Practical Technology

Three years after DirecTV dumped its partnership with TiVo, the companies announced that they would be working together again. Specifically, TiVo will be making a new HD DVR for DirecTV with Internet support. This is due to appear in the second half of 2009.

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It took over a year, but the Apple TV finally had a worthwhile competitor, the Netflix Player by Roku Digital. I’ve been using the Apple TV since day one and the Netflix Player for only two weeks, but I can already see the real differences and for the most part Apple TV is the clear [...]

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Toshiba executives haven’t made an official statement, but the word is leaking out from multiple sources: HD DVD is dead. The hand-writing has been on the wall for months now. Any doubt that HD DVD was losing to Blu Ray should have been removed last week when both Netflix and Best Buy announced that they [...]

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It took longer than expected, but not as long as I had feared, this morning, February 13th, Apple delivered the Apple TV Take 2 update. I’ve just downloaded and installed it on my 40GB Apple TV In a word: “Sweet.” After an 8-minutes download, over a 3Mbps DSL Internet connection, and a reboot, the Apple [...]

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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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