Home video

Let's face it: no matter how much you spend, home theater gear is pretty ugly. That's why the stuff used to be built into fine furniture in the '50s and '60s. And now that is happening again.

The "Theatre" system is part of a collection designed by Marcel Wanders for HE of the Netherlands. It's a low-slung, modern wooden side table with all the home theater stuff built into it and barely visible. The specs are fairly modest at just 25 watts of audio output, but they're probably just being honest, unlike the labeling … Read more

This particular launch may have ended in a ball of fire, but DirecTV says its planned launch of 100 new HD channels by year's end is still on track. Yesterday a Zenit-3SL rocket operated by a company called Sea Launch exploded on the platform. Although the rocket did not contain a DirecTV satellite, the company plans to use Sea Launch to put up the second of two new "birds" later this year. DirecTV spokesman Robert Mercer told TVpredictions.com that the explosion would have no impact on the company's high-definition plans; he wouldn't elaborate. Mercer'… Read more

The Leopard update of Apple OS X will be able to wirelessly transmit the Mac desktop to any HDTV that's connected to an Apple TV box--at least, that's the word according to LoopRumors (as spotted on Digg). Of course, the report is nothing more than a rumor: no source is cited, and there's no way to know if this is based on genuine inside information or whether it's just another fanboy fantasy. But chewing on wild, unsubstantiated rumors is half the fun with Apple products, so--with a massive grain of salt firmly in place--let the speculation … Read more

If there's one technology that continues to remind us of the bad old days of dial-up modems, it's Webcams. The grainy transmissions often look only slightly better than night-vision camera images of a decade ago--especially if you try their useless digital zooms. But riding to the rescue is Hanwha's "Digital Cowboy" (with a name like this, it has to be Japanese). Its new offering, the DC-NCP130, is essentially a 1.3-megapixel telephoto Webcam with a removable 7x optical zoom that connects to your computer's USB port, according to CNET Asia. The camera is going … Read more

A lot of us at Crave have small children, and at least some of us aren't ashamed to admit that we rely on portable DVD players in emergency situations (such as drives that last more than an hour). So we were pleased to find that a new handheld player had made its way to the market, MediaStreet's "eMotion."

On closer inspection, however, the player seemed to fall short compared with other models at least in the specs department. Its 3.5-inch screen is smaller than that of a comparable player from Hammacher Schlemmer, for example, which … Read more

Universal, currently the only studio that releases titles exclusively on HD DVD, was eerily quiet at CES, fueling speculation that its support for HD DVD was waning. Well, late yesterday, the studio helped quell those rumors by announcing that it would be releasing 100 new exclusive titles in HD DVD format in 2007, including a CNET office favorite, The Big Lebowski.

The company didn't reveal all the new titles--or their release dates--but said that 40 to 50 would be available in the first half of the year and that 90 percent of them will be DVD/HD DVD combo … Read more

Two USB HDTV tuners are grabbing headlines today. Since we've yet to be truly impressed by the image quality of any variety of TV tuner (ATI's internal TV Wonder 650 card is the best we've seen to date), we're eager to test out these two new devices.

First up: from Taiwanese manufacturer Compro, the VideoMate U2700. This USB 2.0 hybrid device pulls in over-the-air HD content in 1080i along with standard-def broadcasts. It provides all the DVR features you'd expect, and it can record your shows straight to DVD. You can also select a … Read more

As part of the CES announcement of its promising EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD, Netgear announced a partnership with file-sharing upstart Bittorrent. Ashwin Navin, cofounder and CEO of Bittorrent, sat down with MarketWatch editor Bambi Francisco to discuss how the Netgear/Bittorrent combine hopes to battle Apple's forthcoming Apple TV. While the interview is short on technical details, Navin offers some interesting previews of where Bittorrent is headed. The company's new Online Marketplace will offer more than 10,000 titles from content partners including "3 major studios and about 25 indepedent and foreign studios," which Navin hopes … Read more

Developments in the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war kicked into high gear in the past couple of months. November and December saw the bulk of the long-delayed HD product lines finally hitting store shelves: Blu-ray players from Sony, Panasonic, and Philips; the PlayStation 3; the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on; and the second-generation Toshiba HD DVD players. In the new year, both camps came out swinging at CES 2007. With so much news to process, we've taken the opportunity to collect all the major developments into one easily digestible chunk.

Enter the combo player: LG officially unveiled the BH100, … Read more