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I'm not sure where you're buying them, but at least if you're buying discs on the weekly sales that seem to run almost continuously (rotating between different stores), one can often get DVD media (even 'name brands', though it often doesn't matter) much less than $.25/disc.

Also, RW discs aren't always "many times" that cost ($.25). DVD-RAM discs are, though they also act much closer to a hard drive (can delete particular recordings and regain the space immediately), and are supposedly more reliable than other media.

Anyway, DVD-RWs often show up in sales (such as at Office Depot) for $.33 to $.50 each in 25 or 50 packs.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=614479 is a good thread to keep track of various media deals of the week.

This was directly after I had to return some 30' HDMI cables I got from monoprice for not working at 1080p from my xbox360. This put me in a crunch to get new ones since the drywall was about to go in.

I found Blue Jeans Cable referenced on AVS Forum (you will can weeks digging through A/V topics there) and saw their location was just up the street from where I work. They said I could pick it up in person and waived the shipping charges within a day!

The cables are of excellent quality regardless of the price - which happens to be very affordable. I was most concerned about the HDMI cables at that length, but their website said it should work - and they did with flying colors, so to speak. I got their top of the line for the 1080p and the cheaper Tartan for DirecTV stuff (top res is 1080i), but it turns out I had no issue with their Tartan cable at 1080p either.

I was impressed with their operation.

Sorry for sounding like a marketing cheerleader, but I'm pulling for them, especially after the entertaining read. These are good guys, selling great product at excellent prices. They have earned my future business and do not deserve to be on the litigation receiving end of unethical competitors.

First, go to TVfool and Antennaweb to find out where all the transmitters are and how far. Then, you need to see what type of antenna to get. Good places to discuss about DTV are at: news://alt.tv.tech.hdtv (newsgroup) and AVS Forum. I am not an expert and still learning, but these places are useful.

I couldn't use my old fashion rabbit ears since they were too weak and they were decent for analog feeds.

For those who can't decide which converter boxes to get with the coupons, then see Wikipedia and here. I still haven't ddecided what to get and I need to get them before May 27th, 2008 (should had waited to get better models). :(

The Green Power drives are also impressively quiet! I've been looking for drives like this for years! This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work, people building multimedia PCs, or those who just plain like quiet drives. You can even use a smaller SSD drive to get blazing random access performance just for games while using the Green Power for other purposes, and get the best of both worlds. (The Gigabyte iRam is spec'd perfectly for this, but it's a bit pricey.)

You're not a gfx programmer yourself, are you? Otherwise you'd be linking to nVidia specifications, not consumer reviews. The relevent OpenGL extension is GL_ARB_color_buffer_float, which was indeed implemented for G70-class hardware as of R75 drivers (actually, GL_NV_float_buffer.txt was implemented even earlier).

Yes, you can use this for offscreen framebuffer objects and pbuffers, which is all you need when float texture blending for HDR rendering, but this is then tone-mapped to the 32bit displayable framebuffer for output. It's still not possible to get more than 8bit RGB actually out of the chip. Apart from SGI (who patented float rasterisation), I've only heard of an old Matrox card claiming to do real 10bit integer RGBA output (under quite specific conditions, apparently). Even nVidia's current high-end Quadros can't do it (well, unless you count 10bit 4:2:2 YUV from the SDI connector on some models). I'd welcome any comments showing real evidence to the contrary (preferably from someone who hasn't been repeatedly modded down as a troll), but I've never seen it done.

I can see it easily with my own eyes

The PS3 can decode TrueHD into PCM

There it is right there. Yes, the PS3 player supports TrueHD, but it does notpass it over the HDMI link - it gets decoded to good ol' HDMI 1.0-standard multichannel PCM first. Read the rest of the article - a Sony rep has confirmed this. And AFAIK the PS3 still does not yet support DTS-HD; it only passes through the DTS component. Incidentally, I found it ironic that you're accusing me of trolling :-)

You don't have to convince me that the PS3 is good hardware. It certainly has the edge in CPU power, and the Blu-Ray player is a valuable addition (though it's also the primary reason Sony released late and expensive, throwing away their lead from the PS2). Its graphics are debatable though, and most unbiased people consider PS3 and Xbox 360 GPU power to be roughly equivalent. More on topic, the PS3's HDMI port is more capable than the 360's (which can't even pass multichannel PCM) - but the HDMI 1.3 output is pure marketing, nothing more. Most TV sets (even those that accept deep colour) still can't actually display it, only use it for cleaner tweaking. Certainly no plasma or consumer LCD panel that I'm aware of is capable.

