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Seagate Unveils FreeAgent Theater+

Jason Barry — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:15:21 -0500

Seagate announced the release of their new FreeAgent Theater+™ HD Media Player in a press release today. With a modest prices increase over the previous version--key features include 1080p HD, Dolby DTS, HDMI, network support, and new file-format compatibility.

The FreeAgent Theatre provides a turnkey solution to media center PCs, making it easy to explore media in your living room. The new device features the docking system developed for FreeAgent drives as well as two additional USB ports to attach any storage device to the player. Further, when attached to the network it can pull content from file shares, NAS devices, and the internet.

The new player is available immediately from Seagate.com and online retailers. To find a complete listing of features and specifications visit Seagate.com.

Bristol's ViewSurfer Blurs the Line between TV and PC

Paul Lilly — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:45:51 -0500

We've seen TV tuners added to PCs before -- not the least of which includes AMD/ATI's once immensely popular All-in-Wonder series -- but Bristol takes it a step further and has added a complete PC to a TV for the ultimate hybrid.

The 22-inch and 32-inch ViewSurfer PC/TVs come with a FreeView tuner and an integrated netbook-esque PC complete with an Intel Atom processor, a 160GB hard drive, 1GB of memory, four USB ports, Ethernet, and Windows XP. It also comes with an air mouse and wireless keybaord.

"This is a full digital television set," said Paul Fellows, Brisol Interactive's chief executive officer. "The red button works, and the TV is completely independent of the PC functions. You don't have to be in Windows to watch TV."

Bristol plans to launch the ViewSurfer PCs in October with the 22-inch model priced at less than £500, or about $815 USD. No word yet on how much the 32-inch model will run.

Image Credit: Bristol Interactive

S1Digital Launches New Media Center

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:57:00 -0600

S1Digital announced recently that they’ve completely redesigned a Media Center HTPC, starting from square one.

The new Media Center features a custom designed, “living room friendly” case primarily cooled by heat pipes. But, more importantly there’s some impressive hardware under the hood. It’ll feature up to four CableCARD HDTV or two ATSC/QAM and NTSC tuners, 3TB of RAID-5 storage (standard), a Blu-ray drive (profile 2.0), Gigabit Ethernet, 4GB of memory, an Intel E8500 Core 2 Duo, an ATI All-In-Wonder 3650 (sporting HDMI, DVI, component and VGA outputs), a Logitech DiNovo Mini Bluetooth keyboard and a media center remote. It will also support “up to three zones of audio and video streaming (via Extenders or other Media Centers).”

So how much does something with that much hardware run the average consumer? Why $5,999 of course! And that’s standard (though, to be fair, the standard load out is mighty impressive).

Image Credit: S1Digital

In the Lab: Will Smith Gets Burned by the Apple TV

Will Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:38:06 -0500

As part of my testing for this month’s cover feature, I spent a few quality days watching movies from the iTunes Store on my PC and in my living room. By necessity, I had to integrate a newly updated Apple TV into my entertainment center, which is a fairly common closed cabinet with a few air vents in the back. All of my other electronics devices—my receiver, my TiVo, my Xbox 360—live happily in this environment (although I do open the cabinet door when I fire up the 360).

After leaving the Apple TV connected overnight, I detected the faint smell of burning plastic in my living room. After investigating, I found that the Apple TV was actually too hot to touch—around 140 F. I don’t know about you, but none of the other consumer electronics devices I own (save a towel-wrapped Xbox 360) gets this hot.

After digging into the documentation and Apple’s support site, I was assured that the passively cooled Apple TV “may feel warm when touched.” But that it was “designed to operate quietly in an environment warmer than room temperature, including within media cabinets.” Eventually, I discovered a standby mode, which leaves the Apple TV running but disables the graphics hardware to minimize heating. You can access standby by holding down the Play/Pause button for a few seconds. That’s great, but if I forget to manually put the Apple TV into standby, it won’t automatically do it for me. That’s just irresponsible and dumb. There’s absolutely no reason for a modern CE device that gets this hot not to automatically shut down when it’s not being used.

First Look: The Phantom Lapboard

Will Smith — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:04 -0500

If you've followed the PC gaming scene for a while, you'll no doubt
remember the vaporous Phantom console. It promised to bring PC gaming
to the living room, but the only thing we were excited about was the
killer lap-friendly keyboard-and-mouse controller that they'd rigged
up--the Lapboard.

The
Lapboard is basically a keyboard that you place on your lap; then you
incline the top part of the keyboard (including the key surface) to
reveal a space underneath suitable for mousing. It's designed for use
anywhere you don't have access to the flat surfaces that are typically
required to play first-person shooters with a mouse and keyboard. When
we first gave it a test spin at E3 2004, we were much more excited by
the awesome potential of the controller than we were by the
underpowered "console."

