Photos by Tony Cordoza Using a standalone DVD player in the connected home seems so inappropriately standoffish. Why live by disc alone? That's the thinking behind the Go-Video D2730, a richly featured DVD player that's also adept at playing music or videos, or displaying photos stored on a Windows-based computer.
Photos by Michelle Hood Normally, you'll find the former bat biologist Jeff Corwin and his TV crew keeping one step ahead of stampeding elephants in Botswana or some place equally exotic. But on this stifling day in late June The Jeff Corwin Experience is on location in New York City doing a show about how wild animals adapt to urban environments.
Ever since I got my DVD player and video hard-disk recorder, I've been itching to throw my VCR in the garbage. I haven't done it, though, since I have no other way to play my many VHS tapes - or even VHS-C tapes without using a camcorder.
Napster is dead. Long live Napster 2.0. Out of the battle between the recording industry and the illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing services has emerged a new generation of legal online services that's rapidly changing the way people buy music.
The mutual embrace of A/V and PC got considerably tighter at this year's CES, most visibly with the proliferation of devices that let you experience all kinds of music and video entertainment on your TV and stereo. And almost every one of these products could connect to some kind of wired or wireless network - yet another sign of how deeply the PC mindset has taken hold in the home.
Every night has come down to an impossible choice. Do I revel in the convenience of my video hard-disk recorder (HDR) or exalt in the splendor of high-definition TV? Why can't a set-top box enable me to pause a premium HDTV movie as readily as an ad-glutted network newscast?
When digital still cameras were new and no match for conventional film photography, a typical TV had little trouble doubling as a "slide" projector. But analog TVs can't do justice to images produced by today's multimegapixel cameras.
Media receivers bridge the gap between computer and home theater by letting you store your audio and video files in one room while you select and play them on an entertainment system in another room. The first digital media receivers were limited to streaming music stored on a PC over a wired network to your stereo.