I've had a MythTV setup at home for more than two years now, and have posted several times about it. Here's my quick take on the major changes for 0.21:

* Support for multiple recording directories.
* Support for recording multiple streams over DVB.
* New deinterlacers (and an OpenGL-based video renderer, but that's still disabled by default, as I understand it).

That's it. There are hundreds of other changes and fixes, great and small, but for most people these are the changes that'll mean the most. Despite the 18 months since 0.20's release (a way too-long interval, I'd argue), this is a testament to just how good 0.20 was feature- and stabilitywise.

Even bigger news than 0.21 is the forthcoming $299 Hauppauge HD-PVR, the first consumer-grade high-definition video encoder (and with promised Linux support, no less). Within a couple of months, anyone—not just those lucky enough to have unencrypted FireWire ports—will be able to record in real time full 720p or 1080i video and Dolby 5.1 audio from their high-definition cable boxes into h.264 format and play it back on their MythTV boxes. Be aware, however, that the h.264 recordings will for many likely require faster hardware than what they're using for their MythTV frontends.

I have one of these players, and we're not upset about Profile 1.1 vs 1.0, we're upset that it's a total crapshoot whether or not a given movie will play on your player. I got mine in September, this isn't a device that's three years old, either, but it has been plagued with bugs. I rented Weeds from Netflix, and the disc would play fine ONCE, but not a second time (confirmed with others on AVSForum). Rise of the Silver Surfer didn't work for a month or two after release. Deja Vu would constantly hang during playback. Pirates of the Carribean 3 didn't work until last week, nor did Little Miss Sunshine. 3:10 to Yuma still doesn't work, and last week I sat down to watch Across the Universe to find that you're left at the menu screen, but with no cursor to start the movie, and you can't even skip to a chapter or work-around the issue.

Samsung needs to figure out what the hell is wrong with their firmware and correct it so that it'll actually play movies, and they need to be more transparent about what's going on. They rarely acknowledge issues, and never document what fixes are in new firmware revisions as they're released. Perhaps they could give some test units to the shops that are authoring Blu-Ray discs, or, you know, get an advance copy of the disc so that firmware can be ready on the day the movie hits the streets. Follow this thread at AVSForum for more info.

I have to correct you on some things, since burning media is an interest of mine. You can burn hi-def video to DVD+-R/RW that will play in Blu-ray players. There is a thread over at avsforum. I recommend you skip to around page 30-35 to get instructions on how to do it. Also, the Panasonic DMP-BD10A is a Blu-ray that can play DVD audio.

Someone over on one of the AVSForum insider threads asked a very pertinent question regarding exactly this. So far there hasn't been much of an answer, though (nor do I expect there will be).

Seems to me no one has mentioned something which to me says a lot:

"For a long time, Hollywood was lopsided in favor of Blu-ray: 7 of the 8 major movie studios (Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM) supported Blu-ray, and 5 of them (Disney, Fox, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM) release their movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. Only Universal was exclusively HD-DVD. Now that is rapidly changing what with HD DVD exclusive converts Paramout and DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Bros now for Blu-ray." (this from http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/boost-for-blu-ray-warner-bros-will-release-high-def-titles-exclusively-in-that-format/)

So in summary, we have:

HD-DVD Exclusive:

Paramount/Dreamworks

Bluray Exclusive:

Disney
Fox
Sony
Lionsgate
MGM
Warner Bros

Not mentioned in the article above, I believe Universal Studios is actually HD DVD exclusive, but rumours seem to indicate that they aren't that way by contract, so they COULD jump ship. Further, New Line Cinema is owned by Warner Bros, so it would stand to reason that they will end up Bluray exclusive.

At this point, it LOOKS like a pretty lopsided situation to me. Add in that while supposedly HD-DVD players (and PCs with HD-DVD in them) have outsold bluray players, (again supposedly) bluray titles themselves seem to have outsold HD-DVD, especially in non US markets.

