Last week I greeted the somewhat tardy arrival of Blu-ray and HD DVD to my rack. Happy happy joy joy, as Ren & Stimpy would say, but what to do about my reference receiver? My beloved Rotel RSX-1065 (and its seven-channel equivalent, the 1067) has no HDMI inputs. And regrettably, Rotel tells me it has no immediate plans to update its receiver line for HDMI. That means there's no way to get the new surround codecs into the receiver by a digital path at full resolution. As the magazine's audio editor, I am more than eager to hear lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. I'd also like to plumb the potential of the new & improved lossy formats, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio. The only way to get them into the Rotel at full resolution was via the receiver's 5.1-channel analog inputs, relying on the player's built-in surround decoder. That took care of the Pioneer BDP-HD1 Blu-ray player, and I threw in a digital coaxial connection to continue feeding the receiver's old-style Dolby Digital and DTS decoders. But even if I'd been willing to swap six analog cables from player to player, the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player has no 5.1 analog-outs! I had to settle for the digital optical interface, which handles the new codecs at reduced resolution as a backward-compatibility move. This introduced me to a quirk of Toshiba's HD DVD players, which is that they convert Dolby Digital Plus into PCM and then transcode it into DTS. Thus the optical connection lights up the DTS indicator on my receiver even when I'm not playing a DTS soundtrack. Having at least temporarily licked my connectivity problems, I set about upgrading the firmware in both players. Details next time.
Oh boy. How about a hilarious, satirical dissection of the buddy cop genre by the cheeky bastards who brought us <I>Shaun of the Dead</I>? This movie is hysterically funny, if relentelessly silly. I do think the gag here isn't quite enough to sustain the full two hour runtime- it would have moved better at closer to 90 minutes. But I feel cranky even saying that. Honestly, how can you not love a movie about buddy cops in which the buddy cops themselves love <I>Point Break</I>?!
As a follow-up to Ken Pohlmann's story on Apple and EMI vs. DRM: The Universal Music Group has announced that it, too, will begin selling its catalog online without Digital Rights Management. However, Universal won't be making its entire catalog...
Here's the good news: Time Warner Cable subscribers will be able to view already-aired programming at the touch of a button. And now here's the bad news: The fast-forward function is disabled.
"Diamond" David Lee Roth, that is - and to (cleanly) quote the T-shirt that Stella McCartney wore to her Dad's solo induction into the Roll & Roll Hall of Fame: About F---ing Time! Yes, the big Van Halen tour was announced just a...
The answer is: Dying within two weeks of each other, these three titans influenced visual media immeasurably. Who were Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Merv Griffin? That's correct for $1,000! Ah yes, in the Arts & Entertainment...
A working director ever since film school, Randal Kleiser talks to us about his latest, his greatest, and his now famous USC roommate.
After years in television (The Boy in the Plastic Bubble), director Randal Kleiser earned a place in Hollywood history with his joyous adaptation of the Broadway musical Grease, soon followed by his updated ode to young love, The Blue Lagoon. He's kept busy in the ensuing years with an impressive slate of new projects and sequels—although the notorious Grease 2 was not his. We caught up with him as the DVD of his romantic comedy, Love Wrecked, which premiered on the ABC Family channel earlier this year, was being released on DVD from Genius Products/The Weinstein Company.