Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

It has been over 4 years since we had a thread to show off your home theater setup, so I thought it was high time to do it again. Here is my current set-up.

From the left to the right: Rock Band paraphernalia, Sharp Aquos 52" LCD, component video switcher, Xbox 360, Wiimote charger, PS2, Xbox 360 HD-DVD, Roku Netflix box, Comcast HD box, Sony BDP-S350 Blu-ray player, Wii, Sony Amp, and TSAT-2000 speakers and sub-woofer. Not pictured (either in drawer or rear mounted) network switch, old Averatec laptop hooked to TV, surge protectors, Bye Bye Standby, Microsoft wireless keyboard, and Gyrotransport Air Mouse.

If you need a place to upload your images so you can share them with others in our forum, try Image Shack or Free Image Hosting. Please keep your embedded images 600 pixels or under in width - if they're bigger than that, just post a link. Thanks!

"Velocity Micro introduces the Velocity FuzeBox, the world's first whole home media experience. Take control of your entire media collection-movies, video, music, and pictures-like never before with the FuzeBox intuitive user interface. Then distribute content throughout your home to turn your entire house into a virtual media hub...Catalogue, store, and organize your entire library of movies, TV, music, and pictures on the FuzeBox's massive hard drive. Then access them quickly and easily using the revolutionary and intuitive FuzeBox interface for an immersive entertainment experience."

Velocity Micro has released something new here, and I'm trying to wrap my brain around exactly what it is. In the demo video, I see Windows Media Center, but elsewhere the UI looks quite different - it looks like it's Windows Vista Home Premium-based system where the Media Center UI is front and centre, with some custom software bits thrown in. It's got built-in cable-card support (two in the FUZEbox, four in the FUZEbox Pro), so you can get HD goodness captured to the hard drive. The FAQ has lots of good info - like the fact that this system will not rip DVDs for you, but if it detects an unencrypted movie format on the hard drive, it will pull down cover art and DVD info on it. So there's no breaking the DMCA here - move along MPAA agents. The pricing seems fairly reasonable - it starts at $1995 USD, and that's with 4 GB of RAM, an unspecified Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, and 750 GB of storage space. For $249 more you can jump up to two 1 TB hard drives - nice!

If my local cable company (Shaw) offered cable card support, I might be all over this...but as it stands now, I can only hope that someday I'll be able to indulge in the HD TV goodness (my sucktastic Motorola HD PVR doesn't really count because it's a closed system). The full press release is after the break. Read more...

"I am a lazy man. A lazy man with a large collection of TV series on DVD. It's always annoyed me that I've had to pull the DVD box off the shelf, pull apart several layers of packaging, find out which disc has the episode I want to watch on it and then put that disc in my DVD player. Surely there must be an easier way of watching video in the digital age? With this in mind, I've investigating ways in which I can create a digital video jukebox for my DVDs. After a bit of research, I narrowed it down to four choices..."

A couple of months ago Digital Home Thoughts community member Stinger published his review of the Popcorn A-100, and at one point I intended to post on it and it slipped my mind - sorry about that Stinger! The review is very detailed and contains many photos as well - worth checking out!