Wow that was quick, review of the LG BH100 Hybrid Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Normally most things announced at CES take a while to show up but the folks at Gizmodo have the first review I've seen of the LG BH100. I think the player actually looks really nice too, with those top glowing buttons.
However the review wasn't so nice on the rest of the features. HD-DVD playback was incomplete due to the inability of the BH100 to play the menus of HD-DVD's. The quality of the player's DVD playback came into question and the cost of the player, being more than 2 seperate devices, was also questionned.
Anyways post your thoughts, I'm holding back on next-gen formats for a bit, well, until I get my HDTV in the summer :)
More later,
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 8:03 PM 0 comments
Labels: DVD, Home Theater, Tech
DVD Kiosks
Saturday, January 13, 2007
I've seen some of the kiosks or automated movie stores pop up around but until DVDPlay came around you had to register with a person before hand. Now DVDplay is the world's first fully autoamated way to Rent DVD movies from anywhere, all you need is a credit or debit card. This saves the hassles of a membership card when we tried the local kiosk at home, and you time or dollars don't expire.
If you've never seen this kind of a machine it looks like this:
You simply select a movie on the touchscreen, there's categories, new releases, etc, and then just pay for it with your credit or debit card. You DVD comes right away through a slot and you can take it home in less than a minute total with this whole process. Sure beats trying to find the nearest Blockbuster. I think this is the future of DVD rental.
What you guys think? Anyone tried any? Post your thoughts
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 11:55 AM 1 comments
Labels: DVD
News in the Next Generation DVD Format War
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Wow it seems like things must be brewing in the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray camps after today's double announcements of a Double Format DVD player from LG and a new Disc that holds both formats on one disc.
News.com has a story on the new Warner Total DVD that has both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats on one disc, which can help consumers who want to see content on one format and not the other. Pretty good news for now until one format wins but it could be expensive yet useless if one camp dies off.
Same goes for LG's announcement of a Dual Format Player, as seen from the press release on HardOCP.com, it could be good, but we'll have to see what the consumers decide eventually.
I'm probably going with a PS3, so I give in to them, but I would like to see something where both camps player nice as well,
More later (I swear I post up news/pictures tonight of the Holidays)
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 1:33 PM 0 comments
AACS DRM (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray copy protection) cracked!
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Wow this is exciting news for those movies fans. There's a guy at the Doom9 who cracked the copy protection for the new next generation of movies, namely HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He gets a key from some of the new players and decrypts the movies to a hard drive. Engadget tested it out and they were able to get the movies on their HD but they weren't able to play them due to the crappiness of PowerDVD/WinDVD. I wonder if it'll be as easy to play as DVD's were, so we'll have to see.
In the mean time you can check out the Engadget post HERE and find out what's the fuss all about.
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 9:01 PM 0 comments
Labels: DVD, Electronics
Next Gen DVD formats and players guide
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Most people here have vaguely heard of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD but most people do not have a clue between the differences between the two. Mainly Blu-Ray has been championned by Sony, it's in the PS3, and it has a larger amount of media companies behind it and the discs can hold more data (50gb on a DUAL-Layer Disc) where the HD-DVD camp, lead by Hitachi, have the support of Microsoft and Intel among others, and is cheaper to make and has Xbox360 support as well.
Ok that's good but what about the stand alone players? Well this Next Gen DVD Recorders and Players Guide can help you with that, with info on theSamsung Blu-Ray Disc Player (I've watched movies on this at the Samsung Experience in NYC) and Sony's Blu-Ray players, which many predict to win the format war. Either way getting some nice HD quality movies in your home is definetly worth it so check it out.
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 3:32 PM 0 comments
A new strategy for DVD releases, Fox going to release a DVD for 24, the TV show, the day after it airs
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Sorry for the long title but this is pretty interesting news. Since everyone gets a lot of episodes on Bit-Torrent while waiting for the DVD versions to come out they're trying to undercut that and release the DVD of the show the same week. Yep the same week of the TV broadcast, which is usually Sunday/Monday they're releasing the DVD on Tuesday. It'll be interesting to see the sales since a lot of people get the season box sets or just download them anyways on Bit-Torrent/P2P networks.
Anyways check out the full story HERE and post your thoughts
-Steve
Posted bySteve at 7:09 PM 0 comments
Labels: Bit-Torrent, DVD, TV
