Stars In HD - Ghastly Or Gorgeous
Celebrities are complaining lately about looking less-than-perfect (and often times just plain bad) on HDTV. TVPredictions.com’s Phillip Swann lists and comments about stars who look best or worst in high-def.
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YouTube Coming to Apple TV
Wish you could watch YouTube videos on your Apple TV? Sometime in June, all Internet connected Apple TV boxes will accept a free software patch that will enable wireless streaming of YouTube videos. YouTube is making thousands of clips available each week until thier full catalog is accessible later this fall.
You’ll be able browse the YouTube content on your Apple TV in a variety of ways including: featured, top viewed, recently viewed, history, and even by search. I’m dreading the search option. If you haven’t used the Apple TV yet, there’s a USB port in the back of the device, but you currently can’t use a keyboard for some reason. Entering text on the Apple TV is the equivalent of typing in your initials for the high score screen in an arcade game. Very painful without a keyboard.
So how chewy will these compressed YouTube videos look on your HD TV? I’ve already ripped a bunch of music videos off YopuTube, converted them to MPEG-4 videos and saved them in iTunes. Honestly, the Flash encoded YouTube videos look like crap on a HD TV. YouTube doesn’t even look good when stretched out to its default 480 x 360, let alone 640 x 480 or HD. But YouTube does have thousands of clips and can provide endless hours of entertainment. Fuzzy, but fun.
Apple also announced a new Apple TV model with a 160 GB hard drive for $400. You’ll still be able to buy the old 40 GB version for $300, but personally, I think $100 for 4x the storage is a great deal.
You can read more about the Apple TV here: Apple TV Review
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Heroes Season 1 DVD
No longer are our magnificent Monday night ‘Heroes’ going to be confined to merely mortal NBC TV (and SciFi Channel reruns). Our favorite Heroes and villains are coming to DVD this August with tons of bonus features.
The 7-disc set, available on DVD and HD DVD on August 28, 2007, will include the never-before-aired 73-minute premiere episode and over 50 deleted scenes.
The Heroes Season 1 DVD set is priced at $59.98 and is available for preorder on Amazon.com for $38.99 until July 24, 2007.
Here are some of the Heroes Season 1 DVD extras:
- Unaired Pilot: The Tim Kring cut with audio commentary — A full 73 uninterrupted minutes of the original, unaired, extended pilot episode, as Heroes’ creator Tim Kring first envisioned it, with a character never seen.
- The Making of “Heroes”: From concept to pop culture phenomenon, a behind-the-scenes look at the hottest new series on television.
- Special Effects: The secrets behind the eye-popping visuals that give the Heroes their amazing powers.
- The Stunts: A backstage look at the show’s hair-raising stunts.
- Mind Reader: Matt Parkman’s mind reading abilities reveal your inner Hero with a series of simple tests.
- Profile of Artist Tim Sale: A look at the Eisner Award-winning comic book artist (Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil) behind much of the Manga-influenced artwork used in the show.
- The Score: Go behind the scenes with Wendy Melvin and Lisa Coleman (of Prince’s The Revolution) as they create their ASCAP Award-winning musical score.
- Extra Scenes: 50 deleted and extended scenes.
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Bionic Woman Preview
After months of hype, we finally get to see Michelle Ryan in NBC’s new remake of the Bionic Woman. In this clip from Vmix.com, we get to see Jamie Sommers (Michelle Ryan) find out she has bionic parts and freak out. Those are some sexy bionic toes by the way.
It’s tough to tell from just a few scenes, but Bionic Woman looks like it’s going to be a fun show. With the success of sci-fi shows like Heroes and Lost, Bionic Woman might just be the next big hit. Plus David Eick from Battlestar Galactica is the Executive Producer. Here’s another clip of Eick talking about the strong women characters in his shows.
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Dwight Schrute Bucks
Did you watch the 2007 season finale of The Office (US)? Want to print out your own Schrute Bucks?! A $1,000 Schrute Bucks will you get an extra 5 minutes for lunch. I wonder how many Schrute Bucks it takes to get the Dwight bobblehead from nbcstore.com?
The Schrute Buck gfx was made by Digg.com user dawgma.
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Bionic Woman Pulls Double Duty
There was a bit of a surprise when Katee Sackhoff told reporters that her time on the new NBC series “Bionic Woman” went from “one episode” to “recurring.” But all of that can be explained in one simple sentence: Sackhoff simply wowed network executives.
“She absolutely steals the screen in ‘Bionic,’” Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, told TV Week’s James Hibberd.
Some of the clips featuring Sackhoff, best known to genre fans as Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in SciFi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica,” have been released to the Web by NBC Universal as a way to promote the series, which will make its debut this fall. In it, Sackhoff plays the original bionic woman who gets in a rooftop bionic battle with Jamie Sommers, played by series tar Michelle Ryan.
Sackhoff’s character originally was slated to be offed in the pilot, but executives liked her so much that she is now going to be pulling double duty between both shows which are filmed in Vancouver and produced by NBCU.
Sackhoff apparently isn’t the only BSG alum to be making the show either… two more actors familiar to “Battlestar” fans who have some type of role in the pilot.
