Operation Gadget

Category: Home Theater

  • Amazon.com Now Taking Orders for Microsoft Portable Media Center Devices

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteReuters reports that Amazon.com has begun taking pre-orders for Microsoft Portable Media Center devices including the Creative Labs 20 GB Zen Portable Media Center and the Samsung Yepp YH-999 20 GB Portable Media Center. Both units will cost about $500 and include 20-Gigabyte internal hard drives, bright color displays between 3.5…

  • U.S. Women’s Open Makes Me Wish I Had a DVD Recorder

    Reading Time: 2 minutesMatt Manzi is the superintendent of The Orchards Golf Club where the 2004 U.S. Women’s Open was contested over the weekend. My brother Scott Aiello is one of Matt’s best friends, an assistant superintendent of a course himself, and spent the better part of a week working for Matt as part of…

  • Tour de France TV Coverage is Full of Technical Innovations

    Reading Time: 2 minutesEven if you think that watching cycling on television is boring, I urge you to turn on the Outdoor Life Network sometime this month and watch some of the coverage of the Tour de France. The coverage of the race on the road is particularly interesting when you think about how it’s…

  • TiVo Makes Home Media Option Free on Series 2 DVRs

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteMacCentral reported that TiVo is making the Home Media Option a standard feature on TiVo Series 2 DVRs. Previously, the Home Media Option had cost an additional $99 per DVR. The re-christened Home Media Feature allow TiVo users to take advantage of the following services: media server capability for browsing photos…

  • Thoughts on Recording Procession and State Funeral for Reagan on a TiVo

    Reading Time: 2 minutesThis evening, I recorded 2 1/4 hours of the funeral procession and state funeral for Ronald Reagan. These were historic moments– the first state funeral since the death of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1973. It was also, obviously, the first state funeral to take place in the TiVo era. So, I…

  • Wide Screen DVDs Outselling Full Screen through All Sales Channels

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteSlate published an interesting article on the increasing dominance of the wide screen format as measured by DVD sales. This has been confirmed by the fact that Blockbuster has publicly stated that it prefers to have wide screen (aka letterbox) format DVDs on its shelves for rental and that most of…

  • L.A. Times Pronounces the Rerun Dead

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteMatt Haughey of PVRblog pointed out that the Los Angeles Times has published an article declaring the television rerun dead. I’m with Matt when he says that the end of reruns as we knew them is a good thing, and that Digital Video Recorders like TiVo played a role. I have…

  • Buy an Inexpensive Reprogrammable DVD Player to Play European DVDs

    Reading Time: 2 minutesMy sister and her husband returned from their honeymoon about two weeks ago. They spent part of their trip in Prague and brought home a comercially-bought DVD with highlights of the city. The problem is that the DVD is Region 2 encoded. This means it can be played on DVD players sold…

  • “Friends” Finale Schedule Designed to Extract Revenue, Not Mess Up TiVos

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteComments in response to the PVRblog article NBC Tries to Outsmart TiVo indicate that maximizing advertising revenue is most likely the reason for schedule changes that added time to the beginning and the end of final Friends episode. Late last week, I reported that the accuracy of NBC’s schedule for May…