Sorry to be leaving everyone so soon, but it looks like our parent company, b5media, is pulling the plug on several of our smaller niche blogs. Though I have been with you for only a couple of months, it was definitely fun. See you ’round the tubes! –Christopher Swenson [Read more]

Hulu has been trying to increase their “real” HD offerings of late. Really, the only thing of substance (other than 5-minute documentaries and trailers) that interests me is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which they now have in HD, and still for free! Don’t expect the free to last much longer: go watch it now if you haven’t already, or even if you have! To Hulu: offer more stuff! A handful of mid-season television episodes from mostly shows I don’t watch doesn’t get me excited about your HD offerings. [Read more]

A lot of newer audio technologies have been promising “HD” audio, with features such as “192 kHz sampling”. But what does this mean? CDs sample 44.1-kHz audio at 16 bits per sample. Considering the standard was defined back in the early 1980s to be played with state-of-the-art technology back then, you’d think this is far inferior to what we could cough up now, right? Not really. For starters, 44.1 kHz allows the audio to accurately represent any waveforms below about 22 kHz (due to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem). Well, human hearing only extends to about 20 kHz, and less so as you get older. Basically, 44.1 kHz is plenty for high-def audio. DVDs standardized their audio sampling rates at 48 kHz, probably so... [Read more]

I was busy ripping some episodes of The Legend of Prince Valiant (a cartoon series from the early 1990s), one of the first things I did was to check if the video was interlaced, so that I could change my settings appropriately. You see, to reduce flicker, television shows played at standard definition transmitted a half frame at a time: your CRT television would trace half of a frame, and then the other half. This way you get a smoother picture. Often, DVDs are encoded in this manner as well, causing some funk line patterns to show up, like this: This interlacing would look fine on a standard-resolution CRT television, but looks cruddy on modern, HDTVs. The solution is, when you are ripping it, to turn on some amount of “de-interlacing”.... [Read more]

We seem to be having a slew of Netflix players as of late, between the Roku and the Xbox 360. The latest to the list is the LG BD300. Consumer Reports wrote up a brief post on it, as well as many other blogs, but the skinny is that it will cost something less than $500, and playback Blu-ray and Netflix Instant Watch. While this interests me, I can’t help but wonder if Sony will follow this up with Netflix support for the PS3, their flagship Blu-ray player? I can only hope, seeing as how I don’t need another Blu-ray player. [Read more]