I have been reading about this since the news broke yesterday on places like http://engadgethd.com/ and http://avsforum.com/ and it really sounds like even the HD-DVD diehards (for the most part) are conceding victory to bluray.

-Verxion

Moreover, most CRT-based HDTV units have an aperture grille that only has 800-900 dots per scanline.

I look forward to seeing a source for that...

http://www.dansdata.com/gz029.htm

The Sony "Super Fine Pitch" tubes have about 1400 slits per scanline in their aperture grilles, which they claim is "65% more" than most tubes. That leaves most tubes with 900 or less resolvable triads per line.

Bear in mind that CRT computer displays typically have a dot pitch of 0.35mm or less, whereas television CRTs (including HD) need to be brighter, and have a dot pitch between 0.7mm and 1mm

http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=752049

Unfortunately, none of them are on the market yet. From what I've seen, it'll be in February, about the time they mail out the coupons.

In the meantime, I would follow this thread.

I thought this same exact case was discussed earlier this week, and that it was the copies in the Kaaza sharing folder that were unauthorized:

"In Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA claims that "[once] Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs."

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=953494

Odd how both the summary and the Washington Post article skip that particular fact.

And I haven't see Blu Ray "break" any standard. If you mean Profile 1.1 adds more features than 1.0, then yes it does but future disks must still work on profile 1.0. And many players will be upgradeable to 1.1 through firmware. How is this a problem? It's like claiming HDMI 1.3 "breaks" HDMI 1.2 because it adds new functionality.

Thanks.

For someone who wants to spend a lot less than that, there are so many options at the local walmart/electronics store that it'd be useless to list them. Just go listen to them and pick something you like the best. For someone in what I consider the "high-end" price range, the ascend accoustics are available online direct from the maker, so anyone can get them at an excellent price. They're much better sounding than anything you'll find in an actual local storefront or even online for anywhere near the same price.

If you really want to spend lots more money, than that only makes sense if you are super rich and thus need a personal consultant to help you spend your money (so you're outside the target of the guide) or if you are specifically looking for a better looking cabinet in some way. If you get past Ascend's range of speakers, you aren't buying improved sound, you're buying a prettier cabinet and that's an ascetic purchase that you'll have to determine how much what the suggested change in looks is worth to you. Since you like the other links, you'll also like one for AVS forum, which can be a bit much for someone to read through it all who isn't seriously interested, but will confirm the consensus about Ascend. Having installed and listened to lots of speaker systems of wildly varying prices, I can also confirm that bias from personal experience. If I did my own theater over (and I will when I build a new house), I'd replace my very high-end Canton system with Ascends in a minute.

Um, the crap that you're spreading was about *Paramount* dumping Blu-Ray, not "Panasonic". (Panasonic still supports BR (foolishly IMO, since 95% of BR players sold are Sony PS3s, while Panasonic and the others are left to fight for the remaining 5%).)

I skimmed your link but didn't find any reference the NYT story that you say "the NY Times is sticking to". Rather, I saw a bunch of BR fanboys in tears, blaming Microsoft for their troubles. The NYT story to which you refer is Two Studios to Support HD-DVD Over Rival
The story cites two unnamed Viacom execs as saying that Paramount received 150 million dollars in financial incentives to dump BR for HD-DVD, but they don't say who the source of the financial incentives is. The same story goes on to *quote* *named* Microsoft VP Amir Majidimehr as denying speculation that Microsoft was the source of any such financial incentives (he said that while it may be that someone paid off Paramount, it wasn't Microsoft). The NYT "sticking to its story" doesn't say much, since the NYT didn't accuse Microsoft of anything. One could just as easily say that the NYT is sticking to its story that Microsoft didn't pay off Paramount, since their story has nobody accusing Microsoft of such and has Microsoft denying speculation of such.

Besides Microsoft VP Amir Majidimehr, Microsoft's Kevin Collins also went on the record saying that Microsoft made no payments to get Paramount to dump BR.
Microsoft Responds to Bill Hunts claims of a buyout

Microsoft's version of the story has since been proven correct.
Blu-Ray fanboy Bill Hunt, the primary spreader of the "Microsoft paid off Paramount" story, admitted that he was in the wrong:
Oopsie! Bill Hunt does a mea culpa. Now can the conspiracy theories stop?

