stored digitally on an Escient FireBall hard drive. The family can search for music by artist or genre or alphabetically.

They follow a similar routine for selecting movies. The touchpanel shows them the flicks available on their Sony 400-disc DVD player, they touch the movie they want, choose the TV they want to view it on, and viola, the show starts. Just as easily, they can use a Crestron touchpanel to create a combination of music and video. “Sometimes we’ll watch a Cubs game and listen to music in the same room,” Sheryl explains.

 

Dec 13 2006

News - The Best HD-DVD: Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift?

Ok, need a little faith from you all. If you can completely forget about the movie ITSELF, then the guys at Gizmodo say the features & extras make *gulp* The Fast & The Furious-Tokyo Drift, THE BEST HD-DVD to own. And there are a ton of images showing off the very neat features it has. Although, even with that....I don't know if it would make me ever want to watch it again. Innocent

While we can't vouch for the film itself, we can verify the disc's extras are amazing, including full storyboarding, technical specs on all the cars, GPS mapping of all the chase scenes, and the ability to watch some parts of the movie with repainted cars:

Read the rest & check out all the images Here

Dec 13 2006

News - The VCR Media Center PC

I gotta be honest, this doesn't impress me nearly these days as it did when I first saw these types of mods about 3-4 years ago. But nowadays, with all the HTPC cases available, both small & full form factor, and that look sexier, this just doesn't seem to be necessary. But still kudos for doing it. I still want to see an HTPC inside a nice looking Amp Cool

He frankensteined together a "ViVo", which is a Vista Media Center PC on a Celeron D 3.0 with a 250GB hard drive all running inside, you guessed it, a Panasonic VCR.

The only thing visibly different from the outside is the addition of a fan, and the fact that the VCR slot is actually a disc slot to pop out the DVD drive! Awesome, in a retro way—sort of like being able to go back in time and defile Marilyn Monroe's corpse while it was still warm.

 

vcrmce

 

Read the rest here

Dec 13 2006

News - 1080 - 720 = Zero Difference?

Take this article with a grain of salt. I'm not about to jump on the "No Difference" wagon, but they do bring up some good points which maybe some should consider when buying a new television. I'd be curious to hear from you guys if you've done side by side comparisons what have you noticed?

This is why I was immensely relieved to read that the Imaging Science Foundation, the industry's top name in digital video testing, qualification, and certification, recently proclaimed that the difference between 720p and 1080p is much less than one would suspect. In fact, resolution ranks fourth on an image quality priority list behind contrast ratio, color saturation, and color accuracy. 

Read the rest here

Dec 13 2006

News - Q&A with Microsoft about Vista

Not directly related to HTPC's or Home Theaters, but I'm sure there's plenty of questions out there regarding the upcoming Windows Vista, and Lifehacker asks some pretty good questions.

Why should I upgrade to Vista?

By far the most resounding question Lifehacker readers had, the first answers I got were basically security, stability and new features - the same reasons you'd upgrade any piece of software. Vista takes advantage of next generation graphics, memory and disk technologies that make it faster, more secure and performant than any previous version of Windows. For gamers, Direct X 10 (Vista only) provides incredible graphics. For system administrators, Vista offers more control and "tweakability," if you will, for managing the system. Speaking of, here's a screengrab of Vista's new "Reliability Monitor" for sysadmins. 

Read the rest here

Dec 13 2006

News - v2 Extenders To Be Vista Only

Can't really say I'm surprised. With what little benefits come with Vista Media Center, they need everything they can to get people to upgrade. I'll admit, if my 360 didn't extend MCE2005, I probably would have upgraded by now.

“The Media Center Extender Platform Adaptation Kit enables partners to build Extenders for use with Windows Vista. Because Extender technology is a superset of the PlaysForSure device program, these devices will also be able to connect to Windows Media Connect/Windows Media Player Network Sharing running on Media Center 2005 PCs. They will not, however, connect to Media Center 2005 as Extenders.”

Read the rest of this joyful news here

Dec 13 2006

News - NeoDigits Helios X5000

Its hard to imagine paying $600 for a SD DVD player, but the Helios X5000 may have enough features to convince you otherwise.  Not only does it stream media from a PC, it also sports some pretty impressive audio features in the form of a Wolfson DAC and BurrBrown OpAmp.

 

Not surprisingly, the media streaming application suffers from a very poor GUI. 

From the article:

Our take is that if you are in the market for a high-end media streamer or server, we think you should give the Helios X5000 a try. Not only does the X5000 sound great, but it plays digital and DVD video. You would be hard pressed to find a media streamer that does that for fewer than $600 bucks. The X5000 is not without its faults and you should expect to spend sometime fine tuning its settings, you will also need to be patient with it’s boot times. Remember, the X5000 should be treated as one part PC and one part DVD player. 

