My Media Delivered

News: Western Digital Media Player Released

News: Xbox360 & Tivo to get Netflix HD Streaming

Great news for Netflix subscribers.  The 360 and Tivo are both scheduled to receive interface updates that will allow them to stream HD and SD content to your TV.  The 360 streaming is expected first with the Fall update coming in the first weeks of November, and the Tivo update is expected in early December.

The Tivo update is only coming for the Tivo HD and Tivo Series 3 units, and none of the updates will include any extra fees associated with them. No real word yet on what the quality of these streaming services will be like, however HD content is expected to be similar to the Apple TV (around 4-5 MBps compression)

Hurricane Ike

Sorry for the slowdown in posting on My Media Delivered.  We’ve just survived hurricane Ike, and will be back to normal very soon.

News: Every video/audio format on your Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, iPhone and more

Just came across this new application called tversity.  It’s a media server for Windows that streams every single video format to just about every single device regardless of the codecs used.  The best part…it’s absolutely free.

News: D-Link media streamer gets Hulu on your TV

This is really awesome news.  Free flash HD TV shows streamed to your TV. This is currently only being worked on for the D-Link DSM-330 media streamer.  With flash support on a media streamer, you’ll suddenly have access to tons of new content as many sites today stream their video via flash.

From Engadget HD:

D-Link’s $230 DSM-330 media streamer has always been among the most flexible set-top boxes out there, and it’s just gotten even better, with the latest DivX Connected server software bringing Flash video support to the device. It’s not quite browse-and-play — every site requires a specific plug-in — but Hulu, College Humor, YouTube, ABC News, and Vimeo are already working, and there are more on the way. That’s pretty tempting for two bills, but we’ll stick to rocking PlayOn with our 360 and PS3.

News: Apple updates iTunes to 8.0, adds HD TV shows.

Apple has just updated iTunes to 8.0 this week, along with bringing NBC back to the iTunes store. With their return come all their top shows in the newly released HD format.  I excitedly downloaded the first season of Battlestar Galactica since I never fully finished watching the show.  If you purchase the HD format of the show, Apple sends you the SD version as well for use on your iPod or iPhone.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, I can’t seem to get the new HDTV shows to stream to my Apple TV.  There are ongoing discussions in the support forum on Apple’s website.  I’m sure they will fix this soon.

Other new features of iTunes are the Genius Sidebar, where you can get recommendations to new music based on your tastes, not unlike Pandora without the streaming. Also included is enhanced accessibility, the grid view, and a new visualizer that’s really cool.

News: VUDU is readying Blu-ray quality downloads

Exciting news for VUDU owners if this comes true.  HD movies might be coming your way.  Though I doubt they’ll be true Blu-ray quality.  That would eat up some serious bandwidth.

From Engadget:

While rumors have been flowing hot and heavy about VUDU’s possible demise, it seems the company has other plans in mind. We’ve received word that select beta team members are now being asked to try out new downloads that are intended to rival Blu-ray quality. Dubbed HDX movies, these ultra-high-def flicks are currently being watched by folks willing to wait a number of hours (two to three) for a film to start, but there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever see this hit the masses. Sure, we totally dig the idea of BD-quality content on-demand, but we could almost scoot down to Blockbuster, rent a bona fide Blu-ray Disc, watch, and return it before a so-called HDX title even begins.

News: Digitalreviews.net Reviews Popcorn Hour A-100, A-110, and B-110

Digitalreviews.net takes a look at all the currently released and legacy Popcorn Hour hardware. 

In March we took a look at the original Popcorn Hour A-100 and it quickly became our in-house media playback device of choice. Sure, it wasn’t perfect - but its near flawless display of 1080p content, along with its incredible ability to playback almost every file we threw at it, made us sit up and take notice.

Now, less than five months later, Syabas has announced two new Popcorn Hour models which we have been lucky enough to get our digital hands on.

Informative: FormatWarCentral.com Features New HD Downloads available on each platform

FormatWarCentral.com takes the most popular platforms that have download content and features the current releases by platform for each month. They have releases listed for the Xbox 360 Marketplace, PlayStation video store, Apple TV, and VUDU.

News: Popcorn Hour A-110 Revealed

The latest model Popcorn Hour A-110 has been revealed.  This second generation device HD media streaming device adds new features by placing a USB port on the back for slave functionality.  

From the Popcorn Hour website:

The Popcorn Hour A-110 is a enhanced version of the popular A-100 model. It adds support for 2.5″/3.5″ SATA HDD and USB Slave functionality to improve connectivity and transfer rates. HDMI has been updated to the 1.3a spec, allowing full support of HD Audio pass-through for DTS HD-HR, DTS HD-MA, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD. The ports on the device have also been reconfigured, with a USB port moved to the rear panel, optical S/PDIF replacing the co-axial S/PDIF and a hardware reset button to allow for easier use of the device. 

Popcorn Hour A-110 allows you to pull in digital video, audio and photos from various sources for your enjoyment on your HDTV or Home Theater setup.

You can stream or playback your digital media content from a variety of sources, such as your PC, NAS, digital camera, USB mass storage devices (Flash drive, HDD, DVD drive) ,  internal SATA HDD* and even directly from the Internet via the Media Service Portal.