Category: Home Video

A reader writes: I'm shopping for a low-cost Blu-ray player for my dad, who is deeply in love with his new HDTV. I know he'd want one that does Netflix streaming since he has a subscription, but with so many options out there I'm totally lost -- just tell me what to get! Dearest Reader: If you ask us, Blu-ray technology is in a transition period, so bear with our rant while we try to answer ...

Glide TV (Homebody, Under $250) More and more of us are watching video content from a notebook computer connected to our television sets, but efficiently interfacing with this content has proven to be something of a challenge. Keyboards and mice can be cumbersome and unwieldy (not to mention completely unusable when there's no flat surface to place them on). So what's an off-the-grid, ...

Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ (Media Hound, under $250) You've got a hard drive full of movies and television, but playing these digital files where they're meant to be played -- on your living room TV/receiver setup, rather than your computer -- can be tricky business. Though its interface is light years behind that of Apple TV, the FreeAgent Theater+ ($150) excels in flexibility: The device can ...

Odds are your computer's monitor looks a lot like everyone else's. Well, we here at Switched like to break out of the status quo, and we've found 10 screens that do the same. ...

What an improvement from last week's unimpressive slate. Not only do we have a few day-and-dates like Defiance and' He's Just Not that into You', but we also have the greatest Blu-ray demo disc since 'Planet Earth' from the BBC in the way of' Nature's Most Amazing Events' -- yes they are very amazing, but we still prefer the original name 'Nature's Great Events'. But that's not all, as we are also ...

All catalogs, all the time this week as we slow down for the summer theater season. Not a big deal if you're a Blu-ray fan as there are plenty of great classics to check out for the first time on Blu-ray. Most notable is that Universal is still playing catch-up and obviously still has a few recent titles that were released on HD DVD, but have still not been released on Blu-ray. Warner has a few ...

Today, TiVo will begin selling more than the opportunity to watch your favorite shows when it's more convenient. According to USA Today, the company is trying to hawk viewer information to TV stations and advertisers alike with its fledgling 'Stop/Watch Local Markets' program, hoping to give tracking giant Nielsen a run for its money. Able to monitor viewers' behavior by the second, TiVo will not ...

Bigger isn't always better with HDTVs; a too-big screen in a small room looks ridiculous and will make non-HD content look fuzzy. On the other hand, you don't want to go too small or else you won't get the benefits of HD. There are a lot of formulas for optimum HDTV size-to-room size ratios, but one rule of thumb says to measure the distance between where you'll sit and where the TV in inches, ...

We're big fans of Amazon's amazonmp3; the online superstore's music download service offers DRM-free digital music downloads at prices that are usually at least $.10 per track cheaper than the main competition, Apple's iTunes. Amazon also offers video on demand (or VOD) services for movies and television episodes, but now the service looks ready to expand to high definition offerings sometime in ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/nintendo/Netflix_headed_for_the_Wii'; There's a new survey from Netflix making the rounds, asking customers if they'd like to watch Netflix on the Wii. The service would apparently require a $9.99 "Netflix Instant Streaming Disc," which users could pop into the system when they wanted to watch -- far be it from Nintendo to offer a firmware update. While many of the ...

In the VHS days, rental versions of movies were usually saddled with preview after preview that you'd have to fast-forward through before getting to the main event -- a small penalty for not having to pay full-price to watch it. With the advent of the DVD, and now high-def Blu-ray discs, you're usually just a button-press away from the film itself. Increasingly, however, the real attraction of ...

Amazon Video on Demand has been in private beta on the Roku Video Player for about a month now, but now everyone can stream rentals and purchases to their TVs. The free Roku update enabling the service will roll out this week, and once it's installed, you'll be able to browse, rent, and purchase any of Amazon's 40,000 movies and TV shows. The interface is an extension of the familiar Netflix ...

You know that legend about how, when the economy is bad, people still want to escape to the movies by spending $11 for a ticket and $5 for a bucket of popcorn? Well, it's holding true right now. According to analysts with the company Media by Numbers, movie ticket sales are up 17.5-percent this year to $1.7 billion, while attendance has leaped by almost 16-percent. The New York Times notes ...

It never fails, one of the first thing just about every new HDTV owners asks is; why are there black bars on my new widescreen TV? And this is the reason why just about every HD discussion forum has a sticked thread at the top of the forums explaining why this still happens. So in this addition of HD 101, we figured we'd have our go at trying to give a simple answer to an age old question. The ...

Bad news Kuro fans, the rumors were true and Pioneer is leaving the TV manufacturing business. On the upside, the restructuring deadline is March 2010, so a predicted net 130 billion yen ($1.44 billion) loss shouldn't be enough to get between you and the plasma HDTV of your dreams. The company's U.S. and U.K. plants are shutting down by April and February of this year, respectively, and product ...