If you weren’t already convinced the next-gen optical disc battle was over, Wal-Mart has announced their intentions to dump HD DVD and exclusively stock Blu-ray. There’s also murmurs that Toshiba is about ready to throw in the towel… The quicker the do so, the better - a single format and less consumer confusion will lead to higher adoption rates and ultimately lower hardware prices.
Vudu has thrown down the gauntlet… They contacted me yesterday to emphasize their “quality of HD video is better” than what Apple TV provides. The claim is based on Vudu’s resolution of up to 1080p versus Apple’s 720p. Of course, the pixel count doesn’t tell the whole story… How well are these movies compressed and encoded, what bitrates are we talking here? Ben Drawbaugh of Engadget HD is on-board with a comparison - so he’s Fed-Exing his AppleTV to me for a side by side comparison. And then I’ll FedEx both boxes to him for his perspective.
It?s no secret that it takes a lot of knowledge to truly understand the world of home audio, which is littered with confusing numbers and terms. In this primer from TechLore, we take a look at the power specifications of amplifiers and receivers.