The Bionic Woman airs Wednesdays this fall at 9/8c on NBC. See NBC.com’s Bionic Woman web page for more info.
[Via syfyportal.com]
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Finding Closure For Jericho
Less than a week after American broadcast network, CBS, pulled the plug on its post-Apocalyptic sci-fi series “Jericho,” fans have apparently been making contact with the network in droves, demanding that if nothing else, CBS find closure for the cliffhanger left at the end of Season 1.
That campaign has included letter writing and even the delivery of peanuts to the network, highlighting one of the final words of the series when Skeet Ulrich’s character of Jake Green tells the sheriff of the neighboring town of New Bern that is at war with Jericho, paying homage to a World War II story by his grandfather.
The campaign may have paid off, with CBS making an announcement on the official “Jericho” message boards that there could be plans in the works to at least wrap up the story.
“We have read your e-mails over the past few days and have been touched by the depth and passion with which you have expressed your disappointment,” wrote Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment.
“Please know that canceling a television series is a very difficult decision. Hundreds of people at the network, the production company and the incredibly talented creative team worked very hard to build and serve the community for this show — both on-air and online. It is a show we loved, too. Thank you for supporting ‘Jericho’ with such passion. We truly appreciate the commitment you made to the series and we are humbled by your disappointment. In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure in the compelling drama that was the ‘Jericho’ story.”
While the series had a strong run of episodes early in the season, by the time it returned several weeks after its first part of the season, “Jericho” had stiff competition against “American Idol”- fueled programming on Fox among other places, but was still generating decent ratings for CBS.
[Via syfyportal.com]
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Watch YouTube on Your Apple TV
Here’s a YouTube video showing off a new Apple TV plug-in called “A Series of Tubes.” The plug-in allows you to browse YouTube videos on your Apple TV. Sure, the Flash encoded YouTube videos look like crap on a HDTV. YouTube doesn’t even look good when stretched out to its default 480 x 360, let alone 640 x 480 or HD. But YouTube does have thousands of clips and can provide endless hours of entertainment.
Not ready to start tinkering around with plug-ins for your Apple TV? You can still save videos off YouTube and convert them for your iPod/iTunes. Check out this tutorial: How to Copy Videos Off YouTube.
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Office Season Finale Preview
This coming this Thursday (tonight) is the season finale of the American version of The Office. Here’s a teaser trailer and 10 things we learned from last week’s episode of The Office.
10. Buffoons (like Andy and Dwight) do not need to wear sumo suits to appear more buffoonish. In fact, the hilariousness of the sumo suit is inversely proportional to how funny the character is in his regular officewear. However …
9. The fact that a sumo suit enables Andy to float away on the ebbing tides of Lake Scranton is completely fascinating. How does physics explain this?
8. Michael notes that Lake Scranton is America’s eighth largest indigenous body of water. Ignoring the fact that this is patently false, we’d like to believe he was creating a metaphor for America’s unsustainable reliance on reservoirs and the corresponding danger to the ecosystem. Or a metaphor for being an idiot.
7. Contrary to Michael’s assumptions about Oscar’s beachwear, it’s actually gayer to wear designer jeans to the beach than a Speedo or leather pants.
6. If one employee at Dunder Mifflin could actually win Survivor, it’s Creed. Did you see the two-second shot of him toeing out into the lake and catching a fish with his bare hands? Jeff Probst would be proud. Poor fish. Who knows where those hands have been?
5. Jim is not as good of a boyfriend as we thought. What kind of guy tries to distract his girlfriend while she’s lobbying for a promotion? Then again, why is Karen competing for the same job as her boyfriend? Did we miss something?
4. Pam thinks that she has the most boring job at Dunder Mifflin. We’d give that honor to Stanley … if we knew what Stanley did.
3. No matter what anyone says, we still like Karen better than Pam. Karen goes out and gets what she wants (Jim, a better job, a fake tan). Pam has to walk through a field of burning coals to work up enough outrage to confess her feelings for Jim, and even then, she stops short of saying what she’s really feeling (burning flesh).
2. If you’re going to walk across a field of burning coals, go fast, and remember “The mind has to wrap around the foot.”
1. Not even The Office’s writers are immune to jerking us around during May Sweeps. They hadn’t gone near the Pam-Jim-Karen love triangle for weeks when suddenly, Pam dropped her bombshell (if you can call wanting to be “best friends” with Jim a bombshell). This is all leading up to next week’s season finale, when Michael, Jim, and inexplicably, Karen, head off to New York to compete for the same job. We’ll give two-to-one odds Karen gets the gig, thus putting an end to the ménage tension and taking a little piece of our heart with it.
[Via nymag.com]
The season finale of The Office airs on NBC at a special time 8/7c. Don’t forget to double check your TiVos and DVRs.
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How NOT to Ship a HDTV
The person who packed up and shipped this TV must have been a professional… idiot. They might as well have shipped this HDTV using bowling balls or, I dunno, hammers as padding.
For future reference, here’s a photo tutorial on how NOT to ship a Plasma or LCD HDTV.
More Photos: How NOT to Ship a HDTV
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