TV, Movies & Home Theatre - Page 54

Looks like the Movie industry finally wised up to a few things. One of the first is that people do not want to spend $30+ on a movie regardless of the resolution.

In an article over at PCworld they take a look at the new trend in BluRay pricing. It seems that now your high end titles are around $20 with many titles being offered at just $10.

This is great news and coupled with the sub $200 BluRay players that have hit the market will open up BluRay Hi-Def to more consumers than ever.
I also have to wonder if this move is also not to help combat the rising rate of Pirated BluRay titles some can be found in full 1080p. Lowering the prices could help turn people away from getting their favorite movie in this method.

Read more here at PCWorld.

S3 Graphics are still hanging in there and mostly rely on their Chrome series of graphics cards to help keep them afloat. In November of last year the Chrome 500 series made its debut with a single new offering dubbed the Chrome 530 GT and now S3 extends that to two models with the new Chrome 540 GTX appearing on S3's GStore sub-site.

Thermaltake are pushing a few new HTPC cases out of the door in the next few weeks.

The announcement follows on the heels of Thermaltake's MeOrb low profile cooler and looks to be part of an HTPC line up to come.

The new line will have the RSI H designation with the first two (RSI H SD200 and SD100 mini) to hit stores in the next few weeks. Both will ship with stands for vertical or horizontal setups.

Read more at Techconnect

For a change, the Day 1 keynotes of IDF Fall in Taipei was rather interesting compared to previous years with many demos and such for us to report to you.

This probably doesn't hold a great deal of relevance due to the lack of supporting media for it, but Sony has become the second known manufacturer (Buffalo surprisingly beat them to it recently) of an internal Blu-ray writer that's capable of writing to BD-R at 8x speed. This equates to a full 25GB disc being written in around 15 mins and a dual layer 50GB disc in around half an hour or so.

Sony has today launched its new VAIO TT which sports some pretty cool features. Coming in at 11.1" with a thickness of just over 1", it's clearly on the small side of things. But the tiny statue hasn't stopped Sony from cramming the new TT with features.

Good ole' Chieftec are back with a few new enclosures aimed at the HTPC crowd. Their latest Hi-Fi series certainly look the part and carry with them a few bells and whistles not seen in entry-level HTPC enclosures. Being Chieftec, it's assumed the pricing on these will be very competitive as well, though that information hasn't yet been disclosed.

The Mini-ITX form factor is a great solution for the embedded market, with the obvious benefit of being extremely compact. This would have made it a terrific base for HTPCs as well, but unfortunately more often than not it just doesn't allow for the kind of power people want. VIA's ITX solutions have come a long way, but they still struggle to do much beyond fairly basic tasks.

A mob by the name of J&W Technology are about to come to the rescue here; details and images have surfaced on their upcoming "MINIX-780G-SP128MB" which holds much promise indeed.

We just got back from visiting CyberLink HQ here in Taiwan for an interview about HD on HTPC concerns and issues and one of the things we discussed was its new movie social networking website called MoovieLive.com. They've just officially launched it to the world after our visit.

New Media Enterprises (NME) is not a name you would have heard of, but it is a name that's going to be well known pretty soon. These guys have made a startling announcement that they are releasing the new HD format, offering "True HD" for high definition systems. The technology according to a New York Times report is the same quality as Blu-Ray, but not as expensive to develop. The new format will be known as HD Versatile Multilayer Disc (VMD), and the New York Times states that the Media players are cheaper too.

They also say it is incompatible with Blu-ray which works on blue light lasers, apparently an inferior frequency for HD movies, but more compatible to high density disks. The new VMD layered technology however overcomes this limitation, and brings things up to speed at red light frequencies.

LG has done its bit in helping bridge the HD format wars by releasing the Super Multi Blue GGCH20L ROM drive which is capable of reading both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks!

Fujitsu has just announced its latest notebook in Australia, the LifeBook N6460 and this baby packs some serious hardware. Starting from the top, well, of the spec sheet at least that is, it comes with a Core 2 Duo T7700 processor which is clocked at 2.4GHz and has 4MB of L2 cache. This is just about as good as it gets when it comes to mobile processors at the moment, although there are a couple of faster models, but we're not going to be that picky now and they would've made this notebook even more expensive.

The N6460 also comes with 2GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM, although it supports up to 4GB. Fujitsu has also fitted a 1GB Intel Turbo Memory module to the system and it has no less than two 250GB 2.5-inch SATA drives, although sadly these are most likely only 4,200rpm drives. However, the Australian Fujitsu site doesn't list the drive speeds, so we can only go with what's available on the US site.

A Blu-ray drive is also part of the package and again we have to rely in the specs from the US website which lists the drive as a single speed Blu-ray burner that will write to both BD-R, BD-R DL, BD-RE and BD-RE DL media as well as DVD+/-R at 8x and 4x for the re-writeable versions and 2x for dual layer media. Finally it will also write to CD-R at 8x and oddly enough to CD-RW at 10x, but our guess is that the CD-R writing speed is wrong. It will of course read all those format as well.

Sony has announced a new range of Memory Stick PRO Duo cards in 2 and 4GB sizes that ships with a DVD loaded with four movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment. The movies are Click, Ghost Rider, RV and Stomp the Yard. You do need a computer to take advantage of the free movies though and you can only "unlock" one with each purchase of a Memory Stick.

ProLink has released its PixelView PlayTV Xpress Express card TV tuner card. It's quite a well features Express card, it supports all worldwide TV standards as well as it's got a built in FM radio tuner and video capture features. It doesn't support any digital TV standards though, which makes it a bit less appealing when you're considering that more and more countries are going digital and killing their analog TV networks.

The PlayTV Xpress uses the PCI Express bus rather than USB which is also an option for Express card devices and it's a 54mm Express card. It's also compatible with Windows Media Center Edition and it supports time shift recording.

Along with further price cuts and a trimmed down production line of their CPUs today, AMD have also released a couple of new "TV Wonder" tuner products.

The first offering is their new "TV Wonder 650 Combo PCIe", a PCIe x1 card featuring the Theater 650 Pro video processor (which debuted around a year ago). Dual tuners reside on the card, one purely for receiving digital, and the other analogue. Both are capable of operating simultaneously, allowing the user to watch and record from two individual sources at the same time.

Next up is the "TV Wonder 600 USB", featuring a hybrid TV tuner design which is capable of tuning into both digital and analogue broadcasts, but don't confuse that for being able to provide dual tuner functionalities like the TV Wonder 650 Combo card, as it does not sport dual tuners. This should be a great little addition to your notebook though.

Both of these tuners are compatible with Windows Vista and will become available in September.