Posted 10/17/09 at 02:30:37 PM by Will Smith

It's not like TiVo for your PC, it is TiVo for your PC

To long-term TiVo users, most other personal video recording solutions, whether they’re PC-based or provided by your cable or satellite provider, just fall short. TiVo takes a complex task—recording your favorite TV shows for later playback on-demand—and makes it simple, easy, and even fun. As officially licensed TiVo software for your PC, LiquidTV delivers all the TiVo features you know and love in a PC-friendly software package.

The LiquidTV package comes with the software, a year of complimentary TiVo service (the annual fee thereafter is $40), a standard TiVo remote, a TiVo IR receiver/blaster combo, and a Hauppauge USB ATSC/NTSC/QAM combo TV tuner. The software requires a relatively unobtrusive activation process, although if you want to move it to another machine after you’ve activated, you’ll probably need to make a phone call.

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Posted 08/31/09 at 06:00:30 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

What do a surveillance camera and the average home videographer have in common? Surprisingly, a hell of a lot—it’s just the subject matter that’s different.

One takes really poorly exposed, fuzzy, low-res videos of a gas station clerk getting a pistol jammed in his face, and the other takes really poorly exposed, fuzzy, low-res videos of a kid kicking a soccer ball or blowing out birthday candles.

Apparently, that’s the logic MotionDSP used when it decided that its $10,000-per-license, super-fancy video algorithms could not only be used to help the police catch carjackers, but also clean up the video of little Timmy’s birthday, too.

We’re not kidding. MotionDSP’s algorithms were developed to help resolve license plate numbers from video by analyzing multiple frames before and after a frame. By using the additional data to reassemble one sharp frame, MotionDSP’s algorithms are able to pull out far more detail than you would think possible.

 

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Posted 07/02/09 at 11:59:25 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

Get Robert Stack on the phone! In what could be the greatest tech unsolved mystery since the disappearance of Intel’s Tejas, someone has kidnapped Premiere Elements 5.0 and 6.0!

Just kidding. There’s no crime here unless you believe that it’s flat-out wrong for Adobe to jump from version 4.0 to version 7.0 just to ensure that Premiere Elements matches version numbers with Photoshop Elements 7.0.

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Posted 04/16/08 at 05:00:50 PM by Michael Brown & Will Smith

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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Posted 04/16/08 at 05:00:24 PM by Michael Brown & Will Smith

Vudu delivers more HD content than any other service, but achieving that image quality requires you to purchase a $300 box that can’t be truly integrated into the rest of your home network (meaning you can’t stream the content downloaded to it from one room to another). And the company currently has HD licensing deals with only Lionsgate, Paramount, and Universal; the rest of its offerings are limited to standard definition.

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Posted 04/16/08 at 05:00:01 PM by Michael Brown & Will Smith

Vongo’s subscription business model puts it in a category all its own: The service’s primary focus is to provide an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of movies and other video content that can be downloaded to your PC for a $10 monthly fee. It doesn’t offer any for-purchase content, and its TV offerings are nearly nonexistent.

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Posted 04/16/08 at 04:59:51 PM by Michael Brown & Will Smith

Movie-rental outfit Blockbuster Entertainment acquired movie-download service Movielink in August 2007, but the company seems to have lost interest in its latest asset. When we contacted Blockbuster’s corporate communications department in preparation for this story, they couldn’t be bothered to provide us with Movielink’s phone number (which wasn’t listed on either company’s website). It’s easy to see why.

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Posted 04/16/08 at 04:59:27 PM by Michael Brown Will Smith

Apple’s tight connection with Disney (owner of the ABC television network and Pixar animation studio), its support for high-definition H.264 video, and a slick set-top box for playing your favorite TV shows and movies in your living room, render the iTunes Store an attractive proposition for home-theater enthusiasts. Too bad its video is limited to 720p.

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