-
Roku Users Get 24/7 Wealth TV Cable Feed[teaser]In addition to On Demand programming, you'll be able to tune in to the same channel your cable-subscribing friends have. [/teaser] Wealth TV isn't exactly the biggest channel out there, but its addition to Roku players is an exciting one. It's not because there's programming available on demand or that Roku viewers will be watching it, but the way it's being delivered to the device. Unlike most offerings for over-the-top boxes like Roku's line of media steamers, Wealth TV will be offering customers the ability to watch the same programming as they would on cable, live as it happens. It's cable without cable. "We've received a large volume of consumer requests to expand our distribution to connected devices," says Wealth TV CEO Robert Herring. "This deployment will let us gauge the acceptability and viability of alternative distribution methods for our traditional cable feed." Roku customers will be able to access this programming at a price of $2.99 a month. Source: PR NewswirePosted Wed Jan 19, 2011 at 11:00 AM PST by: -
Netflix Pulls "Add to DVD Queue" From Instant Watch Devices[teaser]It's another move away from physical media for Netflix, and one that's gotten people understandably upset. [/teaser] Up until now, Netflix has had a feature on Instant Watch devices like the PS3, Roku player, and iPhone that would allow you to add a movie to your DVD queue if it wasn't available to stream. Seems like a good idea, right? Well it's gone. Netflix has announced that they're pulling the option because "providing the option to add a DVD to your Queue from a streaming device complicates the instant watching experience and ties up resources that are better used to improve the overall streaming functionality." The problem with that answer is that removing the option actually makes things more complicated. To add a movie to your DVD queue on the iPhone, you can't just search for it and then add it to your queue like you used to. You'll have to search, find it, realize that it's unavailable streaming, close the Netflix app, open up your internet browser and then add it from the Netflix site. That or keep a netbook handy for adding and removing DVDs and Blu-rays from your queue. This seems to be yet another move away from DVD and Blu-ray discs for Netflix, which has been focusing intently on its streaming service. Source: Netflix BlogPosted Wed Jan 19, 2011 at 09:00 AM PST by: -
Rumor: The iPad 2 Getting 720p or Better Resolution[teaser]Apple's popular tablet may be going HD after all. [/teaser] When Apple launched the iPad last year, they did so with the pomp and circumstance normally associated with Apple products. Steve Jobs took the podium and introduced some of the iPad's features, including the ability to play back HD movies. Of course, without an HD screen that hardly matters. The iPad 2, which we should start hearing about soon if Apple is on course for the next piece of tech, is rumored to upgrade the existing 1024x768 screen to a display that can actually play back HD content in its native resolution. It seems likely that Apple would want to upgrade, but there's a question of compatibility. The iPad has a 4:3 aspect ratio, and unless Apple is planning on changing up their apps significantly, we'll likely see another 4:3. The most likely, according to CrunchGear's Devin Coldewey, is an upgrade to 2048x1536 - four times the resolution of the original. Source: CrunchGearPosted Wed Jan 19, 2011 at 07:00 AM PST by: -
"High-Def Digest-Digest" - January 18, 2011[teaser]The first few weeks of January have been huuuuuge, thanks in part to CES 2011. New gear was announced, 3D technology was pushed further forward, and we got what might be the biggest Blu-ray announcement of all time!!! Not sure what we're talking about? That's what the High-Def Digest-Digest is for.[/teaser] Blu-ray News 'Star Wars' Announced for Blu-ray! If you didn't hear about this one then you're really out of the loop. The trilogy everyone's been waiting for and the trilogy everyone wants to forget about are hitting Blu-ray on September 18th. 'The Lion King' & 'Beauty and the Beast' Announced for Blu-ray 3D Disney's going 3D with some of their classics, including 'The Lion King' and 'Beauty and the Beast.' Even more titles are rumored, including 'Nightmare Before Christmas.' 'The Incredibles' Blu-ray Dated It's always exciting when a Pixar movie goes HD, and we couldn't be more excited for the Blu-ray release of 'The Incredibles' on April 12. 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' Criterion Announced For Blu-ray If you're a 'Fear and Loathing' fan, you'll be happy to know that the Criterion Collection Blu-ray will be hitting shelves on April 26. We're still trying to get Drew Taylor to stop giggling and clapping his hands together maniacally. 