The idea that Microsoft paid Paramount to dump BR was something that BR fanboys grasped onto (glossing over the fact that Sony did pay off Target to cease stocking HD-DVD players on the shelves).

Um, the crap that you're spreading was about *Paramount* dumping Blu-Ray, not "Panasonic". (Panasonic still supports BR (foolishly IMO, since 95% of BR players sold are Sony PS3s, while Panasonic and the others are left to fight for the remaining 5%).)

I skimmed your link but didn't find any reference the NYT story that you say "the NY Times is sticking to". Rather, I saw a bunch of BR fanboys in tears, blaming Microsoft for their troubles. The NYT story to which you refer is Two Studios to Support HD-DVD Over Rival
The story cites two unnamed Viacom execs as saying that Paramount received 150 million dollars in financial incentives to dump BR for HD-DVD, but they don't say who the source of the financial incentives is. The same story goes on to *quote* *named* Microsoft VP Amir Majidimehr as denying speculation that Microsoft was the source of any such financial incentives (he said that while it may be that someone paid off Paramount, it wasn't Microsoft). The NYT "sticking to its story" doesn't say much, since the NYT didn't accuse Microsoft of anything. One could just as easily say that the NYT is sticking to its story that Microsoft didn't pay off Paramount, since their story has nobody accusing Microsoft of such and has Microsoft denying speculation of such.

Besides Microsoft VP Amir Majidimehr, Microsoft's Kevin Collins also went on the record saying that Microsoft made no payments to get Paramount to dump BR.
Microsoft Responds to Bill Hunts claims of a buyout

Microsoft's version of the story has since been proven correct.
Blu-Ray fanboy Bill Hunt, the primary spreader of the "Microsoft paid off Paramount" story, admitted that he was in the wrong:
Oopsie! Bill Hunt does a mea culpa. Now can the conspiracy theories stop?

The idea that Microsoft paid Paramount to dump BR was something that BR fanboys grasped onto (glossing over the fact that Sony did pay off Target to cease stocking HD-DVD players on the shelves).

Fox put BD+ only on The Day After Tomorrow. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer has enhanced BD-J functionality which is the culprit for its problems, but had no BD+ stuff in it's filestructure like The Day After Tomorrow Does. According to this thread at AVS Forum, there are 3 specific BD players that have problems playing either one or both of these Fox discs: the Samsung BD-1200 says it requires a firmware upgrade to play, the Samsung BD-1000 plays F4:2 but stutters/skips, and the LG 100 dual format player must have the firmware updated. So far the biggest complaint has been slow load times for F4:2, but that is due to the enhanced BD-J functionality, and is very similar to the load times for HD-DVD on the Toshiba standalone players (I have both formats).

My suspicion is:

  A) Networking stack in Vista is rewritten, for example, IPv6 is native, IPv4 is optional.
        http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns /cableguy/cg0905.mspx

  B) Audio stack is re-written, allowing for the new mixer, where each app has its own volume control (and some DRM, but that's not relevent to this issue)
        http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=71 3073

  C) the Thread scheduler is changed in Vista
        http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues /2007/02/VistaKernel/

  D) Appears to only affect Gigabit and above networking.

  item C is possibly the key to this bug, I'm sure the Networking people did lots of perfomance testing, and so did the Multimedia people, as well as the Kernel folks... But, perhaps the full ramifications of the Thread Scheduler could not have been tested in every other combination.

  The basic problem is that Multimedia playback changes the thread scheduler, which affects EVERYTHING. it could have been "Inkjet Printing while playing audio fails", "cannot hot-swap IDE drives while playing audio", "an open audio application blocks hibernate if brand XYZ laptops"... by chance, gigabit networking performace was affected, not because of any direct link.

  Whats needed is for all performance or reliability minded software to be tested both normally, and while playing music in the background (or just with a program that turns on MMCSS, and then does nothing else). Just like when running under a debugger, multi-core machine, virtual machine, etc. different timing, thread deadlock, and race conditions may be found.

The NYTimes reporter was sloppy with his language and didn't realize how cryptic it reads.
But I frequent http://avsforum.com/ where Amir frequently posts. From reading his posts there, here is what the NYT article meant:

"Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment made by parties unbeknown to Microsoft but said Microsoft, themselves wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group."

