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Posts Tagged ‘media’

Apple has gone to war with just about anyone who dares to compete with its iOS lineup, suing where possible and spreading FUD when they can’t. Before the lawyers ever threw the first punch however, there was the original rivalry, Apple vs. Adobe. Many analysts believed that Steve Job’s unwillingness to embrace flash would be the death of the platform, but amazingly, it thrived. HTML5 video spread across the web like wildfire, starting with YouTube, and moving to just about every content creation site worth visiting. Adobe put up a brave front, but has finally thrown in the towel, and … [Read More...]

Memory maker Kingston Technology announced today the launch of its USB 3.0 Media Reader. Kingston’s new compact media card reader taps into the performance benefits of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and offers up to 5Gb/s data transfers for high-resolution images, large data files, and anything else you need to shuttle over to your PC.

“The Kingston USB 3.0 Media Reader’s ability to handle multiple card formats combined with its small form factor makes it perfect for use at home, on the road or in the office,” said Andrew Ewing, Flash memory business manager, Kingston. “It is the essential device for reading … [Read More...]

There’s now a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of HDTV available. You just need the right media streamer to serve up the goods.

1. Logitech Revue

Supercharged with Google TV, the Revue grabs content via the web, cable, or apps and aggregates it all in a slick menu system. Search for Daily Show and you get everything from 15-second YouTube clips to full episodes on Comedy Central. You can even record directly to your DVR. It can multitask, too: Need to settle a debate on whether Shaq was ever on Curb Your Enthusiasm? Check IMDB without interrupting SportsCenter. … [Read More...]

Having a Sing-A-Long party in the near future are you ? Or simply like to check out the lyrics of your favorite songs ? No matter your reason, here is one way to get the Lyrics your way.

All you need is a Lyrics Plug-In.

Doing a bit of research around the net reveals a few solutions, but the one tool that get the most hint comes from a rather anonymous developer over at lyricsplugin.com. There are TWO plugins designed for Windows Media Player and WinAmp.

The Plugin requires internet connection and will automatically retrieve lyrics for the song playing. … [Read More...]

Being a multi-computer household, we have chosen one computer to be the dedicated multi-media computer. This is where we store all our music, videos, images etc. On occasion you want to access some of this media, sitting at another computer.

But, What if, you are not at home?

The good news is that you can stream the music and videos from your home computer to your laptop over the Internet.

Here are the steps to do so on each of the computers:

1. Open Windows Media Player, click the Stream tab, and select Allow Internet Access to Home Media …
2. First,

… [Read More...]

In this article we’ll take you through the whole process, step by step, with plenty of screen shots. The tuner for this report is the WinTV-HVR-NovaT .

Without a TV Tuner Card your Windows Media Center menu will give you the option to set it up.

My next move was to plug in the tuner unit, but sadly, my system wasn’t ready for it:

Fortunately, Windows 7 was smart enough to know what it needed:

we went through a download operation that I’m sure you are familiar with; just “save” the file to your … [Read More...]

A slightly imperfect mega music machine

It wasn’t long ago that we turned our critical eye on another recently released Grace Digital Internet radio, the diminutive Solo Wi-Fi Receiver. Although we liked it in a general sense, we found its connectivity somewhat limiting and its controls challenging. We also weren’t sure what it wanted to be: It looked like a bedside radio, but it but needed external amplification and speakers to produce sound.

This time ‘round, we look at the substantially more sophisticated, substantially more focused Grace Tuner Wireless Radio and Media Player (Grace’s model number GDI-IRDT200, which sells for … [Read More...]

There were a number of surprise benefits I found upon making the conversion to Windows Media Center.

They don’t hype this much in the Microsoft literature on WMC, but I find the switch from 6 remote controls to just 1 a huge benefit. No more flailing around to set the TV to the right input, and the DVR to the right mode, and Sky box to the right channel etc. etc. It’s all right there on my new remote best friend.

The “Before” and “After” shots are below.

The next logical extension of this change is that you no longer … [Read More...]

One pet-peeve I’ve found with Vista & Windows 7 is that hibernation feature tends to disappear… usually due to a disk cleanup.  Essentially, when the hibernation save file is deleted, Vista removes the hibernation ability. Luckily, turning it back on is very easy. Click the “Start” button, and type cmd… then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open in administrator mode. You can also right-click the item “Command Prompt” in the menu and choose Run as Administrator.  

From the command prompt, type in the following command:

powercfg /hibernate on

  You may have to restart your computer before it will take effect, however I’ve … [Read More...]

BD write speeds reach the double digits

Once Blu-ray burners reached 8x writes, enabling them to fill a 25GB disc with data in less than 15 minutes, speed stopped being a major argument against the technology—now it’s just price and consumer need that stand in the way of widespread adoption. Still, for what it’s worth, Blu-ray write speeds continue to improve at a steady pace, and now, a mere six months after reviewing our first 8x drive, we’ve been presented with Plextor’s 12x B940SA.

But, you’ll probably wonder, what good is a 12x drive when today’s BD-R media has a … [Read More...]

Why Wipe Data Securely?

Whether you are preparing to reuse a hard disk for another operating system, clear off your junk shelves by passing along outdated drives to a friend or relative, donate an old PC to a charity or school, discard a too-small USB drive or flash memory card, or repurpose an SSD, you don’t want to leave any information on the storage device. With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door. … [Read More...]

Why

If you are looking to make your own media center computer and are still up in the air about which software/OS you should use, an article well worth the time to read is: Which Media Center Is Right for You: Boxee, XBMC, and Windows Media Center Compared.

While there are lots more choices out there, the ones covered by this article among the most popular. Outside of the obligatory master “yes/no” feature comparison, each OS has it’s own writeup with the respective strengths and weaknesses outlined. In addition to the article itself, the comments are rather insightful and worth looking … [Read More...]