Engadget gets their hands on the newest TiVo features, which not being a TiVo user, I gotta say look very cool. Think of it like Transcode360 for your TiVo. Very neat...too bad they just mentioned they're going to be raising prices again. :-/

What we found much more exciting was the new PC-to-TiVo functionality being rolled out the TiVo Desktop Plus 2.4. We've got a full walkthrough after the break, but the basic gist is that you can take pretty much any video file and shoot it on over to your TiVo with little hassle. You just set TiVo Desktop to watch a particular folder, and when you place files in there they get automatically transcoded over to TiVo's format and become available to your TiVo over the network. Keep reading for the lowdown.

Read the rest & check out the pictures here. 

Not the cheapest display on the market, but these guys still seem to like it. They also offer a 1080p version in the Elite version of it.

Pioneer’s 7th generation plasma, the PDP-5070HD makes strides over last years offering, the 5060HD with improved black levels and color decoding. Pioneer has also ditched their media box receiver in favor of an integrated ATSC/NTSC tuner and video/audio connections. With an MSRP of $4,000 or more, there are definitely more affordable plasma TV’s on the market. Let’s see what makes the PDP-5070HD worth your hard earned dollar.

Read the full review here. 

Yowsa, Creston has a big bad boy of a multi-room A/V distribution system. The Adagio Media system pretty much does it all including surround processing, video switching and processing, sat radio support and much much much more. Out of the box it has support for 4 to 6 rooms and you can additional equiment to expand that up to 24 rooms! 

From the article:

It’s comparable to the AES insofar as it keeps the main features but now includes video too. In addition to surround sound in the home theater, the AMS-AIP also distributes stereo audio to feed several pairs of remote room speakers. The integrated multi-room amplifier4 rooms. A fifth stereo room, or up to 2 mono rooms, can be supported using spare surround channels if the theater is configured as 6.1, 5.1, or lower. And without requiring any programming, the AMS-AIP can easily be expanded to support another six rooms by adding an AAE Audio Expander. In fact, a total of three AAE's may be added, with simple setup afforded using Crestron Adagio Composer software, supporting up to 24 rooms in all (plus the theater). delivers a robust 45 watts per channel to each of

Not wanting to be outdone by Sony with delay madness, Toshiba has delayed its second generation of HD DVD players. The second gen player was set to come out with HDMI 1.3, 1080p and sport a price tage of $999. That price sounds familiar .

From the article:

From AVS Forum: 

In Europe Toshiba has officially announced the delay, now anticipating a "quantity of units" of the rebadged HD-E1 due in December and the HD-XE1 slated for 2007. Second gen hardware is generally expected to atone for the bug-ridden sins of its predecessors, so hopefully a short delay now means avoiding a quick patch later. In the meantime there's always the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on, or deciding which free HD DVDs to get.

I think it's great to see the people behind the products we use just show how true fans they are of what they're doing. It definitely instills confidence within customers & improves the relationship of the community. So, if you're in the market for a new PVR & doing some research, check this out.

 So this weekend, as an experiment, I spent some time creating a search engine for everything related to “PC DVR” using Google’s Custom Search Engine tool. I included websites for every TV tuner card manufacturer, every software product, and every community site that I could think of.

Read the rest here. 

Looking for a HDMI switcher or a flat HDMI cable? Well you are in luck! Secrets kills tow birds with one stone with their review of a Comects switcher and SL HDMI cable. They get good marks from the reviewer and are relatively inexpensive to boot. 

From the article:

The only thing missing on the Neptune is a Toslink optical out so that one could switch several HDMI sources to deliver HDMI video to a projector, but use the Toslink optical out from the Neptune to deliver 5.1 digital audio to a receiver that does not have HDMI in. But, it won't be long  before HDMI is on every source, every SSP, every receiver, and every digital TV display. In fact, I would think next year's crop of receivers could just eliminate composite video and S-Video connections, and put HDMI and component video jacks in their place, along with more Toslink optical jacks. And, even if you have an SSP or receiver with HDMI inputs, there might not be enough inputs, so a switcher like the Neptune could come in very handy

AudioVideo Revolution sets the stage nicely for the purchase of a new 1080p HDTV. They paint a picture of affordability for the size and feature set. They also touch on the fact that not all rooms are well suited from front projector life. Getting to the display device at hand, the HL-S6187W retails for $2999 and has a bevy of beautiful features such as dual 1080p HDMI inputs, an HD tuner, VGA connector, and a photo viewer interface for a USB drive. I couldn't find talk of the internal bits, I would think you would have to head on over to Samsung's website or an owner's thread on avs for more juicy details.

From the article:

With my Denon player, I cued up my calibration disc of choice, Digital Video Essentials. I found the Samsung's menus to be nicely designed and informative, though some of the more critical controls are buried within a barrage of sub menus making calibration a bit tedious. It's important to point out that, while I was able to ultimately achieve a rather stellar image, the Samsung's picture controls seem to affect one another more than most, which made the whole process take a little longer than expected. Yet, in less than two hours, I was ready to rock and roll.