Blogs

Quick Look at Standout Designs Haven 72" TV Stand

Daniel Schoerner — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 08:13:57 +0000

Over the holidays, my wife and I purchased our first home and one of the first things that we realized was that we would need a new tv stand because of the awkward location that our tv would be in. For quite a while, I have had my eye on Standout Designs. I just never had the exuse I needed to buy one of their stands until now.

Yes - I know. I'm horrible at lighting a shot taken with my iPhone. I couldn't figure out how to get a good picture with light coming in behind the tv. I told you it was an awkward place to put it.

Over the holidays we ordered their free wood samples and found one that was the perfect match for our other furniture. Then it was a couple of week wait for the stand to arrive.

Which it did. On a giant truck. I was very happy to have splurged on the lift gate shipping option. The tv stand is heavy. Very, very, heavy. This is why you hire movers kind of heavy. Helping lift it off a 55' trailer would have been a bit much. If you have stairs, you will definitely want the white glove option.

Unpacking went smoothly. Everything was in great shape. Here's a picture of the stand from the back.

You can see the nice large fans. They spin extremely slowly so that you can't hear them and do a nice job of venting heat from the stand. There's a temperture sensor built in so that you can have them auto on/off or just switch them to on/off all the time.

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DMZ + HSS CES Meetup

Andrew Van Til — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:19:11 +0000

We'll have some boots on the ground at this CES 2013, if you'll be there too make sure to stop by the DMZ + HSS CES 2013 Meetup. I will be.

We’ll be meeting in the Marriott Courtyard Bistro lounge at the Courtyard hotel immediately across the street from the convention center. If you’ve attended CES before, you know what a hassle it is to grab transportation once the show floor closes. So skip the mayhem and spend an hour or so with Dave McCabe, Josh, and Richard. We’ll be less than a 10 minute walk when you leave the convention center.
DMZ

2012: Looking Backwards and Forward

Mike Garcen — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:29:57 +0000

Well, it's that time again, 2012 is almost completely behind us. As with every year, there is a lot that's happened in the home theater world, some good, some not so good. We'd like to take a moment to reflect upon everything that happened and narrow down some of our favorites--what did we love most, what disappointed us most, and for 2013 what are we looking forward to. Hope you enjoy!

2012 Things We Loved

Ceton Echo & Ceton Companion
4 Watts and a Media Center Extender that will actually be supported. Frequent updates continue to make the experience better & better.

"having a solid media center platform that wouldn't require me to run a dedicated HTPC and have to support it day in and day out."
"I love the ability to quickly scan for new show premieres and manage my Windows Media Center using the Ceton Companion wherever I am."

Cases, Cases, Cases
It's been a great year for HTPC chassis, from tiny to huge, there has been passive low profile cases from Streacom and Wesena, and then Fractal Design and Lian Li have made some great larger cases to suit your needs. For the HTPC being dead, there sure are a lot of options to build your own!
Dish Hopper
It would take A LOT to get me to give up the convenience of CableCARD + HTPC, but the Hopper is a step in the right direction. Not only because it provides a decent amount of storage, but also because it's the first mainstream DVR solution that makes ads optional - something that we've enjoyed for years. Of course the studios objected, so litigation is pending, but it's nice to see some MSO validation for something so critical to how my family consumes TV.
Rasberry Pi
This diminutive DIY computer has stirred up a ton of interest in the maker community and among hobbyist developers. The Raspberry Pi has been pressed into service for arcade cabinets, custom routers, and even a supercomputer, but one of the most exciting applications has been to turn the Raspberry Pi into an XBMC-based media streamers. The next version of XBMC will come with official Raspberry Pi support, and with projects such as Xbian, Raspmc, and OpenELEC all in development to provide a turnkey XBMC solution, a fully-capable XBMC streamer can be had for the price of a Roku.
Home Automation Products
"Growth in affordable, simple and low-power home automation products that can be controlled from any computing or mobile device."

2012 Disappointment

How-To: Setup Symlinks for your Parallels Virtuals

Michael Welter — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 14:03:44 +0000

Hi all, I thought I would start a series of off-topic random blogs. If you don't like off-topic content sorry, but feel free to ignore :). I also apologize for typos, grammar, etc...these are quick 5 minute blogs.

A little background...lately I do the bulk of my development on a MacBook or MacMini. It offers the best of all worlds, at least in my humble opinion. Very stable hardware, a stable operating system, a good collection of free or cheap essential software (Adium, iTerm2, FreeRDP, Homebrew, Growl, Sublime Text 2) along with useful native applications like Mail. I digress, my essential software may be a different post.

