Movie

Lite-On might be releasing a $150 Blu-ray player at some point in 2009, recent rumors suggest. There's not much more information available now, but I don't think it seems out of the question to expect Lite-On or another firm like Memorex to release a player for that price sometime during the year.

But is $150 the sweet spot for Blu-ray players? For those who want Blu-ray anyway they can have it, that might be perfect. But for others, $150 is still a steep price tag for a device that would conceivably offer less quality than other, more expensive Blu-ray players on the market.

And as I consider a $150 Blu-ray player, I find myself in the latter grouping. It's not that a $150 Blu-ray player doesn't appeal to me. But for that price, I'm not getting enough that would make me want to spend the money.

For me, the perfect price tag for a Blu-ray player at this juncture, given the economy and the format's shortcomings, is $100.… Read more

NBC's Chuck aired in 3D Monday, and it left many viewers wanting to do exactly that with the paper 3D glasses: chuck them.

The overriding opinion of many people interviewed who tuned in to the 3D television event was disappointment.

"I thought it was a gimmick and did not add anything to the show," said Jamie Knapp of Columbus, Ohio. "The red/blue (glasses) did not look good and gave me a headache."

The 3D promotion was intended to raise awareness of 3D movies, specifically ones coming to theaters soon, like Monsters vs. Aliens from … Read more

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, gents, and nothing says, "I love you, let's put something crazy on YouTube" like a pocket camcorder.

Amazon.com has the Creative Vado in pink or silver for $59.99 shipped. No rebates!

Creative's answer to the uber-popular Flip Video Ultra, the Vado is an ultra-slim digital camcorder that's ideal for capturing life's little moments: the kids doing something cute, your breakneck run down the toboggan hill, an airliner splashing into the Hudson River, etc.

The Vado can record up to an hour's worth of … Read more

I spent most of Friday fiddling with iPhoto '09, and you can read my first impressions here. On Saturday, I spent some major quality time with iMovie '09, and I have to say it's pretty easy to grasp. I'm no professional, and I'll admit that I preferred iMovie HD (or the '06 version) to iMovie '08, but it's not too bad. In fact, I created this short little video of the public pillow fight in San Francisco on Valentine's Day 2007 in about three hours (It could've been shorter, but I spent most of the time finding the source material).

As you might recall, when iMovie '08 first debuted, there was quite a substantial outcry in the Mac community. iMovie '08 was drastically different when compared with its predecessors, without a lot of the depth and advanced features to which most Mac users have become accustomed. So much so that Apple made it a point that you could download iMovie '06 (also known as iMovie HD) for free if you missed all the functionality you lost with iMovie '08.… Read more

Jasmine posted her brief sneak peek at iLife '09 yesterday with a slide show, and it's pretty clear that major improvements have come to Apple's suite of lifestyle applications, most notably iPhoto '09, iMovie '09, and GarageBand '09. Since I'm an amateur photography nerd with aspirations of rock stardom, I'm most interested in iPhoto and GarageBand, though the new iMovie may be enough for me to whip out my Flip camcorder and record more than just dogs riding on skateboards. Of course, iWeb '09 has a few updates, too. I have just got through the iPhoto '09 face recognition hurdle, and am just starting on the rest of the iLife suite. So here's an in-depth look at the facial recognition bit of iPhoto, with more to come later.

iPhoto '09 Lets start with the belle of the ball, iPhoto '09. Why do I say that? Because the new Faces and Places feature on iPhoto '09 was definitely one of the biggest news out of Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote. While iPhoto '08 introduced Events, which lets you group photos based on the dates they were taken, iPhoto '09 introduced three new features that got the Mac community buzzing--facial recognition, geotagging, and social network support. For the facial recognition, you don't have to tag every single photo you have with a name and a face; the idea is that iPhoto '09 will be smart enough to do the facial recognition for you. However, it will only work after you do the necessary legwork to make it all happen.

Assuming you don't have photos in your iPhoto library already, you'll have to import them. Me, I have about 3,500 photos sitting in my Aperture library on the laptop, and that's not even counting the more than 10,000 photos I have in my external hard drive at home. So if you're a big photography dork like me, it'll take some time for all the photos to import over. Once that happens, you can immediately start identifying faces and names. Sometimes iPhoto will be smart enough to detect faces for you, and sometimes it won't be. If it does detect a face, it'll display a square over what it thinks is a face, with a placeholder name "unknown face" underneath it. If it doesn't detect a face, you'll have to hit the "Add Missing Face" button on the bottom left, select the face, and add a name. Once you identify a face with a name, you can go to the Faces corkboard, select a face, and iPhoto '09 will scout out your entire library to find photos with a similar face. Once it does, it's up to you to go through the results to confirm or not confirm if the photos really do show that person. This is how the facial recognition training works.

… Read more

A premium movie channel backed by a trio of studios is expected to debut as an on-demand Web site months before its traditional TV launch.

The consortium of MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Lions Gate announced Tuesday at the NATPE television conference in Las Vegas that the channel will be called Epix (pronounced like the plural of epic) and feature more than 15,000 movies from the three studios. The new channel is expected to launch as a subscription-only Web site in May that will stream its content on the Internet--five months before its planned TV launch in October.

The new … Read more

Now, hear me out. No, you haven't traveled back in time to 2007, when HD DVD was still a viable format. And, no, I haven't lost the last of my marbles. Here's the skinny: Frys.com has the Microsoft Xbox 360 HD DVD Player for $49.99, plus around 8 bucks for shipping.

Why on earth would you want this thing? For starters, it comes with Battlestar Galactica season one and Heroes season one. That's about 35 hours' worth of mighty good viewin' right there.

It also comes with King Kong. I mention that for people … Read more

Last week, I discussed five television shows that I would like added to Hulu, the online video-streaming service backed by NBC and Fox. Now it's time we shift our attention to film to find five classics that Hulu needs to add to its movies page.

Granted, movies are different. You need to invest more time if you want to watch some of your favorite films, and they don't have the ongoing sweep of a long television series. But there is a market for streaming movies online and because they are currently free on Hulu, users can start a … Read more

In an effort to keep pace with rival Netflix, Blockbuster has announced a partnership to offer instant access to its video library through various home and portable devices.

The movie rental company has partnered with Sonic Solutions to offer more than 10,000 movies for rent and sale to a variety of PCs, cell phones, portable media players, Internet-connected televisions, and Blu-ray disc players. The collection of offerings will be a combination of titles from Blockbuster and CinemaNow, a movie downloading service that Sonic recently purchased.

"Blockbuster is a ubiquitous entertainment presence in the physical world. Through this alliance … Read more