More news about the dying HD-DVD format. Gone baby gone! Universal has now gone to Blu-ray. Farewell HD-DVD, we hardly knew ye!

Universal chooses Blu-ray | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

In the continuing saga of the slow death of HD-DVD, Wal-Mart has added its name to the growing list of retailers who have washed their hands of HD-DVD. I spoke earlier about the death of HD-DVD. If it was dead before, there is now no chance for resuscitation now.  Send it to the morgue.

Wal-Mart to officially discontinue HD DVD sales by June - Engadget

It is now official, if it wasn’t official before, HD DVD is DEAD. If it weren’t bad enough that Warner Brothers decision to go exclusively Blu-ray weren’t enough of a death blow, Netflix is now going exclusively Blu-ray. Game Over.

I would have rather HD DVD won if for no other reason than I have a sick fascination in watching Sony formats die one after the other. I have heard of being a maverick, but Sony takes it to an extreme. They have storied career of creating competing formats only to see them receive a tepid response from the public, slide into obscurity, and die.

Remember ATRAC? No? That one was Sony’s answer to MP3…a real barnburner! What about Memory Stick? Maybe… That one was Sony’s flash memory product. It was in every Sony camera both still and video, and basically only in those cameras. No one wanted to give Sony a portion of their profits. Sony was also the progenitor of Betamax, a technically better contemporary of the VHS tape that died a legendary death. (Product failures are still measured by this watermark…)

Yes Sony, what a fine history you have of formats that fail. But, in this case, I think you have finally created a winner, and its true herald is Netflix. With Netflix washing its hands of HD DVD, the war is indeed over.

CrunchGear » Archive » HD DVD group calls Netflix Blu-ray decision ‘unfortunate’

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/12/hd-dvd-camp-issues-sad-little-response-to-netflix-best-buy-snub/

Hands-on with VUDU’s movies-on-demand STB - Engadget HD

For those of you who don’t have a 360, this little box looks very interesting. It only costs $399 and it allows you to download movies to an onboard 250 GB hard drive. The makers of the VUDU player also promise an undisclosed number of HD movies available sometime “before Christmas”.

The real killer aspect of this box is the ability to add storage by connecting a USB hard-drive. That will allow you to store and infinite number of movies…pretty cool.

Microsoft debuts Extenders for Windows Media Center, adds DivX and XviD - Engadget

This may be the first product from Microsoft that got me a little excited since they announced the XBOX36o back in 2005. Microsoft has recently announced a brand new rev of its Media Center Extender line that actually makes them interesting. These boxes now can stream HD and play Divx and Xvid codecs. What?!? Is the H. E. double-hockeysticks place finally expecting some cooler weather?

If Microsoft follows through on this one, they may actually have a future in the living room.

All I ask is that they push this out to the XBOX360. Please…’cause if you do, I might just throw out my old compy and replace it with a Vista box…and I mean it.

Hooking a laptop up to a Samsung HD television

Right now I have my laptop connected to my new Samsung HD television via an SVGA cable. You may ask me “Why would you want to do that?” Well, … ummm…. I know there has to be a good reason for this… Hey, I know I could watch those videos that I downloaded but won’t stream through the XBOX.

It works pretty good, but I did have a few problems out of the box. Here is how I fixed them.

First of all, you must be using the right resolution. If you don’t, the TV may show an image but something will be off. In my case, the right screen resolution is 800×600. I don’t have one of those new schmancy 1080P screens, but it looks pretty good!

When I had the resolution set to 1026×768 I got some strange strobing and the entire screen wasn’t displayed.

The second step I had to do was to go into the menu of the television and have it sync up to the signal. When I first plugged the computer into the tv, I got a signal, but it wasn’t aligned right on the screen. I did the sync step and the image was aligned, but I was getting the strobe…thus the whole resolution thing.