I do the majority of my work using Sublime Text 2 (even in Windows using MSBUILD in lieu of VS.NET) and iTerm2 but I also need access to Windows 7, Windows 8 and Fedora 17 for different builds. While I have different build slaves running on my Hyper-V 2012 server I also use Parallels Desktop for Mac so I can be self contained. This is great but a few tweaks can really make it a powerful yet simple development environment, and that brings me to the point of this blog post.

Using symlinks, both in Windows and Linux, you can simplify management of common config files like .gitconfig, .ssh, .bash_profile, etc. Parallels does a lot of the work for you so we'll start with that. If you haven't already, install "Parallels Tools" on your virtual machines. You can do that from the Virtual Machine menu.

ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 - Refresh Rate Issues

Andrew Van Til — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:09:15 +0000

We lauded ArcSoft when it added automatic refresh rate switching to a beta version of TotalMedia 5 as they moved us closer to the standalone player experience, and while the feature has been fleshed out significantly since then (it's optional now) there's one thing that they've never really gotten completely right with the implementation - the frequency selected for 24p content. I don't want to get too far into the weeds (those unfamiliar with 24p should start here) so we'll just stipulate that almost all Blu-ray sourced content, including 3D, is actually 23.976 frames per second (FPS) and players should therefore select 23Hz for proper output from a HTPC. The problem here is that in the original implementation ArcSoft made the newb [but completely understandable, having done it myself back in the day :)] mistake of tying 24p to 24Hz when selecting the refresh rate in the original implementation. Later realizing the mistake, an INI setting was introduced to correct the behavior, but unfortunately the engine doesn't universally respect the setting leaving 3D playback broken.

Congratulations Jace & Rob Wright - Winners of the Ceton Father's Day Contest!

Mike Garcen — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 05:32:02 +0000

Congratulations go out to Rob Wright, winner of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 USB Tuner, and Jace, winner of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe tuner!! I'll be sending an e-mail to both of you to confirm shipping address.

Thank you to all who participated! Hope everyone had as much fun with the responses as we did reading them!

Contest - Win a Ceton InfiniTV4 USB Quad External Tuner

Mike Garcen — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 19:15:43 +0000

THIS CONTEST HAS ENDED!!! THANK YOU ALL WHO PARTICIPATED AND GOOD LUCK!

Two contests at once, has Missing Remote lost their minds?!?! Yep! But our loss of mental capacity is your gain!

For those of you that are still slacking, you still have time for the Father's Day sale from Ceton! In honor of Father's Day Ceton is currently running a save $30 when you buy two InfiniTV4 (USB or PCIe) over at Amazon.

Generously, they've provided us a USB external model to help you (or your dad) have an awesome way to celebrate paternity via a give away here at Missing Remote. Thanks Ceton!

HOW TO ENTER

We have made some changes, so please READ all the rules.

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Contest - Win a Ceton InfiniTV4 PCIe

Andrew Van Til — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:45:08 +0000

THIS CONTEST HAS ENDED!!! THANK YOU ALL WHO PARTICIPATED AND GOOD LUCK!

In honor of Father's day Ceton is currently running a save $30 when you buy two InfiniTV4 (USB or PCIe) over at Amazon. Generously, they've provided us a PCIe model to help you (or your dad) have an awesome way to celebrate paternity via a give away here at Missing Remote. Thanks Ceton!

HOW TO ENTER

We have made some changes, so please READ all the rules.

To change things up, we've also added several other methods to increase your chances of winning by adding more entries possible.

The only requirement to enter is to reply and answer the following:

What are the top three shows you and your dad enjoy (or would enjoy if you had a InfiniTV 4)?

Add your comment below to enter, plus you can gain up to two additional entries to increase your chances of winning:

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Disney Movie Club Redux

Mike Patnode — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:50:37 +0000

So just about a year ago I wrote up an article on how to get 10 Disney BDs for about $13 each. A year later shows you how slow the BD market is as Disney has lowered the commitment to just 3 more movies at the regular price and allows you to knock off one of those in the original offer for 8.95.

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InfiniTV on Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Michael Welter — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:27:00 +0000

Have a Ceton InfiniTV? Testing Windows 8 Consumer Preview? Check out the new Ceton blog post InfiniTV on Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

Don't have a Ceton InfiniTV? Buy one from our Amazon store via http://www.amazon.com/Ceton-InfiniTV-Digital-Cable-Quad-tuner/dp/B003B4VLJQ/.

Disclaimer: I think most know this already but I work for Ceton and this is a shameless plug. But hopefully it is still helpful to any brave enthusiast willing to risk death threats (it happens, I know) from their significant other by using a "Consumer Preview".

