Wal-Mart Unveils Movie/TV Downloads And I Don’t Care

Wal-Mart’s video download service debuts today (in beta form). Top new release movie purchases run ~$20 and TV shows are $1.96. But why would I pay the same price (or more) to buy a movie at “near DVD” quality and without extras? Heck, they’ve even outsourced the buying of discs and burning to me (assuming … Read more

Apple Just Says No To Vista

Apparently iTunes, iPods, and Vista don’t play nice just yet. A variety of issues have been reported, including: purchased tracks not playing, synchronization glitches, and computer gremlins “may corrupt your iPod.” Apple warns: iTunes 7.0.2 may work with Windows Vista on many typical PCs. Apple recommends, however, that customers wait to upgrade Windows until after … Read more

Hands On With Roxio Toast

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My review copy of Toast 8 Titanium arrived this week. Unfortunately, my only Mac is still running 10.3.9… and is not supported. I expect to have this rectified (running Tiger on something) in the next few weeks. Until then, check out iLounge’s review of the TiVoToGo features. Jeremy seemed generally pleased with Roxio’s ability to transfer TiVo shows for burning and playback, though he took issue with conversion times and the 320×240 output (same as Windows TTG) when converting for the iPod and PSP.

Toast 8 Titanium lists for $100, though prices are coming in under $50 after rebate in many cases — it pays to shop around. If you buy in, be sure to download the TiVo DVD menu theme. I’m still holding out hope that the TiVo Transfer portion of the app will be given away by TiVo/Roxio at some point. Though, for those who want to save a few bucks, the unofficial TiVoDecode Manager is free and will transfer, decrypt, and convert.

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Question of the Day: Repair or Replace iPod?

I get a decent amount of questions via email covering a variety of topics — Believe it or not, I try to answer everything that comes my way. I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this sooner, but I’m going to start running selected questions and answers. Perhaps my response will be useful to a larger group, and perhaps you readers will have alternate suggestions worth considering.

First up we have a question from a long-time supporter of the site. The last time I heard from John he was debating between television models at Best Buy. We had a few back and forths and then he didn’t take my advice. Ha! This time around, I think John and I are in agreement:

I bought an 20 gig iPod 2 yrs ago but now it has some sort of – can you believe it – frown face. Apple wants $250 to “fix” it. I have all of my tunes backed up so it’s not a problem to start over. What do you recommend? Also, have you ever heard of the frown face icon on the iPod? Weird I know.

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Solved: Mystery Of Missing Mac TTG DVD Theme

Roxio’s Mac TiVoToGo shipped last week… without the promised custom TiVo DVD menu theme. I pinged both TiVo and Roxio last week, but it took a little time to hear back with all the ongoing CES and Macworld nuttiness: Toast 8 ships worldwide with a single multi-lingual build and the menu styles are several MB … Read more

Why I Won’t Buy Apple’s iTV

I’m still at CES… And not only am I behind on events/info occurring here I’m also still getting caught up on Apple’s announcements. I just took a brief gander at the $299 iTV (now branded Apple TV), and am disappointed with the first rev of their software. What I’m bothered with as a consumer is … Read more

Digital Media Bytes: Macworld Edition

Being at CES, I’ve had very little time to take in anything other than what I’me seeing first hand. Obviously this is a big day for Apple, so I set aside a few minutes to catch up with the news. No time now for a proper analysis and write-up, but I’m providing links to some … Read more

Showstoppers

The Showstoppers event was held last night (Wynn), where a variety of (mostly) smaller companies set up shop. Not much caught my eye, though I ran into the Engadget, Gizmodo, and CrunchGear teams. (That’s Peter Rojas above, with Randall Bennett handling film duties on the right.) The food wasn’t as good as Digital Experience the … Read more