Audio Video News

When the hard-disk–based personal video recorder (PVR) products like TiVo and ReplayTV hit the shelves last year, they brought a new flexibility to time-shifting television programming. But the first products still had shortcomings: What could you do if you wanted to time-shift two programs from two different channels simultaneously? Buy two machines?

It's no secret that plenty of commodities cost more in Europe than they do in the United States. Gasoline, for example, is typically two to three times more expensive on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Video projectors keep getting smaller, lighter, and better looking&mdash;especially from companies like <A HREF="http://www.infocus.com">InFocus Corporation</A>. InFocus choose the recent INFOCOMM show in Las Vegas, held June 13&ndash;15, to debut the new LP530 digital video projector, which incorporates Sage's FLI2200 deinterlacer. The FLI2200 is the world's first 10-bit single-chip motion adaptive deinterlacer, with Faroudja's deinterlacing and post-processing algorithms to convert standard interlaced video signals into progressive scan signals. The resulting image is said to be among the best available, with an absolute minimum of motion artifacts, flicker, or color irregularities.

Microsoft must still be smarting from a blow delivered by AT&T Broadband. On June 6, the telecommunications giant announced that it was scaling back its plans to implement Microsoft's interactive television software in its next generation of digital set-top boxes (STBs).

Film director John Waters will lead off the <A HREF="http://www.dvdconference.com">DVD Entertainment 2001 Conference & Showcase</A>, to be held August 22 & 23, 2001 at the Hilton Universal City & Towers, in Universal City, CA. Conference organizers announced on June 5 that Waters would give a keynote presentation entitled "From the Lens to Plastic: A Typically Unorthodox View of DVD," detailing how the format has brought his work to a new audience.

If companies like <A HREF="http://www.nCUBE.com">nCUBE</A> have their way, hard-disc-based PVR manufacturers such as TiVo are going to have a tough time finding customers. nCUBE announced last week that it will demonstrate its scalable "network-based" personal video recorder (nPVR) systems at Cable 2001, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's (NCTA) Convention in Chicago, June 10&ndash;13.