Sound And Vision has a relatively unknown company's product on their test bench. Oddly named "TiVo", with a capital V, it sports quite a few features that may make this HD DVR a front runner in the PVR race. 

From the article:

The TiVo Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder contains slots for two CableCARDs, which you can lease from your cable company for about $1.75 each per month (at least in my area). Each card decrypts all the digital channels you subscribe to, including premium channels, though you'd still need a separate tuner from your cable company to access video-on-demand.

PVRWire covers the latest article about DiVx's strategy in the home entertainment realm, with some interesting ideas.

 Greenhall says Apple has it right in focusing on a way to bring PC-based media to the TV set. But where Greenhall differs from Steve Jobs is the hardware. He says consumers don't want to have to buy a special device just to move their media throughout the house. Rather, DivX is hoping to partner with the manufacturers of DVD players, PVRs, and other set-top boxes on a software standard called DivX Connected.

Read the rest here. 

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. is now shipping its new high definition 50” PDP-507CMX and 60” PDP-607CMX commercial plasmas.  The plasmas take advantage of Pioneer’s new PureDrive™ Pro circuitry, available exclusively in the new professional displays, in addition to proprietary technologies to deliver brilliant, sharp imagery with improved panel efficiency.  PureDrive Pro, one of the industry’s most powerful signal processing engines, ensures the plasmas maintain the purest digital signal possible with minimal data loss for smooth, bright imagery that delivers the intended message to an audience. 

“With the increasing desire of a high definition display for use in a variety of commercial settings, our new plasmas provide flexible functionality and breakthrough picture needed for today’s professional applications,” said Jim Krodel, vice president of industrial display for Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc.  “Our plasma displays are designed for enhanced usability and performance in single or multiple presentations, as well as for simple integration in larger scale exhibits and event venues.” 

The new plasmas utilize key technologies that Pioneer has refined throughout the past eight years of research and development.  Improved picture accuracy is a result of First Surface Pure Color Filter (PDP-507CMX) and Pure Color Filter II (PDP-607CMX).  These technologies also reduce the impact of external lighting, allowing the plasmas to be placed in nearly any room environment with little to no picture degradation.  The new commercial plasmas boast smooth, natural image reproduction from Advanced Continuous Emission IV as well as PureDrive Pro technologies. Ultimately, users gain a sophisticated presentation display that is ideal for executive meetings, digital signage as well a host of other professional uses. 

Pioneer’s Expansion Solutions™ technology greatly enhances functionality.  Both the PDP-507CMX and PDP-607CMX possess dual expansion card slots allowing users to insert a variety of expansion cards to modify or enhance the displays’ A/V capabilities for customized display solutions.  Expansion cards are available from Pioneer and third-party manufacturers.

Pioneer’s plasma displays offer significant longevity for a commercial user.  Sixty thousand hours is an approximate time for the display panel to reach half of its original luminescence.  This approximation may vary depending on source and type of content, settings, environment and use.  This approximation does not provide or imply any warranty beyond the manufacturer's standard limited warranty.

The 50” PDP-507CMX and 60” PDP-607CMX plasma are now available for a suggested retail price of $6250 and $9995, respectively.

About.com's weekly feature is here again and they are talking about EDTV. EDTVs were big a couple of years ago in the plasma market when HD versions were considerably more expensive. With the price drops of HD plasmas and LCDs its hardly worth while to invest in an outdated technology such as EDTV.

From the article:

EDTV stands for Enhanced Definition Television. EDTVs typically have a native resolution of 852x480 (480p). 852x480 represents 852 pixels across (left to right) and 480 pixels down (top to bottom) on the screen surface.

If there is a hack... there is a way. I wonder if companies actually think people won't find work around for getting non-pc parts to work on PCs. Latest on the hit list is the ability to use the $200 HD DVD add on with a XP enabled PC. As of right now, file browsing is confirmed and playback is spotty at best.

From the article:

The same day the XBOX360 HD-DVDROM Addon was released to the public in USA, we at blueprint figured out how to use it in windows, now as of this moment, officially, the movie that came with the hardware "King Kong" is currently a Dual Layer (30GB) disc so it would appear the studios are aiming for that size minimally for the majority of movies to start off with at least, this of course mean's you will not be directly copying any hd-dvd's as of yet. However, the most important thing is were now able to read the UDF (Universal Disc Filesystem) v2.5 which is currently used by the Toshiba Corp with there first generation HD-DVDRom drives. You can see the entire contents of the HD-DVD Media when in the drive.

Keys? Who needs them! With a RFID lock, keys will be a thing of the past. You certainly won't have to worry about someone picking your lock because there is no keyhole. It also comes standard with a night mode that disables all external entry functions.

From the article:

With the PIN pad, you'll never lock yourself out ever again. Calling a locksmith to unlock your door or to change your lockset because you misplaced a key will be a thing of the past. Change your PIN and reprogram your RFID cards should you ever lose your keys or have them stolen. No need to change locks...

Chris Lanier has the second part of this excellent article on getting some basic home automation going with, of course, a Media Center PC as the controller. It's pretty slick.

For the software side I will be using Media Center to do everything (naturally), and mControl from Embedded Automation is my plug-in of choice.  I’ve got a copy from Embedded Automation to play with, but as you have seen in Part 1 in my review, you can get the PowerLinc USB Controller with mControl which is the suggestion method since you will need the PowerLinc Controller anyway.

He goes on to say that mControl is quite easy to setup:

Setting up mControl wasn’t much harder than launching Media Center with my remote.  After the basic install wizard of mControl I just launched Media Center and selected mControl from More Programs.  I went ahead and added a zone, in my case I named it “Bedroom.  I then selected the Bedroom zone, and went to “Add Device”.

The nitty-gritty can be found here.