Posted 03/27/09 at 01:00:00 PM by Michael Brown

Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player is missing two components commonly found in digital media players: a display and storage. What the device does have is two USB ports, HDMI and composite video outputs, digital and analog audio outputs, and the ability to play almost any digital media.
Since you provide the storage media, you can never fill up the WD TV. You plug the player into your TV and connect your USB drive or digital camera to the player; it then creates thumbnails for all the digital movies, photographs, and music it finds stored there. If you connect storage devices to both USB ports, the WD TV will index the contents of both drives as if they were one.
The device delivers much higher video resolution than most media players, all the way from 480i using the composite video port to 1080p using HDMI (576p, 720i, 720p, and 1080i are also supported via HDMI). The WD TV supports a host of video formats, codecs, and containers, including AVI, H.264, QuickTime, VOB, and Matroska. It does not, however, support DivX.
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Posted 02/09/09 at 11:30:00 AM by Michael Brown

Creative takes another stab at wireless audio streaming with the Creative Wireless Receiver, an AC-powered 4.0x2.75-inch block that you plug into powered speakers or your hi-fi system. The $70 device receives audio streams from a transmitter, such as Creative’s Xmod Wireless or X-Fi Notebook card (purchased separately), connected to your PC.
For our tests, we used the Sound Blaster X-Fi Notebook ($90), plugging it into the ExpressCard slot in HP’s monster-sized Pavilion HDX9000 notebook PC. The combination sounded great—at close range, at least. We placed the notebook and the sound card in a bedroom and streamed music to several locations within a 2,700-square-foot single-family home.
Read on for the full review!
Posted 02/05/09 at 06:00:00 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

It’s been almost a year since we tested Pinnacle’s original PCTV HD Pro Stick TV tuner. In that time, Pinnacle has fixed many of the original product’s shortcomings. The new PCTV HD Mini Stick is even smaller than the original HD Pro Stick, which was itself the size of a fat USB memory key. You could easily chuck the 1”x0.5” PCTV HD Mini Stick in your bag and never notice it. The remote is also slimmed down considerably and could slip into your back pocket comfortably.
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Posted 01/20/09 at 12:10:41 AM by Michael Brown

You know a product is uncommonly designed when each of its successors looks and functions pretty much like the original. Such is the case with the latest revamp of the Sonos multiroom audio system. All the latest changes are inside the product or the software or are related to third-party services linked to the product. But that doesn’t mean they’re insignificant.
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Posted 01/19/09 at 03:05:50 PM by Michael Brown

Plenty of boxes will stream video from your PC in one room to a TV in another, but they all have two things in common: You need to provide the network, and you need to buy one box for each TV you want to stream to. ZeeVee has a better idea: One Zv-100 will stream video from your PC to all your HDTVs by using your home’s existing coaxial wiring as a network.
Posted 12/18/08 at 01:25:09 PM by Michael Brown

Creative takes another stab at wireless audio streaming with the Creative Wireless Receiver, an AC-powered 4.0x2.75-inch block that you plug into powered speakers or your hi-fi system. The $70 device receives audio streams from a transmitter, such as Creative’s Xmod Wireless or X-Fi Notebook card (purchased separately), connected to your PC.
Posted 05/02/08 at 05:17:12 PM by Michael Brown
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When you see a color display on a music-streamer’s remote control, it’s natural to assume that the manufacturer is going after the vaunted Sonos Digital Music System. But after thoroughly testing the Squeezebox Duet—Slim Devices’s first new product since being acquired by Logitech—we’ve concluded that Sonos has little to worry about.
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Posted 04/16/08 at 05:00:50 PM by Michael Brown & Will Smith
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It turns out that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is good for more than just playing games and streaming the occasional transcoded video file. Indeed, the game console can also be a source of movie and TV-episode downloads using Microsoft’s online store, Xbox 360 Marketplace.
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