Home Theater

Earlier this year the epic battle for the next-gen disc technology was finally ended with Blu-ray becoming the victor. However, I’m still not convinced that a new disc technology is what the industry really needs. With high-speed internet more widely available than ever before and hard drive sizes reaching over 1TB, it only seems logical that we’ll turn to digital distribution with movies, just as we’ve done with music. Once again, Apple is making strides that will no doubt help us along that path.

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With so many different wireless technologies around today, there is still one place that way too many cords are found, and that’s behind your TV. For some people, they have multiple gaming consoles, home theater receivers, cable TV and more running back there. Well Sharp has finally stepped up to the plate and created a device for their high-end TVs that will eliminate all but your power cord.

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While I’ve managed to finally rid my entire house of CRT monitors (with as many monitors as I have, it seemed like quite an accomplishment when I did) I still haven’t upgraded to a flat-screen TV. I’m hoping to pick up a nice LCD TV in the next few months, however, even it would look gargantuan when compared to this latest OLED display from Sony.

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Toshiba has begun to ship its SpursEngine SE1000 image processor - while that might not ring a bell with you, it is actually a similar processor that is found in your PS3, which also translates to having this images processor offering superior performance where MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC/H.265 hardware encoding/decoding is concerned. Samples have already started to ship, and Toshiba is pretty optimistic about sales, projecting around half a dozen million units moved within the first three years of the SpursEngine’s release.

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As much as I can’t stand that Extreme Makeover: Home Edition show, I wouldn’t mind if Ty and his buddies came to my house and whipped it into shape with a few sledgehammers and new furniture.

There is one thing that I never see the Extreme Makeover team do: connect all electronic devices in the household together, seamlessly. In other words, all the electronic devices (TV, PC, etc.) are all wired or shared together seamlessly in a true Digital Home Makeover.

It appears that Microsoft wants to fill that homeowner’s need with the launching of their Digital Home Makeover Contest. To enter, you have to make a video of yourself creatively explaining why you need a Digital Home Makeover.

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And around $100, it may be the most expensive too! But come on, it’s R2D2, man! The only thing that would make this cooler is if it doubled as a trash compactor with swiss army knife attachments.

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A couple of years ago (it doesn’t seem that long ago…) I waxed lyrical about the advantages of using a modded Xbox with XBMC as a living room media adapter.

Unfortunately technology moves on and my trusty Xbox just didn’t have the horsepower to play back high definition content. The next gen consoles can do it but they still aren’t as flexible as I’d like (although kudos to Microsoft for finally enabling DivX playback on the 360).

So what do to? The Mac Mini stepped in to fill the gap nicely; the new Core Duo models are fairly powerful, it’s tiny and it’s almost silent running. It’s also surprisingly good value for money - I can’t build a PC that ticks all those boxes for the price of a mini.

It seems like the developers of the original XBMC software had the same thought and they’ve been porting the media player software to OSX. Over the past month or so I’ve been watching the OSXBMC project with interest and it looks like it’s finally become solid enough for general use.
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Considering that we are less than one year away from the big HDTV switch, it is not surprising that Sharp/AQUOS is prepared with the SE94 Series.

The SE94 series is designed with a “Cornerstone design” with detachable bottom speakers and a slimmer and lighter design. The SE94 also has terrific picture quality with 1080p resolution, as well as a Dynamic Contrast Ratio of 27,000:1. As for colors, the 10-bit ASV panel and 5-wavelength backlight system provides vibrant red and truer greens. In short, it is simply a better picture.

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