We've spent a few days playing
multiplayer shooters using the Lapboard, and we can say that the
keyboard rocks. The tilting/pivoting design is comfortable to use
during extended gaming sessions, works fine on your lap, and is even OK
in its standard position on a desktop. With the board pivoted up,
there's plenty of room underneath for mouse movement, and the hard,
black surface is similar to a high-end mousepad. The board uses a
laptop keyboard similar to one you'd find on a high-end desktop
replacement notebook, with good key action and a standard keyboard
layout. When you're ready to flatten the board, push a button on the
side and it collapses back to a normal state.

Because the
keyboard rotates a full 360 degrees, it works the same for both right-
and left-handed mousers, and hands down destroys the typical wireless
gamepad for playing PC games on the couch--when paired with the right
mouse. Unfortunately, the mouse that Phantom ships with the Lapboard
leaves much to be desired. While a bit smaller than we prefer, it isn't
uncomfortable. The problem is worse than a lack of comfort; we
experienced signal dropouts at a distance of about 24 inches from the
sensor, not acceptable. The mouse and keyboard would both be working
fine, then the mouse would drop out while the keyboard continued to
operate. We tested several other wireless mice with the same
configuration, and had no problems with them. A wireless mouse that
drops connections is an unforgivable sin, in our eyes.

The
other thing that left us deeply concerned is the wimpy click on the
left mouse button. The left button didn't rebound sufficiently from a
click to make it easily clickable again, a problem which didn't occur
with the right mouse button. We think this is a manufacturing defect,
but it's definitely a concern.

So
where does that leave the Phantom? We're waiting on the drivers to do a
full review, but even without fancy drivers, the keyboard is extremely
promising. The mouse is another story though, even if it worked
perfectly, we'd still prefer a mouse with more buttons and adjustable
sensitivity. The Phantom Lapboard is scheduled to be available in June
for $130 in limited quantities. The Lapboard would be virtually
guaranteed a Kick Ass award if it were sold by itself, but the included
mouse will almost certainly bring down the final verdict.

Internet TV the Adobe Way with Adobe Media Player

Mark Soper — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:54:32 -0500

Introducing Adobe Media Player

Wednesday, Adobe released Adobe Media Player (AMP), its entry into the IPTV market already occupied by Microsoft's Windows Media Center for Vista's Internet TV beta. Unlike WMC's Internet TV, which works only inside of Windows Media Center for Vista (which, in turn, is only found of Vista Home Premium and Ultimate edition), Adobe Media Player works with Windows XP SP2, Vista Home/Business/Ultimate editions, and MacOS X 10.4.9-11 and 10.5.1-.2. Thus, AMP is compatible with a much broader universe of platforms.

AMP is built on the Adobe AIR rich Internet content platform, already in use by eBay Desktop, AOL Top 100 Videos, Nick.com, and many other web-enabled programs. When you install AMP, Adobe AIR is installed automatically.

Higher-Quality Video Needs Better Hardware

AMP supports a wide variety of video content, ranging all the way from YouTube-quality 240p resolution all the way up to full HD 1080p picture quality (although my brief sampling of AMP didn't find much content ready for 1080p playback). If you are unable to display 480p DVD quality or HD-quality (720p or 1080p) videos, you might need more system RAM, video RAM, or a faster processor. See the System Requirements for complete details.

So, What's On AMP?

However, before you worry about making sure your system can run AMP, you're probably wondering - what's on? AMP currently offers thousands of individual TV episodes from almost 400 different series from over 40 networks in 46 genres. Whether your taste runs to classic sci-fi, music videos, home repairs, weather, cars, comic books, or about anything else, you'll find something to watch on AMP. You'll see a brief commercial before most content plays, and periodically during longer programs.

Navigating AMP

AMP's home page makes it easy to find video content by genre, recently added content, by networks, new content and personal videos you add to AMP.

The left pane is generally used for jumps to other parts of the collection, while the right pane displays thumbnails for the current category (a portion of the Comedy genre is shown below). Click a thumbnail to drill down or to play it.

Lower-quality video plays live in the window, while higher-quality video must be downloaded before you can play it.

Tweaking AMP

The Options menu provides plenty of ways to tweak AMP:

- Select whether to start AMP on the Home page or the My Favorites page
- How to display new episodes
- Whether to start with the first episode or the most recent episode
- How long to watch a video before marking it viewed, and whether to remember where you left off viewing
- Whether to complete the user profile to help customize content offered to you
- Which privacy and password settings to use
- How many downloads to run at a time
- Whether to use transitions
- Whether to use hardware scaling
- Preferred bitrate
- Automatic or manual updates
- Which status indicators to display

Learn more about AMP by reading the announcement at Ryan Stewart's The Universal Desktop blog at ZDNet.

