Looking for more competition among Blu-ray players? TV and appliance manufacturer Taiwan Kolin is apparently prepping a player for the Taiwan market, expected to debut around the third or fourth quarter of this year. Built around Sharp components (not at all the first player to do so), the Economic Daily News quoted Taiwan Kolin's president as saying it would also see store shelves in the U.S. under Syntax-Brillian's Olevia brand. Unfortunately, with no features listed and a retail price only remarked as "less than NT$30,000 ($977 U.S.)" it'll probably need to be a lot less than that to make any kind of splash here.

AUO's back again, displaying what new flat panel technologies are trickling down to its OEM televisions, and soon to hit shelves in more reasonably-priced models (albeit wearing another company's name) near you. Hitachi and others are at the forefront of the thinner, lower powered LCD movement, and AUO promises an "ultra-slim" 10mm thick 42-inch LED backlit model next week at SID 2008. The new technology gives power savings of 44% over current models, as well as a 46-inch display with 50% power savings, 500 nits of brightness and 5,000:1 "ultra static high contrast ratio". While we'll wait to find out how that compares to other HDTVs with questionable claims to high contrast rations, the company also plans to show technology that provides 200,000:1 contrast ratio with LEDs. Besides just using less power, we can look forward to LCDs built with using less raw materials and resulting in less chemical waste, which due to our extensive comic book research, we can unequivocally say is a good thing.

Don't call it a comeback Media Center -- no seriously, don't call it a Media Center, they don't like that, call it "the system that delivers on the promises of Media Center" -- soon you'll be able to get FUZE's media system software via other manufacturers. According to CEPro, they're negotiating with "a number of other companies" to put FUZE software on multimedia devices to work with web based audio control, v2 Media Center Extenders and more. Until now the only way to get the company's software into your house is through a custom installer, and it's not giving up that market, but expect a new, broader opportunity to get FUZE Media Systems once the agreements are done later this year.

You probably won't be seeing TVcompass's SR 1500 universal remote released looking exactly like this (or even bearing the TVcompass name) but we have high hopes some other company will rebrand the WiFi-enabled unit soon. Featuring a QVGA display,and Windows CE, the SR 1500 pulls device codes from the web using the built-in browser, which supports Flash and J2ME, backup settings to a server, and do custom guide displays. There's no pricing yet, but hopefully that'll get sorted when this thing gets picked up for resale.

[Via pocketpcwire]

If there were ever a time where we'd need to hear it before we believed it, this would be it. Tony Bongiovi, an audio engineer who's been around the block a time or two (read: he worked with Hendrix), has finally crafted the miracle chip he's been missing for decades. Dubbed the Digital Power Station (DPS, not to be confused with DSP), the microchip is described as a "very sophisticated equalizer," and while it was originally "the size of a refrigerator," he looked to Glenn Zelniker, a specialist in digital signal processing, to program a wee chip to do the same thing. The result is a dynamically programmed microchip based on an off-the-shelf DSP from Freescale Semiconductor, which is housed in special headunits (like JVC's KD-S100) and has more than "120 points of adjustment" to tune the tunes to fill each vehicle perfectly. Reportedly, the chip even turns factory speakers into high-fidelity drivers, as it calculates the dimensions of the vehicle and the abilities of the cones while outputting the audio. The JVC unit will cost "between $700 and $1,000 installed," since you'll have to schedule an appointment with your service department to get the correct software installed for your make and model, but we'd suggest a trial listen before you plunk down your one large.

[Via PhysOrg]

Much has been made of Microsoft's supposed plan to include native support for only HD-DVD in their next OS, either in order to force customers to install extra software on their own and/or to force OEM's to face licensing costs on their own. Despite that, Windows IT Pro says internal Microsoft documentation indicates a plan to add Blu-ray DVD support to beta versions of Windows Vista.

Microsoft still officially says it has no plans for Blu-ray support, leaving that to third party companies like Cyberlink. All of this comes just after Microsoft denied Blu-ray plans for the Xbox 360, so the question remains: Does Microsoft really hate Blu-ray, or do they really like it and are just playing hard to get? Be true to your feelings Bill.