XStreamHD to deliver ‘Full HD’ to the home

After a mention at EngadgetHD I dug up the company’s website to find some more info – but details are light. They basically have a press release from last Tuesday and a schedule for their product launch at CES in January. Since I’ll be at CES, I’ll try to check them out. They’re basically a Direct-To-Home (DTH) satellite company focused on delivering Full 1080p HD video and 7.1 channels of lossless audio to the home. Sounds fine – but there is more to a full consumer offering than delivering data to the home. Is this full network programming? Some kind of premium-only content? How good is their STB – and is it a DVR? Lots of questions.

They are certainly looking to hire for a number of positions. Though this is interesting:We are committed to an initial deployment in the Fall of 2006. Seems they missed that target by a smidge – perhaps they should update their site? (Yes, the press release is from 2007. Yes, I checked again to be sure after I noticed that.) It seems the company was founded in 2002, so they’ve been working on something for a while.

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Macrovision buying BD+

TradingMarkets reports that Macrovision is buying BD+ from Cryptography Research, Inc for $45 million. Well, technically they are buying “certain technology assets”, which will include owning Self-Protecting Digital Content (SPDC), which is the basis for BD+ as used on Blu-ray Discs.

The purchase includes certain Cryptography Research’s patents, security software code, and related third party customer and partner agreements. Macrovision will also hire certain CRI employees involved in the technology.

Via Blu-ray.com.

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Very last minute – Amazon Blu-ray one day sale, today

Sorry, I just stumbled over this myself: Amazon is selling Fox/MGM Blu-ray titles for 55% off!

The catch is, this is a One-Day Sale, and that day is today. So you only have a few hours left to jump on these if you want. Sorry. Via Blu-ray.com.

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Roxio updates Toast & Popcorn, fixes TiVo compatibility issues

Roxio has released Toast 8.0.3 (which also includes TiVo Transfer 1.1.1 and Toast Video Player 1.0.2) as well as Popcorn 3.0.2 which, amongst other things, fixes compatibility issues with TiVo units that arose after the 9.1/9.2 software updates, and also provide compatibility with Apple’s new Leopard Mac OS X release. TiVo Blog has a full list of the changes in these updates.

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Playing High-Def Downloads on your TiVo using a Mac

Reader Michael Alderete sent me a pointer to a blog post in which he details the process he uses to download high-def content via BitTorrent and than converts and transfers it to his TiVo for viewing, via his Mac. As he described it in his email:

The article covers installing and configuring TiVo Desktop software on your computer, downloading video from the Internet using Miro, converting it to a TiVo-compatible format with VisualHub, and transferring it to your TiVo for playback. Currently the instructions are Mac-only, but a reasonably savvy person could easily figure out how to use them on a PC, with slightly different software (pointers are given in the article).

Enjoy.

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