Or is this an indicator that Alienware has been completely absorbed by Dell, and has nothing left of what once made it good?

It's more of a case of cablecard secrets and DRM. They are not going to pass any trade secrets along to end users. Read any of the CableCard forums for the problems. They are many.

From a Forum here
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=77 1387
Even if someone is to sell you the OCUR (CableCARD reader), it will not work by just plugging it in. You are going to be purchasing a new system if you want CableCARD.

I heard this before somewhere but no one has said why it will not work. Can you give me some details as to why this will not work in another system. Is it drivers, new mobo, connectors, etc....

Surely like everything else there maybe some hack/diy guide to install these in another system.

There are specific bits both in Windows and outside of Windows that are needed. The hardware itself is the smallest part of the picture. You can only get the other parts needed if you are a Microsoft Certified OEM (not System Builder).

The guy in the article is an idiot, plain and simple. Go to http://www.avsforum.com/ and peruse the HTPC forums, people are easily playing high def video from Vista, even without HDCP compliant video cards. It's kind of odd that this guy would make this ridiculously easy to disprove claim, but I guess he thought nobody would, I don't know, actually try to play a high def video from Vista?

Look, I'm no DRM lover and Microsoft isn't my fave but WTF is with this guy? Take an HD-DVD, decode it, play it back. Wow, surprise it PLAYS! In fact it plays at full resolution. According to this guy it won't and if it does it will look like it's being played on an old tube TV - except it doesn't. The very first guy to break HD-DVD did it because his system wasn't DRM compliant and refused to play his legally purchased media - as documented on Doom9 months ago. Gee, remove the DRM and it worked fine and still this guy keeps insisting that Vista won't play back high quality video. I call Bullshit! $100 dollar video cards outperforming $900 video cards? Is no one fact checking this guy? Odd, I know folks who have been running Vista, 64bit at that, who haven't seen ANY of the issues that this guy bitches and moans about. These folks DL HD content and play it with zero issues but to hear this guy that's simply not possible - what's he smoking?

Has anyone who's shot HD video with a camcorder seen the errors he's claiming? Tracked them down? What consumer camcorder supports ICT? Why in this world would it support ICT? ICT is what tells Vista and other devices to protect apparently and if it's not turned on Vista doesn't do anything. Where this guy got the idea that Vista would arbitrarily protect video just because it's a high rez is beyond me. If that were the case wouldn't it also try to protect all of the other various CODECS out there?

Some discussions on AVS about this -> http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=88 8747

BTW how come when I search this mystery error message about OPM resolution being too high I get a zillion hits on his paper but nothing from users screaming from the rooftops? Does it strike anyone else as weird that he seems to be the ONLY one complaining about this? If it's such an issue then finding users screaming shouldn't be a problem. Seems like every other bizarre error I've entered into Google has found others with the problem so why not this error?

As much as it is fun to bash Microsoft this guy doesn't even pass the giggle test....

and full of errors and misleading statements. This guy put it better than I can.

*MD*

Heh, that and a few features from Columbia (most notably _Monty Python & The Holy Grail_) that I would like. But Sony's stuff is largely popcorn summer garbage that I don't care about, and Disney's basically baby tranquilizer except for the Pixar films that look great upconverted on my XA2 (as does _South Park: The Movie_ unsurprisingly).

BUT.. (and it's a big but):

Most of those Bluray exclusive studios are exclusive only in the North America region. There are a number of films from those studios available on HDDVD in other regions (such as Europe and Asia) and since HDDVD has no region encoding and there's no more PAL/NTSC bullshit, you can order them from foreign distributors (or domestics that source from foreign) and get them here.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/printthread.php?t=6 97243&pp=60 (Studio Canal releases Fox and MGM HDDVDs)

OnAir HDTV Creator:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=69 5589

I tend to find with most AV questions, if I just cruise AVSforum long enough I find the best of breed and a long list of posts praising it. Such is the case here.

their copies of "the prestige" and other blu-ray titles don't rot like some are currently doing..

Here is a list of known exclusive titles. But of course many don't have release dates yet. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=85 8296

Any audiophile knows Bose are complete crap. "All the highs, none of the lows, must be Bose." is the old saying. The only reason they are popular is because Bose spends more on marketing then what other companies make as profit and they are "optizimized" for pop music; anything else sounds like shit through them.

Audiophiles will start taking Bose seriously when they start providing some basic info!:

1. What is their frequency _range_? (# Hz - # Hz)
2. What is the efficieny and setup of their drivers and tweeters? #dB (@ 1 watt / 1 meter)
3. How flat is their frequency _response? (# Hz - # Hz +/- # db)
4. What is their impedence graph?

Bose are the DeBeers of Diamonds in the audio world. Overpriced, and crap ROI.

If you want to see & hear a sample of what REAL speakers are supposed to be like, these 2 internet only companies have some great products, and get rave reviews, with prices to match your budget.

* Rockets 760 -- Upgraded Onyx Rockets 750 that blew people away a few years ago.

* For subs, the best bang for the buck are the classic SVS Subs for _CLEAN_ and LOUD BASS for all your audio and home theatre needs.

The place to learn about audio, is the AVS Forum. I've posted tips on Plasma tweaking their, and my experiences with my own Rockets.

Enjoy

A good source of info for home AV solutions can be found here: http://www.avsforum.com/

For materials, start here: http://www.hometech.com/techwire/index.html?gclid= CP6XwO6Bv4wCFRfOggodXwhGaQ

The developers are looking to target AppleTV as the lead platform (at least on the low-end). This is great as the beauty of XBMC was that it ran on a console and everyone running it was on the same page hardware-wise. The only downside is lack of optical storage on the ATV and whether or not it can decode 1080p content.

whats hilarious, is that it seems that no one read the translation of the article.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=10 343838&&#post10343838

the article talks about making "blue light HD DVD" for walmart. blue light? as in blu-ray?!?!?

furthermore, it goes on to talk about a partnership with TDK. everyone knows that TDK is a blu-ray-only partner. they developed the durabis coating that protects the discs. to my knowledge, they dont even offer hd-dvd products.
http://www.tdk.com/consumer/bluray/index.html

walmart is going to flood the market with blu-ray players, NOT HD DVD players!!!!

Link:

I was told by someone in the know that the player will be on the shelf at $299 and frequently on sale for $199

I'm hoping to get a few thousand with my branding.

-Robert

Uh...right...there is no history of improper acronyms with Asian video equipment.

Educate yourself.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=83 6632

If you follow the link trail back to AVS Forum (and from there to the original press release in Chinese) it is clear that the press release, in fact, talks about HD DVD and not Blu-Ray. This has been confirmed by at least one person who knows Chinese who says the phrase translates to "blue laser HD DVD." An explanation for the awkward phrasing is offered in this post which says that there is an HD format in China that uses a red-diode laser, hence the specification of the laser being blue-diode.

If you follow the link trail back to AVS Forum (and from there to the original press release in Chinese) it is clear that the press release, in fact, talks about HD DVD and not Blu-Ray. This has been confirmed by at least one person who knows Chinese who says the phrase translates to "blue laser HD DVD." An explanation for the awkward phrasing is offered in this post which says that there is an HD format in China that uses a red-diode laser, hence the specification of the laser being blue-diode.

If you follow the link trail back to AVS Forum (and from there to the original press release in Chinese) it is clear that the press release, in fact, talks about HD DVD and not Blu-Ray. This has been confirmed by at least one person who knows Chinese who says the phrase translates to "blue laser HD DVD." An explanation for the awkward phrasing is offered in this post which says that there is an HD format in China that uses a red-diode laser, hence the specification of the laser being blue-diode.

I stopped by Blockbuster the other day for the first time in years (a few kids will do that to you). Asked for a movie, and did my usual "is it widescreen" because some are not marked, and I hate chopped-up movies even on my old 3:2 TV. A few years ago the answer would have been "we only have fullscreen, customers keep accidentally renting the widescreen and complaining".


However, the number of widescreen movies on DVD in 2.35:1 is increasing, meaning you get a letterboxed movie on 16:9 screens. And I've seen a few that are "formatted to fit your TV" in which they've done pan edits to bring a 2.35:1 movie down to 16:9.

