Media @ Home

It’s been a tough couple of years for both camps HD DVD (HD) and Blu-ray (BD). The consumers were hesitant to invest in either technology, the retail shops suffered from low sales. But now the battle is over. Here’s how it all happened…

• Jun 17th, ‘07: Blockbuster announced its plans to keep only Blu-ray movies in its stores, still offering HD DVD discs online.
• Jul 13th, ‘07: Tartan Video goes exclusively BD.
• Jul 25th, ‘07: Target choses to sell only BD players, but continue to sell discs for both formats.
• Jan 4th, ‘08: Warner Bros Entertainment announced to go exclusively Blu-ray. To be fair Warner was considering going BD since October ‘07.
• Feb 11th, ‘08: Netflix decides to stock only Blu-ray discs.
• Feb 12th, ‘08: Best Buy announced its plans to promote Blu-ray as an HD format of the future.
• Feb 15th, ‘08: Walmart announced to stop stocking HD DVD players in March.
• Feb 18th, ‘08: Samsung has revealed that they will start focusing on Blu-ray format.
• Feb 18th, ‘08: Niveus, producer of home media servers, has announced that effective immediately they will offer Blu-ray drives on all of their server products and will begin phasing out their HD DVD supplies.
• Feb 19th, ‘08: Toshiba (one of the major backers of HD DVD) after selling over a million HD DVD players, recorders and drives worlwide has finally decided to stop production of HD players in March, stating that “we carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” (Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba president and CEO).
• Feb 19th ‘08: Paramaunt and Universal the last two major studios supporting HD DVD commit to Blu.

Our condolences to all early adopters of HD technology.

HD DVD rest in peace!

Tomb’s picture courtesy of EyeCraveDVD.com

We all remember elementary school’s math lessons.. The train left Point A at 1 pm traveling 60 mph. How long would take the train to arrive to point B…

I recently ordered some hardware for my media center rack from a store called Etech4sale. The store has a warehouse in San Jose (point A) which is about a 40 minute drive from my home (point B). The objective: How long will it take FedEx to deliver the package from point A to point B? If your answer is “about 40 minutes” — you are wrong. The correct answer is 3 days.

It is hard for me to understand the logics behind GPS software that FedEx uses. Especially knowing that other delivery services are going a great distance trying to optimize their routes. Take for instance the “big brown”. Not that long ago UPS decided to limit left-hand turns that their tracks make - to minimize idling time on intersections waiting for oncoming traffic to clear. This little trick in their “package flow” software saved them “28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons“.

Apparently this is not a problem for FedEx. Here’s how they solved my hardware delivery problem (click image to enlarge). Could someone explain this solution to me, please?

Another mystery for me is why my package was sent by FedEx when I clearly selected “UPS Ground” during check-out.

More on UPS routes optimization: The green way to keep on trucking at Financial Times
Maps courtesy of Google.

CEPro breaks down seven of the most frequently-encountered digital video formats available today -MPG (MPEG), AVI, MOV, ASF, WMV, RM, FLV.

Check it out here.

MCEDev.com has recently announced a new Beta 4 release of TV Toolbox for Windows Vista. This beta includes bug fixes and functional changes that address issues reported by customers who used the first 3 beta versions. 

TV Toolbox allows you to edit recordings (as in remove commercials), convert recordings and define rules to automatically convert just recorded TV shows to a specific format (WMV) to save some HDD space.

Check out the screenshots and application itself at MCEDev.com