Tag Archives: TV

To Blu-Ray or not to Blu-Ray (it’s sort of the question)

Posted on September 2, 2008 | 1 comment

I hadn’t really thought much about it but I see they’ve been releasing TV shows on DVD Blu-Ray, that’ll be nice when the prices go down. I think “they” need to announce when they plan to discontinue regular DVDs. I think they sooner they do this it’ll drive down the cost of Blu-Ray discs and Blu-Ray players and we can all be happier. With the TV format change next year, it seems like this couldn’t be done in the next few years, as long as someone would make an announcement. There has got to be some people holding back because of this!

Speaking of Blu-Ray, Iron Man might be the one to get me to finally take the leap. The effects were so excellent, it’d be a great first one to watch on (my theoretical) new player.

I have purchased a few Blu-Ray DVDs when they’ve been way on sale but still no player for me…

1 Comment

Tagged Blu-Ray, DVD, iron man, movies, television, TV

AppleTV is Awesome!!!

Posted on July 22, 2007 | 2 comments

My AppleTV is awesome! An “iPod for your TV” is a accurate description. I ran the software update (painless!) and it gave me YouTube videos and fixed “enhanced podcasts”.

It mirrors one of your computer’s iTunes just like an iPod does (and allows you exceptions) and will stream from any other computers running iTunes (platform independent) and I don’t think there is a limit. I can’t believe how fast it pulls hi-res movie previews from Apple down to the unit, it’s very very fast. It’s actually much faster than pulling down YouTube videos (many which are low-res).

It really streams full-scren video from other computers really efficiently. Very rarely does it need a moment to catch up. It has no problem with steaming audio. It almost makes no sense to download podcasts, I bet you could stream them live if you had a way to just get the RSS feeds onto the AppleTV.

With “enhanced podcasts” it now properly advances the embedded images to follow along with the audio. The problem is that it just shows them to the side like the album artwork, some images are much larger so it really cheats you by scaling them down. Since you don’t use the up/down keys on the remote during this process “up” would be a great way to enlarge the images.

I have the same image size concern when viewing slideshows with the “Ken Burns effect”, sometimes I want to view the whole image. Once again this would be another great use for the up button. The down button could be used for viewing filenames, date, time and other info about the images. Actually, this would be a good use for the down button while viewing videos or audio.

A few more features (like on the TiVo) like weather, movie listings and maybe Flickr photo viewing and it’d be even better… Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in reviews

Tagged Apple, Apple TV, AppleTV, Flickr, iPod, iTunes, Ken Burns, Ken Burns effect, RSS, technology, television, TiVo, TV, Weather

Mmmmm…. AppleTV !

Posted on July 21, 2007 | 1 comment

So I’ve been very interested in the AppleTV and never got around to trying it. But I was feeling pretty happy after happy hour yeast and Best Buy has a good return policy so I’m now the proud owner of an AppleTV (40GB). It’s very cool. Very easy to install. Very easy to configure. Pure yummy Apple perfection. And there is no way I’m going to return it!

Two user-interface suggestions:
1) They need a better distinction between the computer you sync with and the computers you stream from. This needs to be better in the AppleTV and in iTunes.
2) The top menu item says AppleTV and it looks like it’s a title and not a menu item (it actually takes you back to the main menu) and it’s confusing. I’ve read about this but I forgot about it…
3) Put in a DVD player and a video/s-video port. (This doesn’t count since it’s not an interface issue).
3b) Safari would be cool too! This would just be for .Mac members so it would interface with your bookmarks!

If you think you’d like one of these, then run and go get one, it’s way cool.

1 Comment

Tagged Apple, Apple TV, AppleTV, DVD, iTunes, technology, television, TV

Deal? Or No Deal?

Posted on April 3, 2006 | 4 comments

She had 1 penny, $400,000 and $750,000 on the board so they offered her $375,000. A very generous offer as the show goes. If she doesn’t take the money she has to open one more. She said she was a gambler so this should have been easy and Howie pretty much spelled it out for her that there were 3 options if she picked the case:

She could pick the penny and the offer would go up (probably to about $575,000, IMHO) and you could play between $400k and $750k or go.

She picks the $400,000 case and the offer stays at about $375,000 (the logical spot is the same amount, but I think Howie inferred it’d go up) and you should quit.

This is the worse option, she picks the $750,000 and the offer drops to $200,000 (Howie did the math for her on this one and I’ve never seen him be specific before) and you’d have to quit then.

It’s all a win at that point, so to me you keep on playing. At that point even making a bad choice you still have $200,000!!! And the good choices (66%) are better!

Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in reviews

Tagged game show, games, people, television, TV

Boldly Going Nowhere…

Posted on December 2, 2005 | Leave a comment

A new non-reality show, Space Cadets, starts on Channel 4 (I’m assuming that’s on the British networks) next week and looks like it runs ten days straight. It’s a reality show where they train people to be astronauts and then take them up to a space station. Or do they…?

Continue reading →

Go to college

Posted on August 23, 2005 | Leave a comment

So I really wish I could have been in the room when someone was making the pitches for new television shows. You know, there must have been some new CIS shows, some other cop shows, something new from J.J. Abrams, probably some new Star Trek series and who knows what else. Then someone says ‘Hey! Let’s do a reality-mentory and we’ll call it Tommy Lee Goes to College‘ and then all the network folk stood up and applauded and said go for it.

Continue reading →