If you’re anything like me, it’s impossible to memorize everything you need to know to properly setup and maintain a great home theater experience in your home.  It used to be easy.  Hook up a good 5.1 receiver with some good sounding speakers and a DVD player and you were set.  Well things have changed.
Now you damn near need a Ph.D. to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.  I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who knows everything and if they tell you they do, they’re lying.  Nope.  …

We all want quiet and good looking HTPCs for the living room.  Well what about one that you never see and that is so well hidden no one will even know it’s there?
The Piixl EdgeCenter 3770 hooks straight to the back of your TV using the VESA mounting interface.  At only 30mm deep, it won’t do much to change the look of how your TV hangs and if you have your set on a stand, no one will ever know.  The PC can fit devices 37 to 70 inches.
The …

One of the two competing groups looking to make wireless High Definition transmission a reality has released a spec.
The Wireless Home Digital Interface group (WHDI) released their spec into the wild earlier this week.  Backed by Sharp, Hitachi, Motorola, Samsung and Sony, the specification uses a 40 MHz channel in the 5GHz unlicensed band.  The interface should support 1080p resolution, HDCP and an uncompressed signal.  (Compared to the original stream.  If that’s compressed, no additional compression is added.)
WirelessHD is a competing product that uses the 60GHz band and also …

It’s officially the holiday shopping season, and as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, we bring you The Digital Media Zone’s 2009 Holiday HD Gift Guide. If we missed something, or you think there’s a category we overlooked, let us know in the comments.
BLU-RAYS
UP – Disney/Pixar’s latest masterpiece is a must-have for this holiday season. Vibrant colors and amazing detail levels highlight one of the best Blu-rays I’ve seen. It sounds just as good, with a demo-worthy scene early on during the thunderstorm. The 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio soundtrack …

The shopping season will soon be upon us.  If you look in my local stores, they think Christmas started right before Halloween but we all know the truth.  Most of us will wait until the last minute to get our shopping done.
If you’re in the market for some new tech gear or gadgets for that special someone, you have a ton of options and sometimes that can make life difficult when you’re at the store on December 24th.  Luckily a few sites out there are ready for you and …

Saying that they hope they will lead the nation on the environmental issue, California’s Energy Commission recently voted unanimously to force TV manufacturers to meet new lower power usage standards in order to be able to sell their products within the state.
The standards will be placed on sets up to 48 inches and will be phased in starting in 2011.  At that time, sets sold in CA stores will have to use less that 183 watts.  In 2013 that number drops to 116 watts.  Currently sets can use anywhere …

For those of use with huge DVD collections (our family sits at around 350 at this point) making the switch to Blu-ray is painful.  Buying the same content, albeit in High Definition, at times seems like a waste and as of yet, our family has only just begun.
Warner Bros. is looking to make your transition to Blu-ray just a little bit easier.  Much like their HD-DVD to Blu-ray program earlier this year, the studio is now allowing customers to return their WB DVDs and receive the same movie in …

It appears that the survey Boxee put out a few months ago wasn’t for nothing.  The company announced through their blog today that they are “working closely with a CE company” to develop a branded piece of hardware.
Over the next few years there will be a great change in the way we consume entertainment on our TV. The Internet is (finally) coming to the TV and with it will come a whole new world of content, applications and innovations.
We are building Boxee as a platform that would:

make it easy …

Acting as if it had not been paying attention for the past several months, JVC today officially introduced what it called an “entry-level” Blu-ray player, the XV-BP11, at a “popularly-priced” amount of $199.

I really didn’t think we’d see it this soon but it looks as though before we’re even out of October, the stores are going to try to make this the year that people find a Blu-ray player under the tree.  For a long time now, if you purchased a lower priced Blu-ray player, you weren’t getting much.  It would play the disks and any more than that was bonus.  Looks like Best Buy wants to change the game a bit.
Best Buy is now listing the Insignia brand NS-BRDVD3 for …