Comparing AMP with WMC's Internet TV

Windows Media Center's Internet TV is optimized for the WMC '10-foot UI,' and emphasizes more current pop-culture content than AMP. AMP's a better choice for watching TV series, while WMC's Internet TV's a better source for movie reviews, music videos, and entertainment news. There's not much overlap in content, so why not try them both?

At this point, virtually all content's free, but be aware - one of Adobe's goals with AMP is to enable its content partners to "monetize" their content. In plain language, they'd like you to pay some money (eventually) for the content they offer. Hopefully, they'll provide full HD quality content to make the transaction worthwhile for you. In the meantime, sample and enjoy!

Prefer to 'Roll Your Own' IPTV Solution?

If you'd rather track down your own IPTV content, a good place to start is by checking out the 100 Best Internet TV Channels page at the Daily IPTV website. Another good source for IPTV content is the IPTV Guide.

Linksys DMA2200 Media Center Extender

Michael Brown — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:59:09 -0600

We’ve been waiting for media-streaming devices to catch up to 802.11n, and the Linksys DMA2200 does it in style—geek style, that is. The box isn’t particularly attractive, but we dig the dual-band Wi-Fi radio inside that’s capable of operating on either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency bands.

We also appreciate the built-in DVD player that’s capable of scaling our standard-def DVDs to 1080i. (Linksys’s DMA2100, the same hardware sans optical drive, sells for $300.) We tested the DMA2200 with Linksys’s WRT600N dual-band 802.11n router (reviewed above) and were impressed with the pair’s ability to stream high-definition 1080p video to a 42-inch ViewSonic N4285P television across a wireless network, even with the extender inside a cabinet inside our double-walled media room.
The wireless connection stumbled when we tried to stream HD video with 5.1-channel audio attached, however, and it broke down completely when we moved the extender into a more enclosed area of the cabinet. You’ll find photos of our test environments at http://tinyurl.com/28sjsu.

Aside from delivering the familiar Windows Media Center user interface, the primary advantages that devices like the DMA2200 offer are support for PCs equipped with CableCARD digital tuners and hooks to online media content offered by the likes of Comedy Central, Showtime, and the Discovery Channel. Unfortunately, we found the user interfaces most of those services offer to be utter crap. The ability to pause playback on one media extender and resume it on another, on the other hand, is a slick benefit.

Unlike the less-expensive (but only optionally wireless) Xbox 360, this new class of extender freezes out Windows XP Media Center users altogether: Your host PC must run Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. In fact, aside from the wireless feature and the consumer-electronics formfactor, there’s not a whole lot here that would lead us to recommend the DMA2200 (or even the cheaper, driveless DMA2100, for that matter) over Microsoft’s gaming console—especially if you’re into games.
Streaming 1080p video on a wireless network is compelling; being forced to use Vista to do it isn’t.

Why Wait for SP1? Improve Windows Vista Now!

Mark Soper — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 21:43:38 -0500

Everybody with Windows Vista wants the final release of SP1 now - even Microsoft. Unfortunately, only about 12,000 beta testers have SP1 at this point. Fortunately, you don't need to wait for SP1's official release to get your hands on improvements for various pieces of Windows Vista, including Windows Media Player 11, Media Center, USB support, and others.

Compatibility, Reliability, and Stability, the Sequel

Grab the update discussed in Knowledge Base 941649 to improve this trio of PC requirements in a variety of ways for both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) releases:

- longer battery life
- better stability for battery powered PCs, including both portables and desktop PCs using UPS units
- reliability with startup programs
- faster startup time
- faster recovery time from inactivity or when using the Photos screen saver
- better wireless network stability
- better stability for Windows PowerShell scripting
- compatibility fixes for some third-party antivirus programs - better reliability under certain network driver configurations

Fixes for Windows Media Player 11 and Media Center

Grab the next update to improve reliability, specifically for Windows Media Player. The Knowledge Base article for this update (941651) isn't up at the Microsoft website yet, but here are the direct links for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

[Update 10-11-2007: Knowledge Base Article 941651 is now available]

Media Center fans should run, not walk, to pick up the update discussed in Knowledge Base article 941229, especially if you use the Xbox 360 as a Media Center extender, Scientific Atlanta cable cards, or Video CDs. This fix also replaces the April and June cumulative updates for Windows Media Center.

USB Fixes Galore

The USB cumulative update rollup for USB core components in Windows Vista (941600) offers three types of fixes in one:

- first, it rolls 13 exiting separate fixes into a single download
- second, it fixes various problems with suspend and hibernation
- third, it fixes various 0XFE STOP errors

XML Core Services Update

The final Vista update just released is for XML Core Services 4.0 Service Pack 2. Learn more from Knowledge Base article 941833.

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Discover tips, tricks, and the best (and worst) features in Windows Vista. Get Mark's new book Maximum PC Microsoft Windows Vista Exposed: an Insider's Guide to Supercharging Windows Vista. It's available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, BooksaMillion, and other fine bookstores.