In early February, Amazon and Viacom signed a deal to bring many of Viacom’s television programs to Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service. At the time, we noted that the deal did not include any movies and speculated that Amazon would need to ink a separate deal with Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures. Sure enough, Amazon announced this week that they have signed a three […]
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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 […]
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So if your first thought was: “How can they get away with that?” when you saw the Dish commercial skip announcement, it seems the answer is going to be: “Not easily”. We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear […]
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The folks behind Plex have been busy this last week. First up was the release of a new Local Media Agent to make it easier to add custom posters and background art to the TV library. I tend to be picky about my metadata, especially the images I use, and few things drive me crazier than software that overrides my […]
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It’s been several months since we last heard Comcast chatting up their new settop box UI. At the time, the new UI was codenamed Xcalibur and Comcast was hinting at the ways they were looking to integrate the app experience from mobile platforms with a revamped high-definition live TV and DVR interface. Evidently, things are about to get real. Comcast […]
Read moreWe reviewed one of the higher end Dune HD media players last year and were very impressed with the quality and abilities of the unit. However, the cost of that one was $250, pricing it out of the market for lots of folks. Dune has listened to their consumers and up for review is a more affordable, $169 media player […]
Read moreAs more companies continue to battle for the Blu-ray player in your living room, so too do the features increase as the costs reduce. Samsung has the benefit of having a full line of products and are starting to leverage those between their different products. The trend is continuing. Blu-ray player competition is getting fierce and we all will be […]
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Not long ago it was easy to lean primarily on a traditional remote control – universal, of course — relegating the keyboard and mouse to the audio & video (A/V) cabinet, closet, or other locale of last resort –dragging it out just for occasional maintenance or troubleshooting. However, as over-the-top (OTT) content providers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and […]
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I’ll forgive you if you need a few minutes to check for flying pigs (I certainly did) after discovering that a major MSO has enabled [limited] automatic commercial skipping on their best DVR. Now it’s not quite the same as we in the HTPC community have grown accustomed to since it only applies to PrimeTime Anytime content viewed after 1AM […]
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The last release of the Plex Media Server brought the beta platform to version 0.9.6 and added some pretty big features, including DLNA and Silverlight Smooth Streaming service support. The new release pushes the version number slightly higher to version 0.9.6.1 and does offer several new features including support for the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v2 and more streaming choices over […]
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