But this time I got "when there's a choice, we only stock widescreen now. Corporate says it's "truer to the director's vision".

I wonder how this is going to play out when the "director's vision" generally becomes 2.35:1. If I were to build a home theater now, I'd seriously consider making the screen 2.35:1, as seen in the home theaters featured here.

In my opinion the Blu-Ray QC is already flaky with production studios pretty much doing what they want and not really following a standard. Not all discs give you uncompressed PCM, every disc has a different Live Menu, and the codec they choose to encode the disc is usually a mystery. However, it's nothing like the pathetic situation with DVDs where any kid in his basement can (poorly) author a disc.

Thank god for AVSForums and their quality guide. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=75 3726

Well... you're right. That Samsung BDP-1000 is $.23 cheaper than a 20GB PS3. I wouldn't buy it though. I think you'll find that the AVS Forum thread on that unit has a good number of negative comments about it:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=68 8793

But yeah, it's great to finally see these things hit below $500 finally. Hopefully, when Sony releases the BDP-S300 we'll see the street price fall down to ~$350-$400.

Excellent post.

We're on opposite sides of the pond, so there are some differences. Terrestrial HD broadcast ATSC is still MPEG2 and will likely remain that for a good while. Cable and satellite are transitioning to MPEG4 someday, though it's unclear just when. For now they're still broadcasting MPEG2 over QAM. So, for us USians, BD and HD-DVD would appear to offer the best quality available at the moment. So I guess you UKians are lucky if you can get the satellite service.

All of your bullet points are correct, but I want to respond to a couple of them:

1) Yes. The PS3 does not output 720p for blu-ray movies. I suspect this is the same problem as 720p games being unable to scale to 1080i - the unit lacks a hardware scaler. My 720p projector takes 1080i as input and that's what I used. Yes, I'm sure scaling from 1080i to 720p in the projector isn't the best option. It still looks freak'n great compared to cable HD and OTA HD.

8) Oh God yes. The selection even for BD is nothing like what I want. However, netflix does have over 250 titles available right now, and if you check upcoming title availability BD has a bunch of releases in the works. Here's a list:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=78 2217

Uhhhh... that would be an HD-DVD player, and not a Blu-Ray player. Can you find me a Blu-Ray player that's cheaper than a 20GB PS3? I don't think so. But, within six months, you will be able to.

The primary use for an amplified antenna is for when you are unable to put the unit next to the tuner. If you have a 100 foot run to the tv, you would probably want to invest in an in-line preamp of some sort to overcome loss in the coax. But, you are correct in that an amplified antenna won't magically bring in distant broadcasters - an appropriate one might, though. Don't knock it because it didn't work for you.

Tv reception is an amazingly complex affair, and it is difficult to judge any antenna by others' reviews. Take a look at http://antennaweb.org/ and AVS forum for more on this subject.

I'd still love to be able to view a downconverted version of WGBH's HDTV signal, which should be pretty good (since our UHF reception is very good).

Not really a call for that yet. For example, I have a Samsung DTB-H260F for my LCD TV, and it works reasonably well (some problems with HDCP... sometimes it works, sometimes not). That can downconvert, but the problem is the menus and such aren't sent out the coaxial/S-video outputs, only the component and HDMI outputs. So you can see the actual program, but you can't see any on-screen displays.

To even set it up on a TV without component inputs, you have to plug the green component signal into the video jack on the TV; then you get a black-and-white signal where the menus are visible. After that, you use the coax or s-video hookups, and just try to remember what channel you're on. (Honest. See here.)

As I said, I have it hooked up to a more recent TV so I don't have to worry about this problem, but as you can see from that thread, people who want ATSC reception on an older TV are close to SOL. Though at our local grocery store, I saw 27-inch SDTVs with built-in ATSC tuners for sale...

This thread http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=79 8080&page=1&pp=30 showed that the blue-ray disc is gaining ground. the blueray disc is out selling hd-dvd 2:1.

AVS Forum is quite a bit better source on this than /. and while last years Toshiba's clearly had a problem, the forum has been absent of the massive amounts of complaints that were there last year. Several posters have even stated the original problem fixed.

Here's a couple of the comments.

