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Audio Video News
Boxee rolls out 1.1 update
Michael Berk  |  May 11, 2011

We took a look at the Boxee Box (and some of its competitors in the connected-set-top box universe) earlier this week, and today the company announced an OS update (set to roll out over the next few da

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Beverly Hills Cop (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  May 11, 2011
Looking to track down his best friend's killer, fast-talking Detroit Police detective Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) travels to Beverly Hills to follow-up on some clues. Once there, he's put under the watchful eyes of two local cops (Judge Reinhold and John Ashton), and draws the ire of the local officials with his unorthodox detective skills.

Saturday Night Live showcased Murphy's comedic talent and 48 Hours made him a star, but it was his role in Beverly Hills Cop that turned the talented comedian into a box office sensation. He would later reprise the role of Axel Foley in two follow-up films, but the first of the trilogy is by far the best.

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Audio Video News
Music by Google Will Store, Not Sell
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 11, 2011
Music by Google, a.k.a. Google Music, launched in beta yesterday. Surprise: The new service will not sell music. However, it will let you store up to 20,000 songs in the cloud, making it similar to Amazon's just-launched Cloud Drive and Player.

In its haste to launch the site, Google fell into the same trap as Amazon: It hasn't managed to negotiate sales terms with the music industry. So no store, just storage. Like Amazon's Cloud Player, Music by Google will also play stored music directly from the web.

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Premiere Design
Sharp Video Room
Scott Wilkinson  |  May 10, 2011
One of the coolest demos at CES this year was in the Sharp booth, where the company had set up a "video cube" with 64 thin-bezel, 60-inch LCD panels tiled together, forming five faces of a cube. One side was left open for showgoers to stand at a railing and stare in amazement at the shifting images in front, to the sides, and above and below them. Now, the company has installed a larger version of this system at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo City, near Nagasaki, Japan.
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Ask S&V
High Frame Rate 3D
Scott Wilkinson  |  May 10, 2011
I just listened to episode 63 of your Home Theater Geeks podcast and heard that 3D may be making a move to 48 or 60 frames per second. Am I correct that this is a problem for Blu-ray because it cannot accommodate this higher frame rate? Does this mean we will soon see a new disc format?

Charlie Raskob

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Audio Video News
Pink Floyd on the wing, again
Michael Berk  |  May 10, 2011

Big news from the Pink Floyd camp today (a new site with full info should be relaunching today, so check back over the course of the afternoon).

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Audio Video News
Momentum...mobile...and more from the Googleplex
Michael Berk  |  May 10, 2011

Following yesterday's YouTube announcement, Google should have even more big news today - the Google I/O developer conference kicks off today at noon, with the license-free Continue Reading »

Audio Video News
Hollywood's Netflix Anxiety Subsiding
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 10, 2011
Netflix, previously the bane of content owners, is now wearing a halo of approval. What changed? Netflix is now willing to part with more of its burgeoning revenue for content acquisition.

One notable example is Time Warner, whose CEO Jeff Bewkes once referred to Netflix as the Albanian army. As in: "Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?" Then Netflix paid Time Warner $200,000 per episode for 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck. Now Bewkes refers to Netflix with "fondness."

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The Big Picture
A Closer Look at Active vs Passive 3D Flat Panels
Scott Wilkinson  |  May 09, 2011
Last Friday, video guru Joe Kane visited Grayscale Studio, where Tom Norton and I conduct most of our display reviews, to show us his latest test patterns, which are designed for 3D displays. The images were generated by a VideoForge test-pattern generator from Audio Video Foundry and sent to an Accell HDMI switcher/splitter, which fed two flat panels—a Samsung UN55D8000 with active glasses and LG 55LW5600, which uses passive glasses. (Interestingly, the Accell switcher/splitter can pass 3D from the VideoForge, but not from a 3D Blu-ray player.) The results of these tests were very interesting, to say the least.
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Audio Video News
YouTube begins movie rentals
Michael Berk  |  May 09, 2011

Following up on a post earlier today by YouTube head Salar Kamangar, the company formally announced the launch of its movie Continue Reading »

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