Recently in Home Entertainment Category

Don't know why gadget companies want to open up their own unique stores, but Pioneer has opened its second U.S. retail store in Phoenix.

The 3,200 square-foot store showcases Pioneer's state-of-the-art products in a comfortable home environment with six vignettes, each featuring unique themes and different technologies, as well as a revamped mobile electronics section bringing an interactive shopping experience to customers.

Well, I guess I do know, but don't think that Pioneer ranks up their with Apple or Bose as a big draw.  

But maybe I'm wrong.  

Would you rather shop at an all-gadgets retailer like Best Buy or head to a unique manufacturer-only site?

Or are you comfortable doing both?

Mojo Mobility Inc, a Silicon Valley-based venture firm, has developed a technology to simultaneously charge multiple mobile devices simply using a flat surface that doesn't even to touch the charging circuitry of  mobile phones, iPods, iPhones, and other gadgetry.

While NFP (Near Field Power) is not a new concept, the non-contact charging system leverages an electromagnetic induction method. The system is composed of two coils, one for transmitting and the other for receiving electric power.

Mojo Mobility has developed a prototype sheet-type charger equipped with multiple transmitting coils. On this sheet to the right, up to four devices charged at the same time with the ability to produce 2.5W to 4W of power ..

Read

Want to know the top HDTVs & LCDs under $1000? Well, Amazon has a sweet round-up of the top / best HDTVs that won't break the bank. My 480i/480p/1080i 65" rear-projection TV is getting a bit old, it's bulky, and it doesn't support 1080p, so might be time for me to buy one of these or add it to my Christmas wish list.

Read: Amazon's Top HDTVs under $1000

Nielsen's new TV/Internet Convergence Panel, which electronically measures both television and Internet usage in the same homes, has found that television viewing and online video streaming are complementary activities.

Gosh!

According to the convergence panel, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all.

Nielsen found that the reverse is true as well -- the lowest consumers of television have the lowest usage levels for the Internet.

(And what else could they be doing?)

Nielsen also found that 31% of in-home Internet activity takes place while the user is watching television, demonstrating that there is a significant amount of simultaneous Internet and television usage. Conversely, 4% of television viewing occurs when the consumer is also using the Internet. 

Now I watch TV while on the Internet, my kids watch TV on the Internet while on the Internet and my wife is either on one or the other -- and never both.

Is this a crazy multi-tasking world or what?  

Get more at Nielsen.com.

The WowWee Rovio is a cool Wi-Fi enabled robotic webcam. I like to call Rovio a remote-controlled VoIP webcam sentry robot.

The Rovio is pretty futuristic looking. It looks like it belongs on some sci-fi TV show or movie. Reminds me of some vehicle I saw on Terminator 2. The Rovio can move in any direction and can be controlled remotely. Simply view and interact with Rovio's environment through its streaming video and audio from its built in camera using a browser. You can even control the Rovio from an iPhone and the Nintendo DS.

Check out this cool new converged prototype device from Motorola that combines a picture frame with touch-screen, video camera, Bluetooth headset, VoIP, femtocell, and video streaming. A femtocell is a small cellular base station, typically designed for use in residential or small business environments that allows you to use your mobile phone in your home connecting to your femtocell access point.

Femtocells essentially are an alternative way to deliver the benefits of Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) without the need for a dual-mode handset. In the Youtube demo video below demoed by Motorola representative Harsha Hegde, you can clearly see they're using the popular Counterpath Xten SIP-based softphone - also shown in the screen grab above. Motorola also demonstrates a femtocell mobile-to-mobile VoIP call, which is pretty cool.

The Cult of Mac claims that the new iPod touch is VoIP-capable on the hardware side:

With 5 wires connected to the Touch headphone jack (instead of 4 on the previous model), the device now supports the external microphone included with some headsets, according to Kyle Wiens of iFixit, who fully dismantled an iPod Touch on Wednesday.

So who needs an AT&T-restricted iPhone? Course, you'll need to be in range of a Wi-Fi network to use VoIP on the iPod touch.

It is worth pointing out that this is not the first time someone has run VoIP on the iPod touch. Touchmods added a microphone hack to the older iPod touch version. Another group enabled a SIP softphone client for the iPod touch to use with the "hacked-in" microphone.

With the new iPod touch - no hacking required.

The new Sling Media SlingCatcher and Slingbox PRO-HD (Sling Media Slingbox PRO-HD SB100-100) are now available for pre-order from Amazon and SlingMedia.com at $299.99 each. Just in time for the Christmas holiday season! Woot! Ok, Christmas is still 3 months away, so I'm getting a little ahead of myself.


The highly anticipated SlingCatcher lets you display video content to your TV using a USB drive, but even cooler it can project your PC's display (Youtube, Hulu, etc) and audio to your TV. It can also directly receive a Slingbox feed.

