Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Boxee Box now available

The highly anticipated Boxee box is now available at Tiger Direct.
The Boxee box is a multimedia streaming device that was expected to be released this past summer.

The elegant user interface and seamless connectivity to the internet are what make the Boxee box so popular among the home theater enthusiasts. It seems the Boxee hardware will be manufactured by Dlink. If the experience is anything like the Boxee software released for Windows, Mac, and Linux, this should be an exceptional standalone media streaming device.

Boxee for $179.99
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Saturday, September 11, 2010

Anchor Bay Scaler Performance in Yamaha RXV-765

I finally had a chance to hook up my Nintendo Wii system to the Yamaha 765. The Yamaha RXV-765 is equipped with the Anchor Bay ABT-2010 scaler. This scaler is the same one used in the 2009 Denon line of receivers, and is highly regarded. Although I am only using a composite cable for now, and my tv is only capable of 720P, there is a noticeable improvement in the picture quality. There is less artifacting and mosquito noise in the general scene, and text is rendered with more blending and less jaggies (what I call jagged lines that don't appear smooth). Both problems are typical of composite video connections, and are handled nicely by the scaler.

Most of the games I like to play on the Nintendo Wii are high frame rate, very busy scenes with a lot of fast motion graphics, games like Super smash brothers brawl, and Mario Kart racing. So, as a result, the picture quality during game play is not as easy to see the improvements in as when viewing a static screen, or any of the RPG games that there are not so many objects rendered.

Overall, I am pleased with the picture quality produced by the Anchor Bay scaler. Especially on a composite connection using only the stock average quality cables provided by Nintendo. I could only imagine that feeding the scaler in the Yamaha RXV-765 a cleaner signal would result in an even bigger improvement in upscaling picture quality that would really show the quality of the Anchor Bay scaler solution.