Practical Technology

I recently discovered that a neighbor had bought an HD-DVD player. Whoops. If only I had known I would have told them the last thing they should be buying is an HD-DVD player. The writing on the wall has been clear for some time now. HD-DVD is dead. Oh, you can still find HD-DVD players [...]

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The arguments over which HD format was better started the moment they rolled off the factory floor. Now, they no longer matter. Blu-Ray has won, HD-DVD has lost and now there’s little more than waiting for the HD-DVD house of cards to finish falling down. What finally determined HD-DVD fate wasn’t which one was technically [...]

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According to the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp., which also owns Fox, Fox is getting ready to rent movies to Apple’s iTunes users. This come as no great surprise since Apple has been planning on going into the movie rental business for months now. The story doesn’t go into any details. [...]

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I believe media extenders, like the Apple TV, will be the next big thing in home entertainment. These devices are still having trouble catching on, which is why SanDisk’s introducing the Sansa TakeTV video player makes no sense to me. In a statement, SanDisk senior VP for audio/video, Daniel Schreiber, said in a statement that [...]

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One advantage of the Apple TV is that if your DVDs are stored on a server you can watch any or all of them without ever bothering to put a DVD in your player again. The trick was, of course, how to get your DVD into your computer in the first place. Well, actually, that’s [...]

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