The Sapphire HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition isn't the first liquid-cooled graphics card in the world, but it may be uniquely suited for home theater use because of its silent operation and multichannel 5.1 audio ports on board. Sure, other companies such as Asus and BFG with their NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX water-cooled cards came first with this quiet cooling idea, but Sapphire takes it a step further. How can a lowly graphics card make a difference in a home theater, anyway?

Most of the time, the fan on the graphics card is the loudest noisemaker inside a PC case, so when you eliminate that fan and remove the heat from that fiery ATI HD 2600 XT processor with cool, cool water, it not only cools off the card and lowers the noise level, it reduces heat all over the inside of the case as well, so you don't need such noisy fans elsewhere in there. In a home theater, a bunch of loud fan noise is the last thing you want to have competing with the quiet scenes in your movies and TV sh...

The recent announcement of Heroes Season 1 on DVD excited many fans of the breakout freshman NBC series. The folks over at tvshowsondvd.com have broken the news on additional features on the HD-DVD ...

Movie studios and film companies are reportedly supporting a licensing agreement that's in the final stages of completion, and it might just let you legally copy HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs. This could be a crack in the armor, a compromise for the mess that is digital rights management (DRM). What, did hell freeze over?

Michael Ayers, speaking for the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) licensing group, said Hollywood film studios and content owners may allow buyers of HD DVD and Blu-ray discs to make one backup copy of each disc, and one digital copy to reside on a home media server. Studios may charge more for these Managed Copy privileges, and will be able to dictate just how many copies you make of your movies you bought.
This is a step in the right direction. After all, DRM can go beyond an all-or-nothing equation. If the studios would simply let people make enough copies so they can use their paid-for media on whatever hardware they own, the problem of oppres...

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Remember managed copy? Aw c'mon, it hasn't been that long! Managed copy is / was the answer to people's desire to do totally reasonable things like rip their movies to a portable device, or to a central home server for streaming around the house. Basically the provision in AACS DRM allows users to legally rip however many copies the studio specifies, but those legal rips will still be heavily encased in dark, slippery DRM-goo. You know, just in case you should have friends over with a laptop and sticky fingers. Well, Blu-ray and HD DVD have long since landed, seemingly without any plans for managed copy; shocker, the studios didn't take advantage of the provision. But seeing as how AACS is crackable by a single, simple hex key, the high def DRM obviously wasn't able to cut the mustard in keeping users from doing with their content what they please. The AACS LA's solution? Let them eat cake. The DRM-maker's new plan to distract people from the f...

Zombies have nver looked crisper. Shaun of the Dead is getting upgraded to an HD-DVD release from Universal. There comes a day in every man's life when he has to get off the couch...and kill some ...

Three weeks after sparking an internet user rebellion, the processing key used to encrypt HD DVD and Blu-ray discs is now obsolete -- and the replacement key has been cracked, too.

Filed under: Storage
In great news for torrent freaks worldwide, Taiwanese optical disc giant Ritek has announced its accreditation to manufacture rewritable versions of both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, meaning that pricing on the still-rare media should begin to drop once production ramps up in the third quarter. According to a company spokesperson, archiving all those TV shows and movies onto 20GB HD DVD-RE and 25GB BD-RE discs will set you back around $10-per-platter, though you are getting either quadruple or quintuple the capacity, respectively, of a regular DVD-RW. No matter, we'll be tossing these things around like cheap CD's in no time anyway.
[Via Gadget Lab]
 
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Hey dudes, remember that Toshiba HD DVD rebate we told you about last week? The one where you get $100 off any HD-A2? Here's the rebate.
So far it says Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City and Fry's are participating, but we've heard from the HD DVD folks that Amazon is as well. Amazon's price? Only $299 before rebate. That means you can make out with a $199 player when all's said and done. Score!
Hit the jump for the rebate.
– Jason Chen
Rebate [PDF]
Product Page [Amazon]

Pioneer's Elite AV receivers weren't looking so fresh, after Onkyo's next gen receivers launched in April. These receivers, which launched in the deep shadows of the Project Kuro plasmas, have HDMI 1.3a among other thing. Looks like someone's playing catch up.
The new models are the VSX-90TXV, VSX-91TXH, VSX-92TXH and VSX-94TXH.
It has HDMI 1.3a, 1080p upscaling by Farouja chips, of any video source. The $1600 VSX-94TXH is the first Elite to stream music from the internet, as well as from a PC. And all four new receivers are XM and Sirius Ready. The press material pushes that the receivers will be able to decode all HD DVD and Blu-ray audio formats internally, which is still a surprisingly rare thing. That puts it on par with many of the many of the Onkyo's main points, although lots of press has favored the Onkyo's Reon HQV video processor over the Elite's Farouja.
These two receivers sound nice, but the flashy new UI on the Denon receivers could give Pioneer's us...

Ritek to soon start mass production of BD-RE & HD DVD-RE media Taiwanese company Ritek has said in a statement that they plan to start mass producing BD-RE (Blu-Ray Disc Rewritable) discs as well as HD DVD-RE (high definition) discs in the third quarter of this year. This could result in the market price of this media [...]