Speaker 1: Welcome to HD Nation, your guide to the best in HD content and the best in the home theater gear. No matter what your budget is, all the money, some of the money, none of the money, we're going to help you get a great HD experience. I'm Patrick Norton. And I'm Robert Herron. A lot of great stuff coming on today's show. C-Time, Infiniti V6, he's got a review. I do. We have some information on some of the issues that cable companies have with six tuner cable cards. Totally. We have a lot of news. Oh my goodness. We showed off Allcast recently. A tool that makes it super easy to stream your locally hosted content on Google's Chromecast. Love it. Give your own reports. Google pulls the plug on third-party Chromecast streaming app Allcast. What? The rumor is, is it intentional or not intentional, right? Because Kush on his page is like, Google's latest Chromecast updates intentionally breaks Allcast. I mean, you could argue that Allcast was kind of permanently in beta and that maybe Allcast used some undocumented features. The Verge reached out to Google and said, hey, what's the story? And Google said, we're excited to bring more content to Chromecast and would like to support all types of apps, including those for local content. It's still early days for the Google Cast SDK, which we just released in developer preview for early development and testing only. We expect that the SDK will continue to change before we launch out of developer preview and want to provide a great experience for users and developers before making the SDK and additional apps more broadly available. It's coming. It's coming.

Speaker 2: And I hope they, when they damn well feel like letting us have it, I'm really hoping they just open it up so you can stream your local content, your own content, to that wonderful little USB streaming device. I have to say, though, there is some cheerful news, though, to be had. Chromecast news, the iOS app is now available for download. Right here. So all of your friends who have the iOS devices, including the iPhone, can now download the app to make setup a lot easier, too. This makes it a lot easier, especially if you're taking your mobile device over to, say, a friend's house that already has a Chromecast, and you want to stream to that device itself. This will just make it easier to find those devices either somewhere else or in your own home and get it working. And that's always nice.

Speaker 1: That's the smell of freshly installed data or applications in any case. Fresh apps. By the way, you might want to update your Apple TV when you get home, or if you are home, you might want to update. It's now got apps for Vivo, Disney Channel, Disney XD, the Weather Channel. Your mom will be so excited. And Smithsonian. This is, of course, on top of the news earlier this year that Apple was doing a deal with Time Warner to bring cable to Apple TV, which would be much more awesome if, say, I actually got an app store. Dan Fromer at SplatF was basically suggesting that maybe all of this activity on Apple TV is a sign that we're finally going to get an app store on Apple TV. I just want Google Play and Amazon Prime on, I basically want Google Play, Amazon Prime, and Apple on every single device that I own. Is that too much to ask?

Speaker 2: Yes. And if they can bring in some of that app store loving to the Apple TV product, that's what I would like to see too. I wonder why it's not there.

Speaker 1: Probably because they don't have the remote control yet to really play Angry Birds as well as on the Roku. The Roku's control with the ability, it's better for gaming.

Speaker 2: Use the iPhone as the controller. Oh. Now I'm thinking. He's on it. For the budget-minded home theater enthusiasts out there, Epson has released a brand new Power Light Home Cinema Projector, the 2030 model. This baby's going to be NHL enabled, 1080p resolution, 3D capable, 2,000 lumens, so that'll work pretty well in a well-lit room, built-in speakers, so it's going to be very convenient. Big news for me, though, really, was 3LCD technology. Rather than most of these projectors I see using a single DLP chip or digital light processing, this is using a 3-chip design, and at a sub-$1,000 price point as well. Now you add, say, that Roku streaming stick, and you've got a pretty nice little self-contained unit, audio and video, and a nice package that you could project right to the wall if you want and get a big screen image out of it, and I thought that was pretty cool.

Speaker 1: It's time to change the bulb in my projector. It's getting to be that time. The brightness has been going down. It's several years old, and I'm at the point where it's like, gosh, the bulb is going to cost a third of what I paid for the projector, so maybe I should think about upgrading the projector to something new, except I've got all the 1080p I need. I want deeper, darker blacks. Contrast.