'The Ten Commandments' Blu-rays Detailed The Cecil B. Demille classic will be hitting Blu-ray on March 29th along with documentaries, commentary and more. Blu-ray Director’s Panel – CES 2011 Oliver Stone, Baz Luhrmann, and Michael Mann sat down to talk about Blu-ray and what it means to them. The State of Blu-ray At CES 2011 There weren't very many big Blu-ray player announcements at CES 2011 - Dick Ward says that's a good sign. Other News Samsung Roundtable – CES 2011 Samsung holds a roundtable to discuss the present and future of the company with some of its top execs and a few members of the press. High-Def Digest is there. Philips Announces World's First Wireless HDMI Blu-ray Player Aside from the power cord, you can go wireless with the new Philips player, giving you freedom to put the player anywhere you want - within 100 feet of course. Japan Gets First 3D Series, And It's a Drama! Adventure? Excitement? A Japanese 3D audience craves not these things. Even if they do want it, they're getting a drama about air traffic controllers instead. Netflix Buttons Are Coming to Remotes Everywhere Netflix fans with connected TVs and Blu-ray players will have an even easier time getting to their favorite streaming content thanks to the addition of Netflix specific buttons. Goodbye Component - From Now On Only HDMI Will Do HD Analog video users are out of luck thanks to the new standard. Starting in 2013, Blu-ray players won't even offer component outputs. The Bonus View The Year in Review: The Best Films of 2010 Drew Taylor takes a look at the year's best and inspires controversy with 'Piranha 3D.' How Soon is Too Soon for a Remake? The impending remake of 'Total Recall' makes Josh Zyber ask - is twenty years too soon? My Latest Addiction: 'Game Dev Story' Dick Ward is hooked on an iPhone game - and he doesn't even have an iPhone. 'Game Dev Story' is the game worth borrowing your rommate's phone to play. Worst Weekend Ever Josh Zyber hates on Vampire Weekend, or at least one song in particular in his rant about the music used in TV commercials.Posted Tue Jan 18, 2011 at 12:03 PM PST by: -
KFA2 Announces a Wireless Graphics Card[teaser]No need for cables, and no need to have that tower sitting next to your monitor or TV. [/teaser] A Home Theater PC is one of the coolest things you can add to your setup. It lets you access any content provider you want, play back digital media files of all types, and even play games. It can also be a real eyesore. The problem of course is that you need to have the PC near your TV to make it work. Depending on the size of your PC, it can make placement a real pain. The latest graphics card from KFA2 doesn't have VGA or HDMI outputs, but sports an antenna array that allows you to connect to a monitor or TV using WHDI. You can get around 100 feet of range out of the KFA2 GTX 460 WHDI, which lets you put your PC just about anywhere you want. Pair a wireless mouse and keyboard with it and you've got a winner. Source: Bit Tech (via Engadget)Posted Mon Jan 17, 2011 at 09:00 AM PST by: -
Japan Gets First 3D Series, And It's a Drama![teaser]'Tokyo Air Traffic Controller' starts airing on January 19th. [/teaser] Sure, the name may be less than optimal, but the drama about air traffic controllers is getting Japanese audiences excited. It's the first 3D television series and it starts on the 19th. Don't even act like a show about air traffic controllers is somehow beneath American audiences. We watch crab fishermen, truck drivers, and even shows about rich people being rich. The show, dubbed 'Tokyo Control,' is a 10 part drama created by Fuji TV. During the press conference for this new show, one of Fuji TV's execs came right out and said something akin to "Don't tell me a drama series can't work in 3D." Google Translate really isn't up to the task for a direct quote. 'Tokyo Control' will be available to the 391,000 subscribers to SkyPerfecTV's high definition service, and will air in both 2D and 3D so no one has to miss the show. Source: CnetPosted Mon Jan 17, 2011 at 07:00 AM PST by: -
HD Advisor: Pop Song 89Editor's Note: Each Friday, High-Def Digest's own HD Advisor will answer a new round of questions from our readers. If you have home theater questions you need answered, send an email to [email protected]. If you've already sent a question and don't see it answered yet, please be patient as we work our way through them. To browse through previously answered questions, visit the main HD Advisor page. Answers by Joshua Zyber Anamorphic Lens for 2.35:1 Projection Q: I have a 1080p projector and have considered adding an anamorphic lens for widescreen "scope" Blu-ray releases, but something confuses me. My projector will completely fill the frame vertically by interpolating extra lines off a Blu-ray disc, which an anamorphic lens would then squash back to a 2.35:1 widescreen picture. Although all 1080 lines are in the squeezed image, is this really any better than just watching the picture with the reduced (fewer than 1080) number of lines, since the extra lines are interpolated anyway? Widescreen pictures look really good now without an anamorphic lens. Is there that much to be gained? I believe it's a different story with DVDs since widescreen pictures are stretched vertically on the disc to occupy more lines, and a real gain in the number of lines in a restored (vertically squeezed) image results. But as I understand it, this isn't the case for BDs. A: If you haven't already, I recommend that you read my