I am proud to say that the first store I go to every time I visit the US is Wal-Mart. It's my favorite store, period - in any country. For all you Wal-Mart haters out there, move to another country for a while and start paying 5 times as much for everything, due to lack of competition. America is wasted on the Americans.
Well I live in Europe, and Samsung isn't launching this service here as of now. Why write "Europe", when it's actually only in the UK and Germany? If Samsung launched this in CA and NY, you wouldn't just write "US", you'd write "CA and NY", right?
From what I can gather, there's a tiny chip on each end that converts the HDMI signal from the 10 pairs (or however many pairs HDMI has) into something that can be sent over a 1 copper pair. So it's a bit like the HDMI-Optical converters, except that it's built into the cable, it doesn't require any external power, and it costs 40,000 times as much. Just kidding with the last bit - no idea how much these cables cost - we'll see. I actually have a need for a long, thin HDMI cable, so I'm quite interested, depending on cost, whether these cables can go 15 meters or not, and whether the cable can be manually terminated. I'm sceptical about the last bit, but if I could get an HDMI plug through the pipe I have, then I wouldn't need a thin cable, so it's pretty much imperative if these cables are going to be of any use.
160Mbps - let's see, what would really impress a typical customer if you wanted to show off what that sort of bandwidth can do? I know - show how fast it is to download an HD torrent! Ehhh - on the other hand...
Of course any MKV can be transcoded to an M2TS. The problem is that the PS3 can't play any M2TS. It can only play a small subset of all the formats out there. So transcoding an MKV directly over to an M2TS isn't going to help you very much if the PS3 can't play it. I ran MKV2VOB (which claims to know exactly which formats the PS3 can and can't play) on about 30 MKVs, and of those, only 1 could be transcoded with no changes. With 4-5 of them, the video could be transcoded, but the audio had to be re-encoded (took a couple of hours). For the rest of them, the video had to be re-encoded, hurting image quality and taking an entire day of 100% CPU.
Everyone I know who has had an HTPC for less than a month loves it. Everyone I know who has had one for over a year hates it ;-). The problem is that the things stop working - Microsoft releases a patch, the motherboard clock battery dies, whatever - there's always something to fix. For some people that's just part of the fun. For other's life's too short.
While some MKVs can be transcoded to MPEGs with no loss of quality, most can't. And you can't tell me that a process involving 100% CPU for 10+ hours, with no cancel button, is "easy". Since most HD rips are in MKV format, this was the reason I stopped using my PS3 as a media hub. If Sony ever adds full MKV support to the PS3, I'll be back there in a second.
"With all the new multitouch capable monitors coming out, which one is the best? With the release of Windows 7 I really want a touchscreen monitor for my desktop. I'm looking to get a Full HD monitor that supports multitouch and can still look great during gaming and movies. Which one has the best specs for the price?"
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