Speaker 2: Has anyone bought a TiVo Romeo yet? Are they actually shipping them? Yes, they are. There are quite a few owners out there, actually, and it turns out there is basically an issue that some people are experiencing. Reported over at Zzat's Not Funny, they are saying that some owners of the spanking new Romeo Plus or the Pro DVR are finding that their TV service provider isn't supporting the use of all six tuners for mega recording goodness. Why? It turns out that they have to push firmware updates to the cards in order for it to be fully compatible, and if they haven't done that, if they're not actively supporting the cable cards they have out there, then basically you may be only to record four tuners at once on your six-tuner product. Now, TiVo is providing a workaround that will force its six-tuner models to use fewer tuners until those lagging cable TV providers will actually push that firmware update to the cable card that's installed in the box. It's kind of in their ball, though, or in their court to say, what are you going to do next? Hopefully they will soon.

Speaker 1: This doesn't sound like it's super difficult. Wait, it's in TiVo's court or it's in the cable company's court? It's in the cable company's court, because they're going to deal with it when they feel like dealing with it. Yeah, totally. That is it. I wonder if anybody at my cable company at Comcast would even know if they had four or six tuners support. Is that a cruel thing to ask?

Speaker 2: Somebody does, and that's always the person you want to talk to. There's always one person who has all the knowledge, and they usually only work a short shift every day, I find. And not on the day when you're calling.

Speaker 1: No. If you're excited about MHL standards, you should rejoice. The Mobile High Definition Link is getting an update. What's that mean? You're going to be able to do cooler stuff with your cell phone over HDMI. If you're living on the bleeding edge of mobile video technology, the MHL Consortium has announced version 3 of the MHL spec that's going to bring several improvements to the current version 2 spec used in many mobile devices.

Speaker 2: Totally. In addition, the 3L spec is going to include basically 4K support, or basically 2160p at 30 hertz.

Speaker 1: A $1,000 GPU can barely feed 3D to a monitor, so let's strap your phone to a 4K monitor.

Speaker 2: Why not? That's cool, though, in the sense that they're just basically quadrupling the resolution support over the current standard that's available in a lot of phones today. Also, simultaneous high-speed data channels, so you'll be able to run data in addition to your video as well. Improved remote control protocol support for preferable such as like touchscreens, keyboards, and mice. More power for charging, up to 10 watts now, backward compatibility with MHL1 and MHL2. The latest copy protection schemes, of course, HDCP 2.2 to be specific. And 7.1 surround, complete with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD master audio. Actually, I'm not sure if it's master audio or not, but still, good connectors. And as we've always talked about, MHL is connector agnostic. Usually on one end, you're going to have an HDMI output or a cable. On the other end, it could be just about anything. It's really the transport structure over the wires. That's what MHL defines. It really doesn't say what the in and the out will be, but typically, you're going from something like a micro-USB connector to HDMI.

Speaker 1: So let's say I have a small set-top box. This is starting to sound like a really good alternative to HDMI if I want to do something

Speaker 2: sophisticated with the output, or is it just... It could. It's really more for the mobile devices that you're dealing with, the micro-HDMI ports. Got it. Because most set-top boxes nowadays will probably just go for just a standard HDMI output. It's probably cheaper to license just that than to license the full-blown MHL port. But the MHL part, if you needed the power or that data transfer function, that's where you might want to start incorporating something like that. And when we talk about the Roku Streaming Stick 2, that's something that can actually take advantage of the power off of a MHL-enabled HDMI port and not require additional power in order to actually have it function, which is kind of nice. But generally, you're talking mobile devices and getting them connected to your brand new, in this case, 2160p TVs that you may or may not have yet.

Speaker 1: So, you know, if you're wondering when your mobile device is going to be able to support 2160p video signals and lossless audio tracks and power up a hard drive, the answer is probably soon. We're walking around with a DVR in our pocket. That's essentially it. Well, except for the DVR part. It's close. It's a great video player. It's close. It's a 1080p player. It's, well, kind of. Don't even get me started on that. Things are so awesome. Well, actually, it's not a 1080p player. It's an iPhone.

