Coming Soon!

In case we needed further evidence of the market domination of portable electronics devices, TiVo has announced that a future enhancement of its Series 2 DVRs will allow users to sync to home-networked PCs and then download recorded programs to video iPods and PlayStation Portable media players. TiVo subscribers will be required to buy the software required to drive this enhancement. Although the price for the software hasn't been announced yet, it's anticipated to be low enough to drive sales.

This morning I picked out the weekly Best Buy flyer from my Sunday paper and saw a DirecTV HD TiVo on special for $399 after mail-in rebate. My initial thought was, "cool! Looks like the new MPEG4 compatible HD DVR is finally out!" This thought died of loneliness seconds later as I realized the HD DVR in the ad is the trusty HR10-250 that sits in my own equipment rack. A terrific machine, but not compatible with the new MPEG4 compressed HD channels that DirecTV has very quietly rolled out in the last several months.

This is what nerds do: after watching another awesome episode of season one of <I>Heroes</I> on HD DVD I cued a firmware update and indeed my Toshiba HD-XA2 found one and started downloading it. I waited up until the update was complete, and then checked the player's setup menu and sure enough, "up to 1080p/24" is now a selectable output resolution.