Constant Image Height Tutorial, which gives an overview of what you're describing. Fundamentally, your understanding of the process is correct. Blu-ray discs are not authored with any sort of anamorphic enhancement, like you see on DVD. All movies on Blu-ray (well, most of them) are encoded at a resolution of 1920x1080 square pixels. Any movie with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 will be letterboxed within that frame. The active move portion of the image occupies approximately 1920x800 of those pixels. The other 280 rows of pixels make up the black bars. There are two methods for projecting a letterboxed 2.35:1 movie onto a 2.35:1 screen. The first is to simply zoom the image so that the movie fills the screen and the letterbox bars spill off the top and bottom. In a darkened room, the black bars should barely be visible. If they're at all distracting, some dark fabric above and below the screen is an easy way to absorb that extra light. The more complex method is to add an anamorphic lens that will stretch the 1920x1080 image output from the projector into a 2.35:1 shape. You will then need to electronically scale the image back to its proper picture geometry by cropping off the black bars entirely and stretching the middle portion in a vertical direction. Many home theater projectors offer this feature nowadays, and it sounds like yours is one of those models. You are absolutely right when you say that any new pixels being added to the picture are all interpolated. The anamorphic lens method has three advantages. By cropping off the letterbox bars, there's no chance of that extra light spill distracting you or washing out your movie image. More importantly, by redirecting all of the projector's 1920x1080 pixels onto the 2.35:1 screen, you're focusing more light onto a smaller area. This will result in a brighter movie picture, which can be very helpful with large screen sizes where every lumen makes a difference. The third advantage is that, by packing all of those pixels into the smaller area, you also reduce the size of each, and minimize any visible pixel structure (the "Screen Door Effect") in your picture. This is less of a concern with 1080p projectors than it was with older, lower-resolution models. But it still could be an issue, once again, with those large screen sizes. The downside to anamorphic lenses is that they are very expensive, and can cause pincushion distortion in your picture geometry (generally mild) at short throw distances. You'll also need to decide whether you want to remove the lens when watching regular 16:9 content, or scale your picture into a pillarbox format. The latter will reduce your picture resolution in that mode. There are some anamorphic lenses that let you switch to a "passthrough" mode without any stretch, but these tend to sacrifice image quality at both aspect ratios in the name of convenience. In the end, both the zooming method and the anamorphic lens method have their advantages and disadvantages. Neither is necessarily more "correct" than the other. Which one you decide to use will depend on the specific circumstances of your home theater room, your personal priorities, and of course your budget. PS3 Settings: LPCM vs. Bitstream Q:If both my A/V receiver (Denon 2808) and Blu-ray player (PS3) can decode HD Audio formats, which is the preference for doing it? I have the older PS3 (not slim), and I've heard that it still dumbs down HD audio formats before sending them if you have PCM set...is this true? I suppose on the Denon, either way I should have "Multi Ch" selected when watching a Blu-ray, correct? I see the PS3 and Denon are similar to your setup, so how do you have yours set up? A: In a situation where a Blu-ray player can either decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio internally or transmit them in native bitstream form, there shouldn't be a lot of difference between these two options. Both would provide you with the full lossless track. Theoretically, the Bitstream option may be less prone to jitter, but whether that makes any audible difference to your ears depends highly on whether you classify yourself as an "audiophile" and buy into that belief system or not. (In other words, Placebo Effect will play a strong role in your perception.) As a matter of convenience, the internal decoding option will allow you to listen to Secondary Audio content, such as menu sound effects or any soundtrack that accompanies a Bonus View supplement. Secondary Audio must be live-mixed with the movie soundtrack, which can only be done if the player decodes. The Bitstream option will only send the movie soundtrack itself. If you wanted to listen to Bonus View content, you'd have to turn off Bitstream and then turn it back on again when done. This can be a minor nuisance. With all that said, the original ("fat") PS3 cannot transmit the native bitstreams of either DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD. The console will downgrade to standard DTS 5.1 or Dolby Digital 5.1 when the "Bitstream" option is selected. However, it can decode these formats internally. As such, you should set the console's audio for LPCM