Speaker 2: It sucks. But the iPhone's, I don't know, lacking-ness actually pushed me over to Android. So for that, I'm thankful.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Hey, did you know you can build your own cable TV DVR and stop renting equipment from the cable company? Now, compared to a regular cable box, there are some differences worth noting. A do-it-yourself cable box may be unable to receive pay-per-view or on-demand video services. Now, what I have right now is the InfiniTV 6 PCIe, or express version of the card. Simple to install. Beautiful. I actually have both the old-school one. Here's the old four-tuner design. And I have the new six-tuner installed in my very own home theater PC box I actually pulled out of my rack at home and brought in today. Now, overall, actually, the card itself, right down below in there. Now, setup is super simple. Basically, there's an installer piece of software you download from the InfiniTV, the Seton website. Windows Media Center then pretty much pulls it all together and provides free channel guide information. That really is the key to it all. I'm not having to pay a monthly fee for basically getting what's on TV, that information, downloaded every month. That's something that's incorporated into Windows now, Windows 7 and 8 specifically. And with the latest version of Windows, I think you have to pay about $10 to get the new Media Center package added on if you don't already have it. Now, once it's set up and you've registered the card with your cable company and all that's taken care of, usage is pretty standard. When I was recording six HD shows at once, I had about a 7% CPU usage on an i3 Sandy Bridge part that I have in my home theater PC. That seemed low, it felt low, it really wasn't sweating at all to record all of those shows at once. Now, as we were talking about extender products, now, this is normally the home theater PC would be connected to your main display. But if it's not, there are extender products where you can then, say, in other rooms of the house, enjoy something like Seton's Echo, which would provide the same interface but in a much smaller unit that connects to your network. Also, the Xbox 360 is probably the best known Media Center extender for Windows as well. That is basically anybody with an Xbox 360 in the home can then add it to your home theater PC that's running this tuner system and essentially receive an identical experience, being the cable guide, the ability to record, the ability to schedule and play back whatever you want. Now, another option from Seton is their network-enabled tuner. They have the Infinite TV6 ETH, or F, or Ethernet, I think it stands for, but 299, but it's network-enabled. You plug this into your local network at home and then that will provide tuners to any Windows 7 or 8 system that's also connected to your home network. Now, this is really kind of similar to what Silicon Dust does with their HD Home Run Prime. That's a triple tuner product for 199, and that's another way to do, if you don't want to have the dedicated computer running the tuner hardware, you can have the network-enabled tuner that then provides the experience for the other computers in the house to take advantage of. Also, because these are Windows devices too, I hear they work rather well with the Surface line of tablets out there. So if you want to use those as a media extender, if you happen to own one at least, that might be a way to go. But I think there are a lot more people who probably own Xboxes out there. But really, the bottom line for me with a product like this is that if you're tired of paying for the cable company's DVR offerings, and that's really, you've kind of got to factor in what you're spending on that, and you want something a bit more do-it-yourself than TiVo is providing, cable card tuners like these can feed a household, even a modestly large household, all the live TV and recorded TV they need. And it goes without saying, though, satellite TV subscribers, there really isn't a similar do-it-yourself version of this kind of hardware that provides that kind of flexibility.

Speaker 1: There almost was from DirecTV several years ago, but they announced a product at CES, but they never actually shipped the product. But yeah, just DirecTV, you are not going to be able to do a sort of cable card style

Speaker 2: capture box. No. Their apps are coming on strong, so they're doing more and more with their tablet apps and their mobile device apps, but you don't have a standalone tuner that can handle, that you can build yourself right now at least, as far as satellite subscriptions go.

Speaker 3: Well, I could use an IR blaster and do the recording out of an analog channel off of my, yeah, let's not do that.

Speaker 2: Just subjectively, though, I didn't have an opportunity to measure the power difference between the old card and the new card, but I would just say that it's a more efficient design. There's less stuff to the new card, providing more tuners, and that low CPU usage, too, really just, it made it a dream to use, and I have absolutely no complaints about it in terms of switching speed or recording, and it really was kind of a flawless upgrade. Cool. Yeah, I really liked it.