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I am now worried to death that my tv will have issues with the PS3. Even though Sony demo'ed the PS3 with the tv that I have, it still means nothing to me until real people post up real info. If you have your PS3 hooked up via HDMI please post your results here. I am looking for a Sony xbr2 (46 inch version if that matters at all) that has tried this. Thanks for any info guys and gals.

Sony
xbr2 60 inches-Displays image fine when it is available but losses image randomly. Blackouts happen and then the image reappears.
xbr2 46 inch-No issues at all, syncs right up.
xbr1 50 inch-only displays at 720p (this could be because this set doesnt support 1080p, more research neeed)
xrd 60 and 50 inches-Randomly loses signal like the 60" Sony xbr2

Samsung
BD-P1000-steady flickering image
other display "sparkly" noise images with 1080p resolution but seems fine with 720p.
4696D-reports no signal found via hdmi sometimes and other times it works great.
HL-S5087W-no issues with hmdi

Panasonic
TH42PX500-Randomly loses signal like the 60" Sony xbr2

Westinghouse
LVM-47w1-Randomly loses signal like the 60" Sony xbr2
42w2-flashing screen and signal loss but works fine via hmdi-dvi
37w3-flashing screen and no signal, turn off the tv and turn it back on and it seems to work.

JVC
JVC HD-61FN97-seems to work fine with everything except 480p via hdmi

It doesn't just appear on Westinghouse TVs. See this discussion on AVS Forum. Even Sony TVs are having issues with the PS3...

1: Yes, without a doubt. If you build it, they will come. ;-) There are already some PRO level component-in cards in the $1000 - $3000 price range (Blackmagic Decklink, Aja Xena LHe), but for the purposes of recording full-length HD content, they'd be prone to all the data rate problems already discussed here. To close the sale, the device would need *some* kind of simple data-dump interface that would work on an average PC with an average SATA drive. Since you seem to know low-level DMA programming, maybe the best strategy would be a self-contained recording device, where you just add your own HDD & go? Here's a player version of what I'm talking about: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16855182001. If something like that had a "record" button, I really think it would start a feeding frenzy, even at $2000-ish.

2: In today's market, I could see it being worth another ~$500 if you had a PCI and/or USB version of the device that did for HD component + analog audio input what a Hauppauge or ADS or Pinnacle device does for S-Video input. The price would have to fall eventually, of course, but I think $2,500 would be about right for the early-adopter market (i.e., before you could figure out how to get any economies of scale in the production process). For example, my Hauppauge PVR-150 will (a) tune my cable box via an IR blaster, (b) compress the captured S-Video stream to MPEG2, and (c) provide the muxed stream to a video input device channel that Windows recognizes. It's also compatible for use as a tuner card with Media Center, so some kind of drivers "know" that the IR-blaster & S-Video input "go together." If you are competent at writing Windows video capture source device drivers, then that might be the way to go (though I'd imagine that would add some serious levels of complexity.)

3: VideoHelp is one spot, yes; I'd also recommend checking out the HTPC area at AVS Forums: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f= 26/. If the word got out between those places and Doom9, maybe TheGreenButton.com and a few MythTv forums too, I think the sales momentum would take care of itself from there.

For starters, I'd say figure out if the boards you can program can indeed handle the input & scaling end of the deal. Then try finding out what it would take to get your board's output into MEncoder. On a Windows machine, I convert OTA HDTV streams from 1920*1080i MPEG-2 to 720*405 29.97fps MP4 w/AC3 audio (FFMPEG does the audio), and I can usually damn near run at realtime speeds (above 30fps) on an AMD 3800 X2. That's what makes me optimistic that a dedicated encoder based on MEncoder's code could do the job. Could one get 1080i/30 scaled to 720p/29.97 in hardware, perhaps using a GPU along with libavcodec's support for bicubic hardware scaling?

If you're really thinking about productizing this, I think the big decisions amount to deciding if your skill set is more suited to making a standalone device, or to going the extra mile to write device drivers for Linux and/or Windows. The icing on the latter option woudl be to add some sort of ability to bind to a tuner control / IR emitter, but that's probably not *strictly* necessary as it could be done with separate hardware & simpler, more platform specific software, I suppose.

I'm just a lowly C# programmer myself, but if there's anything I can do to help, or any alpha-testing I could do, please don't hesistate to hit me up.