Home Theater

Microsoft has made its Windows Home Server available to everyone, enabling families to protect, connect and share their digital media and documents. First off the blocks is the HP MediaSmart Server that runs on the above-mentioned Windows Home Server software, which a pre-order can be placed on numerous online shopping sites such as Amazon.com, Bet Buy.com, Buy.com, Circuit City.com, and CompUSA.com.

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Take a minute and go down to your home theater system and look at the phalanx of cables and cords and sundry behind your system. Better yet, just look around you if you’re at your desktop computer.

We all have good intentions of labeling all of our cords when we set up our electronics systems to make it easier to find and unplug one certain component from the whole system. What usually happens is a lot of frustration and crying because you have to unhook everything in your setup to find the one darn cord you’re looking for.
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With today’s obsession for high definition television, what’s a kid to do when dad invests thousands into the HDTV in the den, but leaves him with a paltry 20” TV for his room? Particularly when that same kid plays cool video games like Madden Football, Halo or rock out to Guitar Hero. Well, the Torpedo Entertainment Projector may be the very answer for the gadget obsessed kid who wants to not only eliminate enemy badguys, but also enjoy a good hour of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Ed: do they still show that?) on TV. Costing in the neighborhood of $170, this projector television can project an image six feet high at a resolution of 940×240 resolution.

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Well, it takes just a tad more than that. But thanks to SanDisk’s TakeTV, video fans can now download their favorite DivX, Xvid, and MPEG4 videos from the web and watch them on TV simply by dragging them onto a USB drive and then plugging the drive into the PC via this special gadget. There’s no encoding, no authoring or burning to DVD, no networking. Just a simple drag and drop. The TakeTV does this thanks to the video-out docking station, which translates the PC video format into a signal the TV can read. The TakeTV docking station accepts the USB drive an, like a palm sized DVD player, sends the TV signal via the composite, S-video, stereo audio outputs. The Take TV couldn’t be simpler.

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Seeing that the consumer society is rapidly becoming more mobile, both Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox have announced that additional versions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Live Free or Die Hard for portable movie players and computer viewing. Up until now, on the go movie fans were left with the options of either ripping their own DVDs with varying success, or pay for yet another version of any film they wanted to watch on their iPods. And if users owned another video player, they were stuck with only the option of ripping their own DVDs (there are other downloadable movie options for PC, but they usually have some sort of time based viewing restriction).

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ATI has released a bunch of new TV tuners for those who have been thinking about including a computer in their living room as part of the entire home entertainment package, instead of the usual LCD TV, HD DVD/Blu-ray player, and high end audio center taking all the attention. The products in question are the ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB, TV wonder 600 PCI Express and the TV Wonder 600 PCI. All of these tuners will be able to bring HDTV goodness to the computer, so make sure your rig runs silently enough not to interfere with dialog in a movie due to the noisy hum of its cooling solution.

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Popular Mechanics has announced their Break Through Award winners for 2007 and it’s no surprise that the iPhone (non-bricked version) heads the list, which includes hi-tech tables, high capacity flash drives, a gadget that gives your video game experience a work out, and a multi format HD player (it’s about time).

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Well, perhaps in second place compared to the infamous “Death Star” home theater and slightly cooler than the DIY Trek Theater. And certainly cooler than the Titanic Theater, which admittedly has a vintage movie palace look. But still, can anyone tell me what is cooler than watching the Raiders Trilogy in a Home Theater Room themed out as a museum to the life of Indiana Jones? Teamed with hieroglyphics, replicas of the infamous golden idol that Indy carries football style in the opening scene or the cup of a carpenter as it’s bookend, and even an Arthurian Sword as a door knob. And naturally, there’s also the trademark leather jacket, hat, whip to finish off the ambience. The ceiling even looks like a worn rock face that exposes a cave to the elements. Sadly though, there’s no Lost Ark - though not for wanting one. Apparently, there simply was no room for it in the 8-by-12-foot theater.

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