Speaker 1: Flawless upgrade. Nelson of New York or Vancouver, British Columbia wrote, and hi, I love the show and I watch a DVD on my Sony KDL40Z4100 TV, I get a cinema mode option, which I like because of the contrast for watching movies. I've recently built a home theater PC and run XBMC to watch my movie reps, MKV, AVI, or VOB mostly, however, I can no longer get the cinema mode option on my TV. I'm guessing this has something to do with the video output from a PC being different from a Blu-ray player. All the components are connected by HDMI and switch through a Denon AVR889 receiver. Any ideas for getting cinema mode as an option when I'm using the home theater PC? Much thanks. Nelson of New York or Vancouver, British Columbia.

Speaker 2: Nice. Now, Nelson has a 120Hz Sony LCD that has a true cinema mode that can perform basically a function called frame repeating with 24p video, like your DVDs and your movies that are recorded at 24 frames per second. The original video was at 24p. Now, in order to maintain that, you basically want to maintain that look, too, so basically it looks like film while minimizing flickering. Now, you wouldn't want to show it at that low frame rate. You want to speed it up, but by frame repeating it, you're able to then display it at a rate that minimizes flicker but still gives you that film look. Now, this is really similar to disabling the frame interpolation feature that many LCD televisions use to reduce blur with regular video, or if you have it running during a movie, it can also turn it into something that looks like the camcorder mode or the soap opera effect is another popular one. We don't like that. No, it really takes away the look of something, and I'd rather not change that. Now, Nelson's loss of this TV's true cinema option is likely related to the home theater PC's video output. Most home theater PCs will default the video output to the TV's native resolution, 1080p60 in the case of Nelson's Sony. Now, with the HTPC converting everything to 1080p60, the TV's video processor no longer sees that original 24p video stream, and if it doesn't see that 24p video stream, there's no Sony true cinema. So, one option would be to set the home theater PC to output at 1080p24. Not ideal, though, for video sources, but movies will look the way you want them to. Now, option two, this is one I like, set the home theater PC to output 1080i. 1080i is going to give you the best of both worlds. The TV can easily convert that format to 1080p, and 1080i is an interlaced format that HDTVs can easily detect that 24p sourced material and provide all the film mode and frame conversion features that are available. So, that's really the super trick of all, is that when you run into one of these devices that you're just not sure why it's not enabling that feature again, go to an interlaced format. In particular, 1080i is usually the one to go with, and that way, the video processing features suddenly kick back in, and you're able to enjoy your true cinema mode in the way you want, and you still get all the benefits, too, of 1080i for video being converted to 1080p. So, there you have it. It's a win-win, really.

Speaker 1: Jocelyn wrote us with a question about where to find a DVR for recording free over-the-air broadcasts. She says, hey, Tekzilla crew, is there any device out there that can record over-the-air TV besides TiVo? Building a Myth TV or equivalent is not in the cards at this moment. Thanks, love the show. Jocelyn from Cincinnati. Magnavox, you found, actually. A $350, one terabyte DVR that may do the trick.

Speaker 2: Totally. And the good folks over at, I want to say, Channel Master, they have a K77 box that's on the near horizon, which looks like it's the successor for a previous box that was really popular. It's unfortunate that building your own really isn't the option, but over-the-air tuning and recording is well-supported on the PC side of things. I mean, you could either stick with the viewer recording program that comes with your tuner hardware, say, if you bought one of these cards, or like we talked about, using Windows Media Center to provide a full DVR interface complete with grid-style channel guide. It is adding to the complexity, though, if you're not in the mood of building your own. However, there are some options out there. I'd be curious to know if anybody's using a good over-the-air DVR that's pre-built from someone that you can still buy today. And if you are, do let us know, please.

