July 1, 2007 — Vista View introduces the Saber DA-1N1-I TM TV Tuner card. This card fills the need for a high quality Combo TV tuner with hardware encoding that Vista and Media Center enthusiasts have been waiting for. The Saber DA-1N1-I is a low profile combo tuner. It combines two high quality tuners on one small card. The Saber […]
Read moreThe Tech Report has an excellent review of the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 series, they include metrics important to HTPC users including tests of the decoding abilties, HD image quality, power consumption, and noise. The Tech Report The Radeon HDs may have good reason for consuming a few more CPU cycles and a little more power than the GeForces in […]
Read moreA FAQ to help you understand your HDTV options with an eye to HTPC usage. What is my HDTV’s native resolution? Don’t confuse "native resolution" with resolutions an HDTV set can accept. HDTVs can usually accept all formats of digital TV but they are up/down converted to the native resolution(s) of the TV. CRT based HDTVs – (both direct-view and […]
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As part of the upcoming 2009 digital TV transition the final phase of consumer electronics compliance was put into effect last month: any TVs, DVRs, etc. made from this point forward must also include an ATSC tuner. For the HTPC world this means that any PC TV tuner made from this point forward must have an ATSC tuner in addition […]
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As a compliment to our upcoming ATSC/NTSC combo round up I wanted to share how I test the TV tuners. Read on for the nitty gritty. To be objective about our testing we have a group of still images, most of them are industry standard test patterns. These are compiled onto a DVD video disc and played back on a standard DVD […]
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In talking with Alan the other day it became obvious that we should have a write up about why 120Hz LCD HDTVs are a big deal and why they should be your TVs of choice. Read on for the details A quick refresher on the common HDTV formats: 720p is 1280×720 progressive scan with 60 frames per second [720p/60] 1080i […]
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Digg this story! Not to get all gadgety on you but I finally got myself into the 21st century for mobile/personal audio. I thought I would share my first impressions, and general usage experiences as well as comments on moving video to the iPod from various sources including downloads and converted TV recordings. First Impressions Man this thing is […]
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NVIDIA's DualTV MCE end of life announcement made earlier today is the first of what I'm sure are many other similar product discontinuations and/or end of life announcements. Looking around various forums that have picked up on this I see some incorrect information being spread around. To be clear: the mandate is only about over the air analog signals. It […]
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The next generation optical disc formats, like standard DVD, are encrypted on disc, but unlike standard DVD, also require protected paths from the player to the display. With this comes a confusing new group of terms, many of which betray the idiosyncrasies of the next generation content protection requirements. The confusion has become obvious, especially when otherwise very technically literate websites start producing […]
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Oppo is a name that has been getting quite a bit of recognition in the past two years. They make high quality DVD players with an affordable price. Their latest is rather unique, it is designed to be a digital only solution. After the review, you may want to check out the blog post on HQV benchmarking the Nvidia's GeForce 7-series video cards. Read […]
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