You don’t have to be a millionaire to recreate the movie theater experience in your own home. You can if you have the money and you can go all out – even install the same kind of theater seats you find at the movies. You can even have curtains that’ll open on command with the push of a button, but you don’t have to hire a professional to build a home theater for your house.

You don’t have to be a technology whiz and no everything there is to know about having a DVD home theater. What you have to have is some basic knowledge about home theater systems so that when you go shopping for yours or start looking to upgrade, you get the best system for the best deal.

What to you get with a home theater? You get the kind of quality that makes your old way of viewing movies at home look like its still stuck in prehistoric times. It’s been said that having a DVD home theater gives the theater experience. That’s true but with added benefits. You get the sound and quality any time you want it. So if you’re a night owl, you can get that theater experience at three o’clock in the morning when most theaters are closed. [Read more…]

There are a few HD DVD players on the market and Toshiba is of course offering a few. There are three models ranging in price from $399 to $799

The HD-A2 delivers the excellent picture, sound and interactivity features of HD DVD, and adds a new, sleek, compact chassis. The combination of stellar high-definition picture quality up to 1080i, near high-definition picture-quality of up-converted standard DVDs output through HDMI, and leading edge audio (including Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus) provides a new level of Home Theater Experience.
Price $399

The HD-A20 takes the performance and convenience of the HD-A2 to the next level. For the highest level of picture quality with today’s best performing high-definition TVs, the HD-A20 adds 1080p output. That’s twice the resolution of a 720p signal.
Price $499

The HD-XA2 is our flagship HD DVD player and incorporates our latest technologies. With a chassis reinforced by solid brushed aluminum panels, the HD-XA2 uses advanced digital and analog video processing technology and includes 1080p with Deep Color support specified in HDMI™ 1.3a.
Price $799

In a much-anticipated move, online DVD rental pioneer Netflix will begin offering downloads.

Today the company introduced a new feature that allows people to watch movies and television series on their personal computers. The company will make the new feature available to its subscribers in a phased roll-out over the next six months.

Subscribers will continue to receive DVDs by mail and will have the additional option of instantly watching about 1,000 movies and TV series on their PCs. The new feature will be included in subscribers’ monthly membership plans at no additional cost.

The company said the phased roll-out is “meant to ensure that subscribers have a great initial experience with the feature.” “We named our company Netflix in 1998 because we believed Internet-based movie rental represented the future, first as a means of improving service and selection, and then as a means of movie delivery,” said Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive officer. “While mainstream consumer adoption of online movie watching will take a number of years due to content and technology hurdles, the time is right for Netflix to take the first step.

“Over the coming years we’ll expand our selection of films, and we’ll work to get to every Internet-connected screen, from cell phones to PCs to plasma screens. The PC screen is the best Internet-connected screen today, so we are starting there.”

Netflix is “specifically focusing on the rental segment of electronic delivery, distinct from the download-to-own market and advertising-supported electronic delivery,” the company reported.

The new immediate viewing feature differs from current services in that it does not require the often lengthy downloading of a large video file, the company reported. The Netflix feature uses real-time playback technology that allows video to be viewed at virtually the same time it is being delivered to a user’s computer. Following a one-time, under-60-second installation of a simple browser applet, most subscribers’ movie selections will begin playing in their Web browser in as little as 10 to 15 seconds. Movies can be paused and a position bar gives viewers the ability to immediately jump to any point in the movie. The feature requires only Internet connectivity with a minimum of one megabit per second of bandwidth. The more bandwidth a consumer has, the higher quality the video displayed, ranging from the quality of current Netflix previews to DVD quality with a three-megabit-per-second connection.

Selection will expand over time as licensing for electronically delivered movie rentals widens. Studios offering titles include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., New Line Cinema and Lionsgate. In addition, content is being provided by A&E Television Networks, Anime Network, Allumination FilmWorks, BBC Worldwide, Cinema Libre Studios, Egami Media, Film Movement, Hart Sharp Video, The Independent Film Channel, Magnolia Pictures, New Video Group, New Yorker Films, Palm Pictures, Seventh Art, Silvernitrate Entertainment, Starz Digital, ThinkFilm, Video Action Sports, WMG Productions and Wolfe Video, among others.

As with the Netflix DVD catalog, subscribers can browse movies available for immediate viewing by title, genre or star rating. Personalized recommendations, based on an individual’s historical preferences, will also appear.

Netflix said it expects to make the new feature available to all Netflix subscribers by the end of June. The hours available for instant watching will vary based on subscribers’ monthly plans. For example, subscribers on the entry-level $5.99 plan will have six hours of online movie watching per month and subscribers on Netflix’s most popular plan, $17.99 for unlimited DVD rental and three discs out at a time, will have 18 hours of online movie watching per month

It’s been a hot season for high-def news. First, Sony Relevant Products/Services’s PlayStation 3 game console made a big splash with its built-in Blu-ray drive — a drive that held up production, forcing a PS3 shortage in the U.S. market. Then Microsoft announced that users of its Xbox 360 Live service could download high-def movies, only to see the service crash briefly under the heavy demand.

Now LG has announced that it will debut a dual HD DVD/Blu-ray player at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a show that’s become, over the years, the industry’s Mecca for all things cutting-edge. And Warner Bros., for its part, has announced that it will introduce a dual-format disc at CES called “Total HD.” The disc will carry both HD DVD and Blu-ray movies, and work in either type of player.

Of course, all this begs the question of which format is winning — or, rather, whether either of the two formats will win. And will consumers, whose wallets are already weighed down as it is, care enough about the promise of HD DVD or Blu-ray to spring for either one?

No Clear Winner
“The balance isn’t tipping just yet, and we’re still very, very much in the early-adopter phase,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice-president and research director at Jupiter Research.

With no clear winner, it’s possible that LG’s dual-action drive and Warner Brothers’ dual-action discs could tip the scales one way or the other, he added. “But at this point, for most consumers who are savvy enough to have learned over the years that they’re better off waiting until there’s a standard out there, that there’s enough content out there, and that the prices have dropped sufficiently, they’re best served by waiting rather than getting on board.”

The bottom line? According to Gartenberg, the industry might go hot and heavy over the next few months, with release after release and news report upon news report, but consumers are more likely to sit on the fence and watch the action unfold.

Behind the Third Door
That watch-and-wait approach is the third option that few people are talking about. It’s quite possible that neither format will win, and both will die out in time.

It is indisputable that HD DVD and Blu-ray offer eye-popping movies whose main selling point is their quality, but the quality wars have played out before — most recently in digital music. Gartenberg noted that consumers picked MP3 players (and the iPod, above all) over different, better-quality sound formats that made their own Las Vegas debuts in years past, with all the splashiness of showgirls.

It was the ease of use of MP3s and crowd-pleasers like the iPod’s sleek, well-received design that brought consumers around. And what’s good for music might also be what’s good for movies. “So it may not be about just higher-quality video for consumers,” said Gartenberg.

“There’s one scenario here that says that neither format wins, that consumers continue to buy DVDs and happily ignore these things, and neither one gains enough momentum to win out over the other,” he added.