Bitstarved HD issues go mainstream

crankshaft-1-17-07

Well you know HD quality issues from cable and satellite providers has hit an all time high of public awareness when Crankshaft, a comic strip that focuses on a cranky senior citizen and his middle-aged children, gets their jabs in on overly compressed HDTV channels. I opened up the paper today at work to see this comic: This is clearly depicting […]

Read more

HQV Benchmarking the GeForce 7-series

nvidia_enhancements

The HQV Benchmark DVD is probably the best and most objective video processing test available today. Unfortunately there are still subjective comparisons that need to be made to give a final rating. Of course reference images are given to compare against, and if you see something that has totaly failed it is obvious. The less obvious is when the scores allow […]

Read more

Thoughts on building a high-def ready HTPC

Just kicking around some ideas for what would be an ideal next gen optical format (HD DVD and/or Blu-ray) ready HTPC. This is of course somewhat hypothetical as, alas, I don't have the hand's on knowledge… yet. This is culled from what I know from informal testing, user reports, and decoding performance benchmarks available on the web. Feel free to […]

Read more

Second generation Wii to offer DVD playback

An interesting tidbit from AVZombie says that the 2nd gen Wii will offer DVD playback   It won’t play them when it launches in the UK, but a second generation version of the Nintendo Wii games console will offer DVD playback, when it goes on sale in Japan late 2007. The feature is unlikely to stay a Japanese exclusive for […]

Read more

UK to get 50Mb broadband in 2007

Looks like those in the UK might be getting some nice Fiber to the Neighborhood cable based Internet tech… Cable telecoms giant Telewest/NTL, to be rebranded as part of the Virgin empire next Spring, has confirmed that it is currently trialling 50Mb broadband technology. It expects to have the new service, which it says “blows our rivals out of the water” available to […]

Read more

Blockbuster Unveils Online/In-Store Rental Program, Will Offer High-Def Discs

Blockbuster Video this week announced two significant upgrades to its rental programs. First, Blockbuster Online users are now allowed to return movies either through the mail or into a Blockbuster store. The "Total Access" service includes one free in-store rental per month, but customers are awarded an additional free in-store rental for each movie returned to a Blockbuster store. Also […]

Read more

How-To: Upgrade your Series3 drive

tivo_logo

EngadgetHD (formerly HDBeat) has a cool article about how to change out your TiVo Series 3 CableCARD enabled DVR with a larger hard drive. The Series 3 shockinly only comes with a 250GB drive, which as many of us know, HDTV will fill pretty quickly. As much as we love the TiVo Series3, for $800 we would like a bigger […]

Read more

Blu-ray, HD DVD Encoder Sharpens Image

blue ray logo

Thomson just introduced a new H.264 encoder for high definition optical disc mastering. H.264 is widely regarded as the trickiest of the next generation codecs. So a new toolset that can help create good looking 1080p movies is A-OK with me!   TIGER AVC, co-developed by Thomson Corporate Research laboratories and Technicolor, is an optical disc compression tool that supports both […]

Read more
1 6 7 8 9