Category: home theater

  • Give Amazon credit for great data on Blu-ray Lord of the Rings

    I’ve been among the many movie fans disappointed by the studios’ greedy Blu-ray releases. Last year’s issue of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (non-extended editions) was probably an all-time low. New Line Cinema paid the price, with so many one-star reviews on Amazon that the discs were eventually consigned to the store’s virtual discount…

  • Getting iTunes to sync standard def videos to your iPad

    We’re big fans of the recent PBS Masterpiece series Downton Abbey and bought the high-definition version from iTunes to watch on the big TV that is connected to our Mac mini media server. But when my wife asked me to load the series onto her iPad recently, I ran into an annoying syncing problem based…

  • The future of Apple computing isn’t all led by Apple

    There’s a great video up on Macworld’s site of a conversation between four highly knowledgeable Mac pundits about the “future of the Mac.” The participants were Daringfireball’s John Gruber and Tidbits’ Adam Engst along with Jason Snell and Dan Moren from Macworld. The discussion was interesting and worth the 48 minutes or so of my…

  • Trouble finding the best blu-ray versions of Harry Potter

    I’ve written before about the difficulty of finding blu-ray movies that look good and avoiding those that look worse in high-definition. Certainly, the modern and lushly filmed Harry Potter film series looks good in blu-ray. But which edition should you buy? Regular blu-ray disks or the pricey ultimate editions. Unfortunately, the Warner Brothers studio has…

  • Internet TV a long way off because that’s how they want it

    (updated 10/22) There’s a really important article semi-buried on page B3 of the New York Times today: Internet is a Weapon in Cable Fight. You should go read it but the short version is that the Fox network is fueding with cable provider Cablevision over payments for carrying regular TV stations on the cable system.…

  • One-star boycotts may be working

    There was a lot of debate over the past few years about consumers rating down books, movies and other products with one-star reviews because of issues not directly related to the quality of the entertainment. Rather, fans were upset about formatting, pricing, obnoxious digital rights management and other media deficiencies. Authors and producers whined but…

  • Caught up with too many remote controls for the home theater

    One of the biggest problems so far with our home theater set-up is juggling the three remote controls plus keyboard/track pad needed to operate all the various devices. The Samsung TV has a control as does the Samsung Blu-Ray player. Each of those two controls can sort of control some of the functions of the…

  • New AppleTV may be great but it solves nothing

    “I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.” Steve Jobs gives great gadget and he was in fine form on Wednesday…

  • Find the best Blu-Ray movies ’cause some don’t look so good

    As the super-duper-hyper-amazing home theater plan moves into high-gear, I’m discovering an unfortunate side-effect from high-definition television. Lots and lots of shows and movies don’t look any better in high-def and, in fact, many look worse. We have a couple of sources of HD programming including HD shows on our Verizon Fios cable, HD downloads…

  • Using a new HDMI Mac Mini with my TV: Early days

    This will be the first in a continuing series of posts about using a brand new Mac Mini with an HDMI port (purchased in June 2010) connected to a high-definition television. To read all of our adventures jumping through hoops, losing remotes and forgetting the password to bypass parental controls, see this page with all…