I have one remaining problem and that is how to get the image into native 16×9. If I use the 16×9 setting on the TV, it stretches and distorts the image. (My laptop is sending a 4×3 image.)

I went online to look to see if the drivers for the video card in this laptop have been updated, but alas the latest drivers were from 2004, before the crush of 16×9 monitors on the market. My video card assumes that the only monitor it would ever be hooked up to is a standard 4×3…drats!!!

That means if I want to watch a movie from my laptop on my schmancy HDTV, I will have both letterboxing and pillars. If you don’t know what that means, do a Google search…well let me save you the trouble. Simply put, it means that I have a big black square surrounding my video content….again drats!!!

With a quick upgrade of my laptop, I should be in business. And since I am swimming in an ocean of money, that shouldn’t be a problem….wait…..DRATS!!!

Oh well, at least I have a schnazzy new monitor to look at www.murdog.com.

By the way, even I am getting sick of the ’sch…’ thing. I believe I will stop that now!

What What… I have found a really great use for my tv other than watching normal tv. I am downloading TV from revision3. I know there are a ton of people out there who have been watching video podcasting out there, and I am actually one of them, but lately I haven’t been watching them because I don’t really like watching them on my laptop.

I have a 360 and I have been able to stream them to the TV for a long time, but I ran into a strange problem. On my desktop, for some reason that I can’t figure out, the Windows Media won’t find the videos on my computer. It is really frustrating. I finally gave up and started downloading the videos on my laptop. I have less storage, but it seems to be working.

The killer part is now I have a widescreen HDTV and now I can watch Tech shows from the net in full HD. Delicious.

If you have a 360 and an HD tv, and you are into Tech programming, gets yo’self Media Player and maybe the Juice podcatcher, and you can be watching some dopes geek programming.

May 7th was my birthday! I am now 35, which means that I am halfway to 70 years old… What The Heck??!? That blows my mind…anyway, I wanted to blog about a new toy that I got for my birthday.

Now that I have a new television (32 inch Samsung LCD HDTV.) I have just past that nebulous frontier of having too many remotes to enjoy watching TV. I call it nebulous because you can add a remote or two (if you do it over time) and not feel overwhelmed.

We got our tax return back and we purchased the new TV, and we past that frontier. We had to at least two remotes to start everything needed to watch TV, and if we wanted to watch DVDs, we had to use three. That is too many.

The other day I spent the day with my dad and we went to BestBuy to look for a birthday present. We looked and looked until I came across a Logitech remote that is designed specifically for the XBOX. I showed it to dad and that was his gift to me.

I got it home, and I LOVE IT!!!! Programming it couldn’t be easier. Instead of programming it the way you do other remotes by trying different codes until your equipment responds, the Logitech XBOX remote is programmed via USB.

It is actually pretty simple. The remote comes with a disc that installs a program that allows you to reprogram the remote. I stuck that dude in and installed the program. Simple! Next I plugged in the remote and answered a few simple questions and then hit a big button that said “Update Remote”. Voila… It worked.

And it is better than standard universal remote because it has one button that does everything needed to say watch a DVD, or play a game on my XBOX or watch tv on my DVR. And, that isn’t trivial. I have to set my TV to the right input, and I have to change my audio receiver to the right channel, and so on… each activity is similar…very complex.

I have to take my hat off to my wife. She actually is really open to learning new tech things, and is very sweet about all my new toys, but the TV had gotten out of control. She loves the simplicity of the new remote. It makes life much easier. We love it.

In fact, Megan just came into the room where I am blogging and said that she loves the way the new remote lights up whenever you move it. What??!? She noticed something before I did. Apparently there is an accelerometer in the remote. It can feel motion, and it automatically turns on the light….Sick!

If you are drowning under a sea of remotes, you really need to check out the Logitech Harmony remotes. Sure they are $100, but that is not that much to pay for the simplicity! And, you are future proofed. This remote can work for you basically in perpetuity. (That means forever).