2011 Fall TV Conclusions

George Schmauch — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:36:11 +0000

In a previous blog, I lamented the new fall season of television programs and laid out my intentions of not watching any new shows until they proved themselves. I actually broke down and recorded a couple of new shows, but have yet to watch any of them. I also spoke about what I was still watching. Particularly, I had a pretty scathing review of Ashton Kutcher's acting and his character on Two and a Half Men (Charlie Sheen actually seemed to agree with me <scary>). I may actually need to rescind my comments and I'll explain why. I'm also interested in what people thought of the fall season.

Lilyhammer - I Hope This Is The Future

Andrew Van Til — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:13:21 +0000

Netflix has provided over the top (OTT) video streaming via its "Watch Instantly" service for quite sometime, but until yesterday there was little to fundamentally differentiate that service (besides convenience, and the need for high-speed Internet) from a trip to the video store or the mailbox. Introducing original programming changed that - moving the company in a more interesting, welcome, and potentially disruptive direction.

I'm Getting a New (sort of) TV

Zach Christiansen — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:13:13 +0000

While I already got my Christmas wish and have been loving my new Silverstone GD05B. What I really wanted, but just didn’t have the budget for, was a new and bigger TV as my 32 inch LG 32FZ4D-UA wasn’t really the ideal size.Well thanks to a failing color wheel and dimming light bulb my wish has come true.

While visiting my in-laws over the holidays I asked my father in-law if his 50 inch Samsung DLP (HLN507WX/XAA) had always had that high pitched buzz. He responded by saying that it had only recently started but had progressively been getting louder, however he wasn’t really sure what was causing it. Some quick searching on the internet revealed that the likely culprit was a faulty color wheel. Rather than fixing it himself, however, he decided to get a new TV and off of my advice went with a 55 inch LG Infinia 55LW6500 3D TV.

Thus I have now become the proud owner of a slightly used 50 inch DLP in need of a new color wheel. (and light bulb as the picture is getting dark) Once the parts arrive from amazon (color wheel, light bulb) I will be following this guide to replace the color wheel and barring some major catastrophe will have an almost new TV once complete. I think the only person in my house who won’t be happy with the new TV is my cat Hobolochito as he will lose his favorite perching post.

2011 Year in Review

Mike Garcen — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Another year is about to conclude, and I wanted to take the chance to highlight some of our most popular articles throughout the year. Real life sometimes gets in the way of reading the site, so hopefully this will help if you might have missed a certain special review or guide. Feel free to contribute what YOUR favorite article has been.

Here are the top 10:

How to Enable Concurrent Sessions in Windows 7 Service Pack 1 RTM
No real surprise here. Still our most popular guide to date, showing you how to get multiple logins at the same time on your Windows 7 box without having to kick off a user.
Intel Core i3-2100T and DH67CF Mini-ITX Motherboard / Intel Sandy Bridge: Core i5-2500K and DH67BL Motherboard / Intel Core i5-2400S and DH67GD Micro-ATX Motherboard
I combined these reviews from Andrew since I think they deserved to share the top spot. Sandy Bridge was truly revolutionary and was great news for all us HTPC enthusiasts. Even 11 months later, these boards are still solid.
How to Watch TV without Cable
Examining all the various non-traditional cable TV options available for watching your favorite television programs, without having to pay a fortune.
Beginner's Guide to HTPC Software
Taking a look at what software exists for use on your HTPC as your media center. This category is more than alive as some of these interfaces have become so beautiful you almost want to just sit at the home screen and drool. Maybe that's just me.

All I Want for Christmas v3, by MissingRemote Staff

Mike Garcen — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:41:06 +0000

Now 3 years strong, our tradition continues. In the first year of our list, we saw some good, some bad ideas. Year two was a lot of the same. Let's see how everyone feels about our staff's wish list for 2011 Christmas time!

Andrew van Til (Babgvant)

In my case it reads a little better backwards

The AVR-3311 didn't find its way under the tree last year (or the months that followed), mostly because with the the AVR-1909 still performing well it was smarter to add surround sound to the secondary viewing location via Mike's choice - the Yamaha YSP-2200. With more 3D Blu-ray titles trickling out, and my kid's increasing demands to "watch it in 3D" it's getting more cumbersome to connect up another HDMI cable to the TV on movie night so I'm hoping to solve the HDMI 1.4 problem this year.
For that reason my wish list is just getting a number bump to the 125W Denon AVR-3312. With support for Audyssey MultEQ XT, 0.05% THD, and built in Ethernet providing IP control, firmware updates, DLNA and access to some audio over the top services it's has all of the good stuff that put the AVR-3311 on last year's. Adding in an extra HDMI port and a slightly more modern look; I can't complain too much about the wait.

George Schmauch (Skirge01)