The Slingbox PRO-HD is the first Slingbox to stream in high definition (HD) supporting 1080i resolution and 5.1 surround sound. It can serve video up to PCs, Macs, and mobiles. Slingbox PRO-HD supports multiple inputs including of course component inputs to capture HD broadcast content from your HD set-top box. It also sports an integrated digital tuner including both ATSC OTA and clear QAM - a first for any Slingbox. You'll probably need some serious bandwidth to stream HD video over the Internet, so really this is best for streaming on a LAN not over the Internet. Though Slingbox does some pretty good compression and buffering, so maybe it can?

To pre-order the Slingbox PRO-HD from Amazon before the mad holiday rush (Wii shortages?), head on over here

And to pre-order the Sling Media SlingCatcher SC100-100 Universal Media Player for TV on Amazon, click here

I was watching the Republican National Convention (RNC) speeches last night, toggling between CNN and FOX News, when a major rain storm hit Connecticut causing a lengthly loss of satellite signal. It was the middle of Rudy Giuliani's hard-hitting speech when I lost all of my TV channels. I have to get my nightly politics "fix" or I'm a grumpy blogger in the morning.

The highly-anticipated speech from Governor Sarah Palin was still to come and it looked like I wasn't going to be able to watch it live. Sometimes CNN offers live streaming coverage, so I headed over to CNN.com and sure enough they were offering a live streaming video feed. But alas, it didn't work. Only the audio worked and I got a green box for the video feed. Perhaps their web servers were overloaded by others doing the same thing I was? There was a lot of media 'buzz' surrounding last night's convention speeches, in particular Palin, so I'm sure lots of Internet users were watching via their PCs.

Next, I headed over to FOXNews.com but couldn't find the live feed link. Then I remembered I recently installed TVUPlayer from TVU Networks, a P2P TV channel streaming application and I recalled that FOX News was one of the channels it supported. I fired up TVUPlayer, and clicked on FOX News. It gave me a warning that the channel was experiencing technical difficulties, and prompted 'are you sure you want to continue". This was an error I had never seen before. I clicked continue and it started to stream, but it was very choppy. CNN's video streaming is screwed up, FOX News video streaming is choppy what's going on here? I have to wonder if CNN & FOX News experienced a higher streaming demand last night. Whether it was pro-Palin supporters or simply people curious to check out Palin, something was going on last night. I've never had streaming issues from two major websites simultaneously.

Anyway, I gave up on FOXNews.com and went to the channel list in TVUPlayer to look for another news channel. Interestingly, only FOX News and a local ABC News channel was listed in the channel line-up. No MSNBC or CNN or Headline News. Cable news networks that don't permit live streaming are missing out on a huge audience and shooting themselves in the foot if you ask me. You can sell commercials/ads in live streaming feeds or simply use the same TV commercials. Regardless, you can monetize and more easily track the number of Internet users streaming your video feed than using the antiquated Nielsen Ratings system, which is based on "sampling" data.

Anyway, then I saw C-SPAN and C-SPAN-2 in the channel line-up. Nobody watches C-SPAN, so surely their servers will have plenty of bandwidth available! I launched C-SPAN and the video quality was superb. I was able to catch the second half of Rudy's speech and the beginning of Sara Palin's speech live on my computer. Phew! Gotta love the Internet! After about 30 minutes, the storm died down and I got my live TV satellite signal back and I switched back to my TV.

I suppose I could have watched the speeches on Youtube when they get posted, but it's just not the same thing as watching an event live. I for one cannot wait for the day when I can stream live any TV channel over the Internet. I might even be willing to pay a few cents for the privilege.

Found a cool Text-To-VoIP Plug-In for MorphVOX Pro that allows you to speak over the Internet or soft-phone using customizable text-to-speech voices. Essentially it lets you type phrases/words, it converts the text-to-speech, and then plays it over your PC's audio connection.

This plug-in allows you to type text messages to your friends over voice clients such as Ventrilo, MSN, Skype, softphones, World of Warcraft Voice Chat, Counter-Strike and other VoIP-enabled games. They claim the plug-in is helpful for people who cannot speak with their own voice or who would like a text alternative to communicating with voice. Or perhaps your just a shy, pimple-ridden male teenager whose voice is changing making you sound like a girl, so this is one way to avoid embarrassment as you frag one of your enemies and shout "I blasted your [censored] sky high!".

The plugin ties directly into the Windows audio class no doubt so it should work with most VoIP applications. It appears they're using the Cepstral TTS engine, which is often used in Asterisk, the open source IP-PBX. In addition, the Text-To-VoIP plug-in works directly with the MorphVOX Pro voice-changing engine. This provides a way for you to morph a single text-to-speech voice into hundreds of different voices.

Go check out the Text-To-VoIP Plug-In here