Speaker 1: Yes. htnation.revision3.com is the email address. And notable Blu-ray releases this week, well, actually do not include Breaking Bad, but oh my goodness, people are still talking about this and freaking out every second. And to completely jerk your gears around, let's talk about Winnie the Pooh. The many adventures of Winnie the Pooh out on Blu-ray this week. Great discussion of processing source, great discussion of processing source and why noise reduction can be a problem on classic films, especially animation. Still a great kid's film, but I love the conversation they get into on Blu-ray.com where they talk about noise reduction and its impact on the movie. This is part of a much larger discussion, especially with Disney's back catalog. There's a great Disney classic screenshot comparisons on the Blu-ray forums, forums.blu-ray.com. And I'm not going to, well, actually, I'm going to hit the spoiler here, but it's amazing when you start looking at the differences going from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray and what the sort of processing does to the film and maybe your experience of it. Are you losing detail? Are you making it more approachable for a new generation? Speaking of making classics more approachable for a new generation, The Great Gatsby. I love Baz Luhrmann. This movie might be a hot mess, but the video and audio, well, it's about as unhinged as Moulin Rouge. Looks great. High Def Digest says watching The Great Gatsby in 2D is a far better experience than seeing it in 3D. At least it was for me, without all the distracting pop-up elements vying for attention and adding a cartoonish quality to what should be a very serious film. That was David Krauss of High Def Digest. And Blu-ray.com had the best summary of color I've ever heard. Brassy, brazen, primaries are flashy and shameless, black levels are filthy rich, and contrast is a brightly lit party in and of itself, all of which is precisely as it's intended to be. 2D sounds like the way to go, and the 5.1 soundtrack is going to be pretty solid in either version. And you might want to rent it if you didn't see it in the theater, because people are either loving this movie or hating it with not much in between. Good deal. Yeah. Other notable releases this week include the Criterion Collections To Be or Not To Be, Contiki, The Painting, and of course The Walking Dead, the complete third season, and Sons of Anarchy Season 5. It is a good week for Blu-rays. Really good. Oh my goodness. We've been talking about budget stereos recently, and for reasons I cannot imagine, I forgot to mention, the stereo amp budget of the century, LaPai's Class T amps, starting at $20 on Amazon.com. Class T amps are tri-path amplifiers and interesting sort of amp technology, digital amp technology. But there are lots of variations on this, but the LaPai 2020A Plus, I've seen it anywhere from like $16 or $17 to $25. It is a really solid entry-level amplifier if you don't want to spend a lot of money. And if you want to start spending more money, just do a search for Class T amplifier, and you'll start getting into some sophisticated ones that even claim to be super audiophile cool guy. Dayton Audio, of course, being the company that makes the $50 speakers that we liked but don't seem to be as well-made anymore, but that's a whole other conversation.

Speaker 2: Nice. Do you use that for just single channel? Do you need multiple amps if you're going to do, say, a four or five channel setup? That's a stereo setup.

Speaker 1: I mean, if you and I got really bored one afternoon, we could probably spend $100 and cobble together a 5.1 or 7.1 surround system out of these LaPai amplifiers. That was my thought. But we'd need an analog source for each channel. So that might be... We could take a high-end Blu-ray player.

Speaker 3: Oh, no, actually, no,

Speaker 1: Here's what we need. Here's what we need. This is awesome. We'd go to Oppo. We'd get one of Oppo's unbelievably beautiful freaking, you know, are they $1,000 now?

Speaker 2: It doesn't matter. They're worth it. They're worth... Yes.

Speaker 1: If you need those features, that's a great Blu-ray player. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. Let's see. Does the $500 one have the analog outputs on the back? Let's take a look. Yes. Front, left, center, center, da-da-da-da-da-da. That should be... Yeah. That should be all of the channels we'd need. So, okay. So we could take all of these channels, and we could hook them. We could take our nice $500 Blu-ray player, and run it into a bunch of $23 amplifiers. Yes. And then use the... The only problem would be volume control. Aye, what a mess. So, if the Oppo has a volume control, we're good. If not, you'd have to adjust the volume on all the LaPie amps. I don't know. We could probably put them all, like, ah, figure it out. Technically, there is a LaPie... Rubber band. ...plasti-amp with a remote control, but you don't want it. All right. That's it for this episode of HD Nation. Head on over to hdnation.revision3.com, or tweet at hdnation, and please subscribe, revision3.com slash hdnation. We want to see you each and every week watching the show.

Speaker 2: You know it. And please, post any comments, questions, or suggestions right down below. And until next time, thank you for watching.