Recent Comments:
Ask Engadget HD: What is switched digital video (SDV)? {Engadget HD}
Jul 2nd 2008 3:12PM Uh, no RS. You are paying $50 per month for access to those 50 channels. NOT continuous delivery of all 50.
Comcast relegating some stations to digital only in Washington, D.C. {Engadget HD}
Jun 16th 2008 7:41PM Wherever they do it, I sure hope they do a better job (for their customers) than they have been doing here in Manassas VA. Right in the middle of Tiger's put on 18 to outright win the Open and the NBC digital channel drops completely off line. Thank goodness I could still turn to channel 4 and see the rest of the tourney (in crappy SD).
Apparently the NBC affiliate here has some really crap back end equipment that can't at all deal with HD. They must have someone sitting there watching the feed and having to flip a switch back and forth to enable and disable HD. The signal on often drops out when a show goes to commercial until 'poof" a 480i SD signal carrying commercial pops in. Then your show starts back up and is in crappy 480i SD until 'poof' the HD comes back. And any time they scroll weather alerts across show, the signal drops down to crappy 480i.
It's funny, you'd think local affiliates would be scrambling to do things right with HD? Especially with locally generated content (like news). But only 1 of our "big 4" does news in HD. So hey ABC, NBC, and FOX, you want my eyeballs back you better get going on HD!!
Conceptronic ships Grab 'n GO Full HD media streamer {Engadget HD}
Jun 12th 2008 2:11PM The web site says about SMB and NFS:
"Currently only NAS devices with a UPnP AV Server are supported. Samba and/or NFS support will be added in the future. When this feature becomes available, we will release a firmware update which can be downloaded from www.conceptronic.net or the Internet Upgrade option in the CFULLHDMA."
which would seem to contradict the announcement?
Iomega's DVR Expander does 500GB of eSATA storage for SA DVRs {Engadget HD}
Jun 10th 2008 12:31PM I bought a eSATA external drive enclosure and eSATA cable for about $20 a while ago and plugged in a standard IDE 320GB drive I had laying around after upgrading a PC to bigger drives. It plugged in and no configuration required, my 8300HD just all of a sudden had more free space (tripled my capacity versus the included 160GB). This sounds ideal for those who one a one stop solution, and since it's Iomega prices at web merchants will vary all over the place, so this is probably easier than the "roll your own" method I used.
CNET's HDTV picture settings database takes the edge off calibration {Engadget HD}
Jun 3rd 2008 9:21AM It's indeed a sad state that sets aren't calibrated "out of the box", but then again, to what standard should they calibrate? And for what lighting scenario? I mean, if my HDTV was setup in my brightly lit living room it would need very different settings than it needs in my dark home theater room. And as has been noted, how to account for non-linear degradation of the illumination source (be it bulb, plasma aging, etc.)?
I think it would help tremendously if all manufacturers included some built in test patterns and a "walk through" menu for setting up the picture. Not as good as truly calibrating, but darn sure would have more HDTV's displaying a "better" picture than they are now!
Hitachi Maxell claims new Li-ion battery with 20x the power {Engadget}
Jun 2nd 2008 9:58AM And electric car "filling stations" are where???
Crap, you can hardly buy E-85 and GM has been pushing that to roll out to stations for how many years now? I fail to see how electric cars are gonna "take off" in our suburban landscape? Maybe in highly dense places like NYC or LA or Tokyo or London or ???
Sanyo introduces PLC-XC55 / PLC-XC50 projectors {Engadget HD}
Jun 1st 2008 10:43PM Agreed. Hey Engadget HD, don't waste our time with non-D stuff eh?
Cannon PC to offer up dual / quad-CableCARD Media Center rigs {Engadget HD}
May 29th 2008 2:23PM It looks cool and all, but isn't CableCard just so last gen? Now if this support dual tru2way cards....
Mad Catz PS3 3-Port HDMI System Selector gets reviewed {Engadget HD}
May 29th 2008 2:22PM With it blending in to the PS3 look, and the added bonus of the remote, I can indeed see the utility in this thing. That said, I would be seriously concerned about actually using it since as pointed out the PS3 has no documented need for extra cooling and I would be concerned this thing (even if you snipped wires and disabled its fans) would increase the likelihood of a console overheat.
Windows Home Server data corruption fix on the way {Engadget HD}
May 23rd 2008 1:30PM What gets me is this data corruption has been KNOWN about for SO long it MS STILL doesn't have a releasable fix??? Wow. Glad my "home server" is running Linux....
