With all these HDTV and movie download services we'll need more hard drive space Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive



Monster of monster cable fame getting into HTPC media center market

PVRwire roundup of CNET PVR related CES videos

Sirius to add satellite video to services

Questions and answer about AppleTV the artist formerly known as iTV

AMD has this whole new AMDlive media/streaming initiative thingie, which if you understand what it is, let me know... probably as useful a marketing term as "centrino" and "viiv"

Xbox 360 IPTV hands-on: engadget gizmodo xbox360 IPTV handson

Sony Vaio TP1 roomba looking media server

Slingbox AV: The Review details how the reviewer setup his SlingBox to control his BeyondTV setup remotely to placeshift his BTV recordings.

hat tips: SnapStream blog & PVRwire

If you desire a software (and free) placeshifting solution for your BeyondTV setup you might also want to look at Orb network streaming software...

Everyone's favorite tuner card guru Sphere put up a preliminary VistaView Saber 2020 Dual Tuner PCIe Preview over at HTPCnews

"The Saber 2020 uses PCI Express X1 (PCIe), this is significant. Many of us have PCI Express X1 slots sitting idle. Further, PCIe is a point-to-point connection; it isn't a shared bus like "classic" PCI. This means that there should be zero issues with compatibilty, unlike PCI based solutions that tend to conflict with other TV cards, especially HDTV tuners."

I've been playing with the VistaView Saber2020 PCI Express x1 dual TV tuner card for the past week or so and I've been digging it so far. A byopvr review is forthcoming. If you're the impatient/impulsive type you can pick one up from PCalchemy in the meantime ;)

engadget scoop on Hauppauge Wintv HVR 950... See also the official Hauppauge wintv HVR 950 product page

"Looks like Hauppauge quietly went and released a hybrid NTSC and ATSC TV tuner for PCs. And don't it look to be from the same OEM'er Elgato's been kicking around with? The WinTV-HVR-950 hybrid TV stick supports up to 1080i ATSC digital or analog NTSC TV broadcasts when slotted into your USB 2.0 port and ships with Hauppauge's WinTV-Scheduler and the WinTV2000 application to watch and schedule TV recordings to MPEG-2. No word on pricing or availability but we have a sneakin' suspicion it'll cost ya about a Benjamin."

Ugh, besides the cuteform USB 2.0 dongle form factor *shrug* Software encoding NTSC on an ATSC card isn't any great shakes (I usually recommend NOT using the NTSC side of an ATSC card anyways because of the software encoding)


found via HTPCnews

Check out this early ATI Theater 650 review over at hot hardware. ATSC and hardware encoding analog tuning? Where do I sign up --- not so fast... sometimes it doesn't pay to be an early adopter.

The daily tech is reporting that there is a nationwide recall out for the ATI Theater 650

"In what appears to be a quick retail turnaround, ATI has issued a major nationwide recall of its ATI TV Wonder 650 graphics cards. Although details of the recall remain unclear and ATI has not issued official reasons for the recall, several readers have emailed DailyTech noting that the TV Wonder 650 cards have begun disappearing from store shelves.

Retail chains such as Best Buy were the first to take the new cards off store shelves."

Both links found from HTPCnews

As you probably already know, we're big fans of using the Hauppauge MediaMVP as network media client to extend our PC PVRs to additional televisions far from the "server" HTPC. Now we don't have to string wire to do so.

Over at the SnapStream blog they gave the Hauppauge Wireless MediaMVP a test run in an uh... interesting location :)

"Ever had the desire to wirelessly share recorded TV content, videos, music, and pictures to televisions throughout the house? For those of you who said yes, Hauppauge now has answered your demands with their new Wireless MediaMVP. Did I mention it was wireless?

Hauppauge sent us an evaluation unit of the Wireless MediaMVP (referred to as WMVP henceforth) the other day, so I decided to take advantage of this freebie, and test the unit in my house by connecting my Beyond TV server to the WMVP"

Also see forum thread on wirelessly streaming live tv from BeyondTV to MediaMVP

HTPCnews has posted the venerable HTPC community guru SpHeRe31459's updated 2006 PVR Card Guide with tons of great up to date info on different chipsets like the Conexant (popular with Hauppauge cards) and ATI Theater x50 Pro Designs, ViXS (used in Nvidia DualTV and VistaView's new PCIe Saber2020 card) , NEC, and WIS Designs.

"This guide is to give people the background information and pictures to understand what hardware MPEG2 encoding card they own or are thinking about owning. This guide started off with the need to explain to people which card was which. This is especially true for those considering buying from Internet auction sites. There have been many cases of vendors claiming to sell one card but in fact have a different card. This is to arm you the HTPC user with an understanding of what the differences are between the cards.