output and let it do the decoding. Only the newer PS3 Slim is able to bitstream HD audio. Homework Assignment: You Be the Advisor The HD Advisor knows many things, but he doesn't know everything. Some questions are best answered with a consensus of opinions from our readers. If you can help to answer the following question, please post your response in our forum thread linked at the end of this article. Your advice and opinions matter too! Blu-ray Playback on a PC Q: I'd like some help with Blu-ray playback on a PC. What's the best Blu-ray playback software, Powerdvd9 or WinDVD 9? For PC HD Audio, what are the best HD sound cards? Are there any obvious downsides to HD Audio over analog from a PC? What are the best setting on a PC for outputting the 1080p picture? My full HD projector receives a signal from my Blu-ray PC at 1080/60 – should I set the PC graphics card to 1080/24? Check back soon for another round of answers. Keep those questions coming. Joshua Zyber's opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of this site, its owners or employees.Posted Fri Jan 14, 2011 at 12:15 PM PST by: -
Redbox Sales Tumble in Fourth Quarter - 28-day Delay To Blame?[teaser]Stock for Redbox parent company Coinstar took a 24 percent hit on Friday in response to lowered sales estimates released for the fourth quarter. [/teaser] It's inevitable that when a service or product skyrockets there's going to be a time where everything starts to even out, in the case of Coinstar's Redbox service, that moment may have arrived in part due to highly unpopular deals cut with Hollywood studios that delay rental access to the latest releases. Like Netflix, Redbox has signed on to a deal that gets them access to discs at a lower cost, while giving the studios a four-week window in which to sell their releases before they hit the rental market. That agreement may be hurting the company's bottom line. Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, believes the delay requires Redbox to do a better job selecting titles for each rental location, to ensure customers continue to rent, even when the assortment of titles is not as fresh as before the delay window was imposed. "The miss is attributable to poor inventory management," Pachter concluded. This would seem to coincide with company reports that kiosk traffic remained strong, even as the number of rentals per customer decreased. It will be interesting to see if this fall in rentals coincided with increased retail sales of delayed rental titles within the same release window. "We have already taken a number of decisive steps to better align content purchases with our consumers' behavior, including offering more day and date titles and better allocating Blu-ray titles to high demand areas," said Chief Executive Paul Davis. It remains to be seen if the savings brought about by the 28-day delay will balance out the losses resulting from reduced business. As of today, the hit to the company's stock is undeniable, with stocking falling $13.80 to $43.15 in after-hours trading on Thursday, and the plunge continuing down $13.97 (24.5 percent) to $42.92 by noon on Friday. Source: Seattle Times news servicePosted Fri Jan 14, 2011 at 11:35 AM PST by: -
The Nintendo 3DS May Record 3D Video[teaser]There's no confirmation, but Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata has been dropping some hints. [/teaser] Sony made big waves with the Bloggie 3D, a $250 video camera capable of recording 3D content in a 720 resolution, but Nintendo has a chance to take the wind right out of Sony's sails. The 3DS is an eagerly anticipated glasses-free 3D handheld from Nintendo that has already been confirmed to have 3D photo capability, but in a recent article from Nintendo, there have been hints about being able to record video. "I think it will be fun if we're able to include video recording capabilities with future updates," says Iwata. When asked by 'EarthBound' creator Shigesato Itoi whether this would take up a lot of space, Iwata said that SD cards will allow for much more freedom there. "Long videos, lots of photos, they'll fit." The 3DS is due out in Japan in March, and is expected in the US by May. Source: NintendoPosted Fri Jan 14, 2011 at 10:30 AM PST by: -
Viewsonic is Creating a Boxee Based TV[teaser]Google's not the only one rolling out specially branded TVs. [/teaser] The Boxee Box has been a success according to manufacturer D-Link. They've been having a bit of trouble keeping them in stock, and that's the kind of problem you want to have. The D-Link set-top is currently the only home theater device short of an HTPC that will get Boxee on your TV, but that won't last long. The folks at Viewsonic are creating their own Boxee device, but it's not a set-top - it's a TV. Viewsonic showed off a 46 inch television with an Atom CE4100 processor inside, ready to provide you with the full Boxee experience. It's the first TV to pack Boxee and only the second product announced made by someone other than D-Link. There's no word yet on pricing or availability, but you can be sure we'll be keeping an eye on this one. Source: Boxee BlogPosted Fri Jan 14, 2011 at 09:00 AM PST by:
