Crave

Episode 58 of the Digital City, where we wrangle with the legal arguments over Apple vs. Psystar; show off the latest super-fancy laptop to hit our desks, the $2,000 HP Envy 15; and find the world's best laptop backpack in the Booq Boa.

Both Modern Warfare 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii get some praise, while PSP Go sales seem to hit a wall; and we compare the original God of War games to the new polished-up versions in the God of War collection for PS3.

Related links:
>>Booq Boa Squeeze review
>>Spend some time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii
>>Modern Warfare 2 arrives

>>Watch the Digital City live every Monday at 3pm EST on CNET Live!
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Two Pixar classics on Blu-ray for just $11. How can you go wrong?

Here's an interesting deal for anyone who has:

1. Children
2. A Blu-ray player
3. A nearby Target store
4. A love of Pixar films

With a little coupon magic, you can score the "Monsters, Inc." and "Up" Blu-ray combo packs for $10.98 (plus sales tax).

Each bundle has four discs: two Blu-ray Discs (one with the movie, one with extras), one DVD of the movie (bonus!), and one disc containing a DisneyFile Digital Copy (for viewing on, say, a laptop or iPhone).

Start by printing this $8 off "Monsters, Inc." coupon. You'll need to install a small app called Coupon Printer, but it appears to be harmless.

Next, print this $10 off "Up" coupon. It also requires Coupon Printer.

Finally, head to this Hot Coupon World post, scroll down to the Expiring November 25, 2009, section, and enter a '1' in the field next to "Blu-ray movies: "Up AND Monsters, Inc. together." Then scroll all the way down, click "Get Coupons," and print the coupon.

Now hop in the car and drive to your local Target. I'm not 100 percent sure they'll take all three coupons, but a blogger over at Frugal Find (source of this nifty deal) reported they had success using it.

As someone who has children, a Blu-ray player, a nearby Target store, and a love of Pixar films (particularly these two), you had better believe I'm looking for my car keys. How about you?

"9" will be one of the new Blu-ray titles to feature iPhone interactivity.

(Credit: Amazon)

Excluding the recent Netflix PS3 disc, BD-Live has been a bust. Still, we give the movie studios credit for not completely abandoning the technology yet, and according to a recent Video Business story, Universal will feature iPhone interactivity on many several releases, "including Bruno, Public Enemies, 9, and Inglourious Basterds."

While it's easy to write it off as a gimmick, the iPhone functionality (called "Pocket Blu") is aimed at overcoming one of the biggest hurdles to interactive content, which is the painful process of entering text using a standard Blu-ray remote. While iPhone functionality won't solve that problem for Blu-ray owners that don't own iPhones, it's probably the easiest workaround at this stage. (We would have loved if Blu-ray players included a remote with a built-in keyboard, similar to Vizio's bluetooth remote.)

Universal is also planning to offer some exclusive content for iPhone users. We've complained about this before, but there's really no reason to limit that content to iPhone users (or even BD-Live users), since there's nearly always extra capacity on the disc for the bonus features.

Perhaps the best news is hidden at the bottom of the Video Business article; Universal says new titles will allows users to view much of the BD-Live content without having to register first. BD-Live has plenty of problems, but nothing kills enthusiasm faster than having to enter an e-mail address using an onscreen keyboard and a Blu-ray remote.

(Credit: JVC)

These days, what separates Blu-ray players from one another has less to do with how they play Blu-rays--they all do that pretty well--and more to do with the sort of extra features they offer. Many players, for instance, can access a variety of online entertainment options, including Amazon Video On Demand, Pandora, Vudu, and especially Netflix. Unfortunately, JVC's latest player doesn't have any of those online features. In fact, it can't even access the online extras found on some Blu-ray Discs.

JVC has released an entry-level Blu-ray player, the XV-BP11 ($200), which--surprisingly--only complies with the older Blu-ray Profile 1.1 standard. That means it's not capable of playing back any of the Internet-enabled BD-Live content that is included on some Blu-ray Discs. Now, we'll admit that virtually all of the BD-Live content we've seen is disappointing, but that's still not reason to get an underfeatured Blu-ray player when there are Profile 2.0 players with Netflix streaming for $100.

The rest of the features on the XV-BP11 are somewhat more respectable, including onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. There's also a USB port on the front panel capable of playing back a few digital media formats, like AVCHD, JPEG, MPEG-4, MP3 and WMA. (Sorry, no DivX.) On the other hand, like we said, there's no support for any online streaming-media services, unlike the entry-level players from LG, Panasonic, and Samsung. In fact, there's not even an Ethernet jack (at least according to the specs) for easy firmware updates.

HP's ultra-compact Pavilion is stuffed with home theater-friendly features.

(Credit: HP)

If you're in the market for a PC to serve as the hub of your home theater, look no further than the refurbished HP Pavilion Slimline S3750F. It's compact, loaded, and on sale at Buy.com for $479.99 shipped.

As many of you pointed out in last weekend's post about the Nero LiquidTV TiVo PC, Windows Media Center offers some pretty killer DVR features.

I agree 100 percent, which is why there's a PC much like this HP sitting in my family room, connected to my TV.

The S3750F features a quad-core AMD processor, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, and a Blu-ray drive/LightScribe DVD burner.

It also comes with an AverMedia ATSC/NTSC TV tuner, which can pull in analog cable or over-the-air digital signals. My advice: add a couple extra tuners so you can record multiple shows from multiple sources simultaneously. (Thursday night is just a bear this year, isn't it?)

HP supplies a remote for couch-friendly operation and 802.11n Wi-Fi for wireless-friendly operation.

My one and only complaint with this system (apart from the 90-day warranty, which I consider minor) is that it comes with Vista Home Premium, not Windows 7. And because it's a refurb, it's not eligible for a free upgrade.

Still, I'm running Vista on my media-center PC, and it's been absolutely fine and dandy. In other words, an upgrade isn't essential, IMHO.

Shop around a bit and you'll see this system selling for at least $800 elsewhere, and as high as $1,000 at many stores (including Amazon). A desktop this loaded for $479 is a real deal.

Most sub-$100 Blu-ray players have zero frills. This one has a big one: Netflix streaming!

(Credit: Best Buy)

The holidays must be drawing near, because suddenly the Blu-ray deals are heating up.

For example, what's better: a refurbished low-end Blu-ray player for $79.99 (sold out, I'm afraid) or a new Blu-ray player with BD-Live and Netflix support for $99.99?

The latter deal is happening now at Best Buy, which charges a reasonable $7 for shipping--a charge you can avoid by opting for in-store pickup. (Either way, you'll have to pay sales tax.)

The Insignia (Best Buy's house brand) NS-BRDVD3 offers the usual 1080p output goodness, including upconversion of regular DVDs, along with Dolby TrueHD decoding, Blu-ray Profile 2.0 (which allows for BD-Live features, among other things), and support for Netflix streaming (for subscribers only, natch).

You'll need a wired Ethernet connection to take advantage of the Internet features (and get a required firmware update), so plan your "deployment" of the player accordingly.

I haven't found any reviews of this particular model, other than the handful of user reviews on Best Buy's site--most of which are very positive.

I will say that between this and the $80 refurb from the other day, I'd definitely drop an extra $20 on this. Netflix streaming is just plain awesome, and a one-year warranty is always preferable to 90 days.

This does get me wondering what kind of Blu-ray deals we'll see as we get closer to the holidays, and particularly on Black Friday. Could a player get as low as $50? Food for thought. In the meantime, this is about as good as it gets, price and performance-wise.

(Credit: Matthew Fitzgerald)

Apple's new iMac all-in-one desktops impressed us, especially the massive 27-inch model we reviewed this week. But we're left wondering what happened to the rumored Blu-ray drive option. Playing HD optical disc content on that big 2,560x1,440 screen seems like a no-brainer, so we set out to see if we could successfully hook up an external Blu-ray drive.

First we connected a USB-powered external BD-ROM drive from HP to the new 27-inch iMac. The iMac's OSX 10.61 operating system allowed us to explore the file structure of the Blu-ray disc, but there's no official Blu-ray software available for Mac, so we were unable to actually play it.

Our next step was to create a Boot Camp partition so we could install Windows, an operating system compatible with most Blu-ray playback software. In this case we installed Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit, along with Cyberlink Power DVD9. After creating the partition and installing Windows, we ran the boot camp software on the Mac OS X Install DVD, another necessary step that allows Windows to identify our hardware.

Finally we loaded in a Blu-ray disc into the slot-loading external drive. Through Cyberlink, it played back well, at least at first glance. The picture looked as crisp as we' d expect from a BD disc, and definitely seemed much sharper than a DVD. To delve a little deeper we also checked out some specific video quality tests along with CNET HDTV reviewer David Katzmaier.

First we checked a helicopter flyover of the Intrepid from "I Am Legend" and it was clear the setup couldn't properly handle the 1080p/24 content--we saw the halting, stuttering motion in the conning tower and the wings of the airplane, for example.

The next thing we looked at was picture quality using the test patterns on the FPD Benchmark Software for Professional Blu-ray disc. Overall it was good; during the motion blur test it performed poorly, with the onscreen test patterns (letters, numbers, etc,) hard to make out. But this problem can be caused by a number of sources--Windows Vista running on Mac hardware, the USB Blu-ray drive, the Cyberlink Power DVD9 software or all the above. Suffice it to say that average users probably wouldn't notice these issues if they weren't looking for them.

In the end, Blu-ray is still a distant dream for iMac owners, but if you absolutely, completely need to have this feature, it is technically possible--even if the results aren't perfect.

Note: If you're wondering about the Apple Magic Mouse in the photo above--we did get it to work in Vista--but just the basic, not the "magic" finger gestures.

Read the 27-inch Apple iMac review.

Read the Apple Magic Mouse review.

More on motion resolution on HDTVs

For the first time ever, you can score a Blu-ray player for just $80.

(Credit: Magnavox)

It wasn't that long ago that we finally saw Blu-ray players dip below the magic $100 mark. Now, Newegg is offering a refurbished Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-ray player for $79.99 shipped.

That's a new low, big time, so this will absolutely, positively sell out quickly. If you're interested, chop-chop. (Make that click-click.)

The RNB500MG9 features 1080p output and upconversion and Blu-ray Profile 1.1. However, that's about it in the specs department. If you insist on BD-Live and other frilly features, keep walking.

Though I've covered this model before, I still haven't found any substantial reviews. If you already own an RNB500MG9, hit the comments and let us know what you think of it!

Newegg doesn't specify the warranty (whats up, 'Egg?), but I'm fairly confident it's a refurb-standard 90-day guarantee. (I'm checking with the vendor and will post an update in the comments when I find out.)

If you do miss out on Newegg's deal, Sears has the same model for $99.99 shipped (plus sales tax).

The last time I found a Blu-ray player with BD-Live support in this price range, it was a refurbished Sony model that sold out in about 10 minutes.

Right now, Amazon has an even better deal: a new Panasonic DMP-BD60 Blu-ray player for $128.23 shipped. Regular price: $250.

This player not only supports Profile 2.0 (meaning it can play the BD-Live features found on some discs), but also performs such nifty tricks as streaming Amazon On Demand and YouTube video, accessing your PicasaWeb photos, and fetching weather and stock reports.

You'll need a wired Ethernet connection to take advantage of these goodies; the DMP-BD60 has no Wi-Fi capabilities.

You'll want to read CNET's review of the player (and/or watch the above video), which is mostly positive but concludes with a mere three-star rating.

Apparently users don't agree with the criticisms, having rated it four stars out of five on average. And on Amazon's product page, the DMP-BD60 averaged 4.5 stars.

In other words, this high-end Blu-ray player rocks. And it's unheard-of to find so many advanced features for just $128. If it supported Netflix streaming, I'd call it a must-buy. As it stands, it's a must-consider.