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In: Home Theater
With: 2 Comments

I’ve been a TiVo user since 2001 and I’ve owned 7 TiVos. It’s a great product because it is extremely easy to use yet offers an impressive array of features.  However, I think TiVo can offer even more functionality without compromising, and perhaps improving, the simplicity of the user experience.  Here are my ideas: Seamless multi-room experience: I want every TiVo in the house to display the exact same recording content even though it’s distributed across multiple boxes. Single Season Pass / To Do List: I don’t want to manage Season Passes on each TiVo, I want them to talk to each other and comeRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 6 Comments

I received an e-mail from Netflix today informing me of yet another price increase, due to the fact that I rent Blu-ray movies. I was paying $11.99 for 2-discs-at-a-time and 4 rentals per month. And this did include the Watch Now online viewing. But over the past few months, Netflix removed the Watch Now from this plan, created a $1 fee to rent Blu-ray movies, and then changed it to a $2 fee monthly fee to rent Blu-ray movies. So two price increases (from $11.99 to $13.99/month) and one feature removal (no online steaming.) Is this enough to get me to leave Netflix? No. I’veRead More →

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In: Home Theater, Reviews
With: 2 Comments

I just unboxed and installed my Vudu XL evaluation unit, connected it to the flat panel TV in my family room, and started played around with it.  Here are my initial thoughts: This is a very nice looking set top box; possibly the most attractive design I’ve seen, with lots of glossy, high-quality plastic. The bottom of the unit even has a nice textured pattern on it. It’s unexpectedly heavy.  This is not a thin sheet metal enclosure with a tiny circuit board inside.  It feels solid, dense, and well constructed. It passed my easy of installation test: I didn’t need to consult the installRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 11 Comments

I installed the Windows 7 beta (32-bit) on my wife’s MSI Wind netbook with great success.  In fact, it was flawless.  So I decided to give it a try on the second Media Center computer (HTPC) that I just finished building using the 64-bit version.  My results were as positive this time.  Here a summary of why Win7 Beta didn’t work for me on my HTPC: Drivers. The drivers for the motherboard (Nvidia 9400) wouldn’t install from Windows Update and were over a month old.  (At least I was able to install the latest drivers on the Nvidia website.) Lockups. The PC locked up twiceRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 8 Comments

To get the best video quality playback possible for movies in a home theater, it’s necessary for the refresh rate of the source component to match the refresh rate of the display. One of the most common problems stems from the fact that most movies are 24 frames per second while most televisions are 60 frames per second (approximately.)  It’s not a simple mathematical conversion to get 24 fps to scale to 60 fps. There are processing fixes (reverse telecine) to overcome this problem, but the frame rate of the source material must be properly detected and the proper correction applied. The best solution isRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 4 Comments

Note to readers: this information was current as of early 2010. Since then, ATI, Intel, and Nvidia have all released video/audio solutions to allow bitstreaming of the original Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio streams with the use of playback software such as Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre. The below content, from early 2010, is for historical reference only. If you’re a home theater enthusiast, you want the highest-quality audio and video possible, and that means Blu-ray with lossless audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio) and the best video compression codec (VC-1 or MPEG-4 H.264 AVC HP.) Most people would choose a Sony PlayStation 3 orRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 2 Comments

I just finished reading an interesting article by Amir Majidimehr (former Microsoft VP, video compression) in Oct 2008 issue of Widescreen Review.  I was surprised that there are 4 different, incompatible versions of MPEG-4! Here are some facts from the article; I recommending picking up a copy of the magazine for all of the details and background. MPEG-2 was created in 1993 and gave great improvements of JPEG. Real Video and Windows WMV-9 were alternative compression codecs created for internet video streaming and are about 200% to 300% more efficient than MPEG-2. The MPEG association wanted to get into this segment and created MPEG-4 (laterRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 2 Comments

I’m very annoyed by the fact that I spend $30+ to purchase a Blu-ray movie and yet still forced to watched advertisements, trailers, and FBI warnings. Several years ago, SlySoft released a version of AnyDVD that allowed users to overcome these User Prohibited Actions for regular DVDs. Today they announced version 6.4.3.2 of AnyDVD HD that gives users the same features for Blu-ray. AnyDVD is a program that runs in the background on your Windows computer. When a DVD or Blu-ray disc is inserted, it dynamically re-authors the content of the disk so that when you use your favorite DVD or Blu-Ray software player, allRead More →

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In: Home Theater, MBA China Trip
With: 20 Comments

Windows Media Center can automatically download the metadata (cover art, movie name, cast, plot summary, etc.) for DVDs. If you place a DVD in your drive, this occurs automatically. However, if you backup your DVDs to a server and access the moive via Windows Media Center, this data is not available. But there is a work-around and it involves creating a DVDID.XML file when you back-up the DVD to your media server. Here’s how you do it. The easiest way to do this is to use My DVD Settings, a program created by Gelano over at TheGreenButton forums. Unfortunately, Gelano and his program have bothRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 3 Comments

I’m used to companies offering less than stellar customer care in this age of low-cost, low-margin business. So when a company goes above and beyond to take care of their customers, it gets my attention. Most early-adopters suspected that the High Definition Disc Format war would end and either HD-DVD or Blu-ray would one day become obsolete. Which is why I’m surprised that Busy Buy and Circuit City are both compensating customers who chose the now obsolete HD-DVD format. Best Buy will be giving a $50 giftcard to anyone who purchased a HD-DVD Player prior to February 23, 2008 (just go to BestBuyTradein.com and register.)Read More →