This is a rebuilt and revised edition for 2006 and made especially for the new HTPCnews content system. Enjoy! "

Got the scoop on a new product coming to market early September. VistaView will be releasing the first analog dual tuner PCIe (pci express) TV card called the Saber 2020

Some quick features of note: It will be MCE compatible/certified for Windows MCE 2005. It's low profile. Dual tuners (duh!). It's hardware mpeg2 encoding of course, and is using the ViXS chipset, which is the same as the Nvidia DualTV card -- except again this card is PCIe instead of regular PCI. The retail flavors will come with some PVR software which notably includes PIP (picture in picture) functionality. I think that about covers all my notes :)

So far there's only been single tuner PCIe options on the market (notably ATI's TheaterPro chipset). It's good to see more options available to HTPC builders and to have more cards to put into these PCIe mostly dormant slots!

Larger picture after the jump ( Digg It!? )

ATI announced/launched their latest update to the Theater line of tuner cards, the ATI Theater 650 PRO

More scoop from: TG Daily:
"ATI today announced the Theater 650 Pro, an evolutionary upgrade over the 550 Pro predecessor. According to the manufacturer, the ASIC offers improved TV reception, picture quality and PVR performance...

Compared to the 550 Pro, the 650 version adds a new 3D comb filter, noise reduction features, a modified MPEG encoder and support for digital TV standards around the globe. Users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and South Korea will see Theater chips with integrated ATSC capability, while European buyers will get chips with DVB-T support."

ExtremeTech ATI vs Nvidia Picture Quality Shootout

"Graphics cards are all about 3D, right? Read most graphics card reviews, anywhere on the 'net or in print, and you'll see they focus almost entirely on 3D performance and features. We understand this because that's why we would buy these expensive devices in the first place. Windows 2D performance is essentially a solved problem (at least until Windows Vista), so what else is there for the graphics card to do?

One word: video. Video on the PC is tremendously popular. Now with the PC's emerging role as a media device for the living room, video becomes even more important.

Both ATI and Nvidia have been touting their video quality and performance lately, and both have chosen to market the video experience. "

See also Slashdotter's take on the Nvidia vs ATI article

Lots of news out of the Nvidia camp from CES 2006.

First up, Nvidia delivers first HDMI video card solution for Sony HTPC (press release)

Nvidia demo's hardware accelerated h.264 forceware drivers for both 6xxx and 7xxx gpu's!

"NVIDIA showed us a demo of their upcoming Forceware drivers with support for hardware accelerated h.264 decoding. Unlike ATI’s h.264 hardware decoding that is limited to X1000 series of GPU’s, NVIDIA is supporting h.264 hardware decoding in all PURE Video compatible GPU’s. The above demo was of a 6600 series GPU playing back a 1080p h.264/AVC video clip. The video was very smooth and did not drop any frames."

Anandtech scoop on an HDTV-DVD notebook which also mentions the h.264 pure video decoding hardware acceleration.

Finally here's a Nvidia press release roundup of what Nvidia demo'd at CES 2006 this year.

I couldn't make it to Vegas for the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year :(

But looks like some of the guys at HTPCnews did! Here's there first entry of CES 2006 PVR related news. I imgagine they'll be updating frequently with lots of cool pics and inside info on upcoming products.

UPDATES More HTPCnews first day CES 2006 coverage in Vegas

Preliminary Day 2 CES coverage more to come re: day 2.

ATI announces their new All In Wonder 2006 PCI Express Edition bundled with Adobe® Premiere® Elements 2.0 and a MSRP of $199.

UPDATE AnandTech preview/review of the AIW 2006 PCIe

New Nvidia GeForce 81.85 Beta Driver Update

Release Highlights:
* Compatibility fixes since 81.84 BETA driver. For a full list of fixed and known issues please view the Release Notes.
* Mixed vendor support for NVIDIA SLI.
* TV-Out/HD-out support for NVIDIA SLI.
* Added support for VSync on Direct3D games when running NVIDIA SLI.
* Performance enhancements for dual-core CPUs.
* PureVideo high definition MPEG-2 de-interlacing support.
* Usability enhancements when connecting to an HDTV.
* Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0c and OpenGL® 2.0 support .

found via HTPCnews

TechPowerUp has the scoop on NVIDIA and the latest happenings and advances of their Pure Video Cinematic Home Theater technology including a new NVIDIA Pure Video DualTV Dual Tuner card that features the very impressive ViXS video processing for on the fly transcoding/processing! Looks like a MSRP of $169/$189 (two different models: one for MCE 2005, one for regular XP)

They seem to be positioning the NVIDIA DualTV as a high(er) quality capture quality and some interesting bells and whistles. If the NVIDIA Pure Video DualTV encoding quality is half as good as the NVIDIA Pure Video Decoder is at mpeg2 decoding it should be a pretty awesome card! Of course the proof is in the pudding and the greatest hardware in the world is useless if the good 3rd party PVR applications don't support it.

Hat tip to HTPCnews and SHSpvr. Large picture of the NVIDIA DualTV board thanks to MannyTC via SHS.