Dec 13 2006

News - Media Storage Challenges in the Digital Home

Networked Attached Storage is certainly becoming more mainstream over the past year. As the article mention, its no doubt due to the massive amounts of personal digital data everyone has. Everything from recordings, to family photos and downloadable movies. A healthy dose of competition certainly helps. In the past, anything labeled as an external storage device was marked up substantially over its internal brethren.

From the article:

I'm wondering, do most consumers really need more media storage capacity, or simply better utilization of the storage that they already have at their disposal? For those of us who have wireless access points, and/or wired home networks, an intuitive application to better manage the placement and update of available local hard-drive and remote/virtual 'shared folders' may be all that's really needed.

In the HTPC world, NAS certainly makes sense with the options now available. It keeps a lot of hot noisy hard drives out of an already hot system. 

Dec 13 2006

News - Details leak out about Nvidia's Intel IGP chipsets

If you aren't interested in big screen gaming, integrated graphics will serve the purpose for most HTPCs. That is if they are powerful enough to drive HD video. For example, the 6150 based chipset does a fine job up to a certain resolution and farts out after that. Thats why with great interested I am following the details for Nvidia's next IGP. Sometime next spring you can expect Nvidia to release a new chipset supporting HDMI with HDCP Smile.

From the article:

According to their information, which was passed on to the site by chatty motherboard manufacturers, Nvidia will launch an MCP73 integrated graphics chipset in the second quarter of 2007. The MCP73 will be an all-in-one chip, and it will include a G72-based graphics core (similar to the one in GeForce 7300 graphics cards) with HDMI output and HDCP copy protection support. Also among the MCP73's rumored specs will be a 1066MHz front-side bus, single-channel DDR2-667 memory support, PCI Express x8 and x1 expansion, support for four 300MB/s Serial ATA ports and one ATA port, and Gigabit Ethernet.

The MCP73 isn't the only Intel IGP on Nvidia's roadmap, though. Supposedly scheduled for the first quarter of 2008 is an MCP79 chipset that will include a GeForce 8-based graphics core and 1333MHz front-side bus.

Dec 13 2006

News - Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 Sound Card

I haven't had a chance to investigate Auzentech's X-Meridian suitability for HTPC life quite yet. For example, I am not sure if it will pass through sound unmangled or not. If you guys have, drop a line in the comments box and let us know what you think about it. While we wait for people's responses, head on over to ThinkComputers and see what they think.

From the article:

If you are an audiophile yourself or you are looking for that perfect gift for an audiophile then look no further. The Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 has all of the features you could ever want in a 7.1 card and with a MSRP of $199.99 it won't break the bank either. When paired up with a nice 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound audio system this sound card will definitely deliver. The Auzentech X-Meridian is the prefect companion for any mid range or high end PC that needs their audio to really shine to make it the perfect PC. Because of the X-Meridian's nearly flawless performance ThinkComputers gives it a score of 9 out of 10.

Dec 13 2006

Guide - Holiday Shopping Guide

2006 Holiday Gift Guide!

 

    It just seems like yesterday I finished paying the bills for last year's presents and now its already time to go shopping again! We here at MissingRemote.com, the caring bunch we are, want to make your life a little easier this season by taking the guess work out of buying presents for the HTPC person in your life. These presents are guaranteed to score huge points with the HTPC person in your life and maintain a high SOAF (significant other acceptance factor other wise known as WAF) for your self.  

 

    We are going to divy up the gift ideas into several price ranges to help people with different budgets. We have decided on $25, $50, $100, $200 and "The Sky Is The Limit" price points. We put this together on a whim to share with our readers. This certainly isn't a piece of journalistic mastery, just a few geeks throwing out some shopping ideas.



Dec 12 2006

News - Movies slow to take off online

This really doesn't surprise me much at all. Sure downloading is easy, but so is Netflix-ing, and then you have all the "pirates" who will copy their Netflix movies. Can't do that with the DRM-heavy online movies. And it's not like you save all that much money to truly make it worth the effort.

But according to ABI Research, only about 5% of North American internet users that say they watch video on the internet have rented or purchased a downloaded movie. That's far fewer than the number of people who have downloaded movies for free from file sharing sites.
The most popular videos online are short clips, like those found on YouTube or news and sports websites.

Read the rest here

Dec 12 2006

News - Canada starting their HD videophiles young with BabyHD

I love this kind of article. Don't get your kid out there excercising. No, no, no. Get them indoors & watching MORE Television! YEAH! Thank god too, because I heard those Canadian babies were complaining that Spongebob just wasn't as sharp as he could be. I wonder what growing up with HD would have done to GI Joe?

The youngest Canadians are rejoicing that they are no longer going to have to suffer through the pains of cartoons in standard definition thanks to BabyHD. This new station is targeting the youngest crowd with advertising-free HD programming. Eventually the station will be 100% true HD but the operators don't expect this to happen till the end of the fourth year in operation so till then, at least 50% will by up-converted programs.

Read the rest here

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