Custom Installation How-To

Like Santa descending a chimney every year with an ever-larger bag of goodies, DVD players have been coming down in price while their bundles of features have expanded.

At a glance, you'd probably think that Panasonic's $1,000 DMR-HS2 looks pretty much like every other DVD recorder out there-including the Panasonic DMR-E30 that I reviewed just last month. But the DMR-HS2's chassis carries clues that something more is going on here.

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When you build a home theater, one of the biggest expenses is the labor for installing the speaker wire. The greater the obstacles, the more time and expense involved. However, you can conquer the majority of wiring situations with a little know-how and ingenuity. Here's how:

The players are in position, and the pieces are now on the board. But this is not a chess game, and the stakes are even higher than in the richest of Grand Master tournaments. This is the beginning of another video-recorder format war, but unlike the VHS vs. Beta conflict of the late 1970s and early '80s, there are three competing formats.

A DVD player is already a terrific bargain - an inexpensive black box that can play discs full of razor-sharp images, immersive surround sound, and fascinating extras. But what if you could wed a DVD player with another popular entertainment device like, say, a TV, VCR, or game console? Well, it's already being done.

When progressive-scan DVD players first emerged almost two years ago, the already excellent picture quality we'd come to expect from standard players suddenly got a whole lot better. That's because the new models could convert video signals to a progressive-scan format for display on a TV or monitor with progressive-scan capabilities.